Where Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) Take Us?

It's pretty crazy to me that in the span of 20-25 years, we went from basically no internet.. to practically living on it.. to now AI revolutionizing things once again when it comes to human dependency on the digital world. I was born in 85. I grew up without the internet. In my early teen years I saw its infancy, with DIY websites, naive social tools, and Flash animations. It was great, it felt like it was made by the people, for the people. The possibilities were limited, sure, but there were no rules. We were making up the web and what it would be for. Fast forward to now, and things have drastically changed. The younger generation doesn't seem aware of it, but now that companies have taken over every single mainstream platform and are increasingly turning everything (information and entertainment) into a monetisation opportunity with constant ads and invasive practices, it really feels like technology's reason to be has switched to mainly benefiting the corporate world. We see it with latest computer OS, smartphones, and game consoles; power is gradually taken away from the users in favor of streamlined experiences full of content but void of control and personalisation. Even cars manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon now. I fear AI will only increase this. The common people will sure be able to use some aspects of it, but the most unfathomably advanced stuff will be developed - and reserved - for the corporate world, digging a trench ever deeper between the consumers and the technology they live with/on, keeping autonomy and agency away from them as much as possible.. always for profit. There's already tons on people eager to add AI to anything and everything without realizing that this whole technological endeavor is pretty much a global social experiment we all participate in and have no clue of the current repercussions or how it will turn out. The negative effects of social media are just starting to be understood, yet not many people seem bothered. When workers from any degree of education alike start getting replaced by the cheap alternative that is AI, what will happen then? When passionate artists get pushed aside in favor of technology producting an endless stream of digitally generated content bound to market research, what will we do? When humans are deemed too costly and complicated compared to the software alternative, which is compliant, malleable, and forever productive, how will we live? What will happen of the human experience? That's what scares me.

We didn’t get regular Joe videos for like two months and now we get HALF HOUR Joe videos??? I love this so much.

I asked ChatGPT to write a story about a kid going to the shop to get some milk in New Zealand idiom. It did very well, using terms like "dairy", "jandals", "stubbies", "pushbike", "mum", "kiwi" and "bloke" (instead of "convenience store", "flip-flops", "shorts", "bicycle", "mom", "New Zealander" and "guy"/"dude") and speech that included "g'day", "fresh as", "mate" etc as well as showed awareness of NZ brands such as Anchor milk and Whittaker's chocolate - but used US spelling for some of the words - "pedaled" instead of "pedalled", "flavor" instead of "flavour". When I commented on the "Americanisms", it apologised and supplied corrected text with NZ-English spelling. It also showed awareness of Māori words commonly used even by non-Māori "kiwis" and understood what I meant by "going and getting some kai". That's some pretty heavy lifting.

"To replace creatives with AI, clients will need to accurately describe what they are looking for. We're safe." This is so relatable. My fiance's first year or two as a graphic designer for a Fortune 500 tech company drove him absolutely up the wall constantly. Having pressure of being evaluated for his work and meeting other people's deadlines, when no one would actually tell him what they wanted or needed! He was forced to waste so much time making things, and then present them, and ONLY THEN people would decide what they wanted in the first place: "Oh no, not like that. We need this... like this... and with this..." He got to where he'd make 3 versions of everything he did, to make things go faster, so the stakeholders could pick one, or at least narrow down from there. And that was only when he had enough information to start. FREQUENTLY they wouldn't even tell him BASIC things, like "Do you want this to be a video or a graphic?" or "What is the text content for this 1-page leaflet I'm supposed to make that I have no idea what it''s for?" I'm so glad he's on a better team now.

My friend wrote a university essay using chatgpt, then put it through Quillbot and then paraphrased the essay himself and it still got detected by the universities AI detector which is GPT Zero. Out of curiosity, I put my own essay through the detector and despite the fact I had 100% written the essay it came up as AI-generated, it's crazy in academia right now...

As an artist that still draws on paper, I have to say that I have noticed just in the last month that my posts that are my hand drawing with a pencil or simply pencil on paper drawings are suddenly getting WAY more interaction, like 5x more from similar posts just a year prior. I think there is starting to be a push-back against the super slick digital/AI look. I think as AI ramps up, there will be a bigger desire for real human-made craft, that you can show is human made. (based on what I'm observing just this last month) I hope I'm right bc that is actually an unexpected boon for artists who still use the traditional methods.

I recently got to speak to a high school teacher who taught me back in the day. He told me that with really good prompt crafting and/or prompt revisions or second prompts asking for details, he was able to use ChatGPT to produce code for a specific model of robot for his robotics class. And it woked as intended. So basically he is preparing his teaching material for September on his own time and AI accelerated that massively for him. And so it follows actual engineers setting up production lines are starting to do this too.

I love the “clients will need to accurately describe what they are looking for” quote. I always chuckle how bad clients are at scoping requirements BUT when I’m a client I suck just as bad. It’s pretty simple, I contract work out that I cannot do myself, hence I know little about it in the first place, hence my scope is pretty crap. So we are all in this together, don’t feel bad.

One of the most scary things about AI, besides the warfare, is the social engineering. A handful of people control the general direction of political and social responses.

Once AI creators prove that CEOs and boards of directors can easily be replaced by AI, we'll see some pull back and regulation. A personable face, a confident voice, and some logic. And you have yourself a competent CEO.

You always get your research right, even on the most trippy subject. It's impressive.

As a designer (power Photoshop user for 25 years) I can say that some of the AI software is such an incredible tool for photo editing. It has made some aspects my job infinitely more productive. AI does a fantastic job with “grunt” work, freeing me up to do the part AI can’t. (At least for now….😅)

Love how the room darkens whenever the dialog has the possibility of a negative plot. Nice touch

Speaking of the legal repercussions, there was a civil case in DC where the plaintiff's lawyer submitted a brief written by ChatGPT that cited 5 completely false decisions and many false (as in no true) references to those 5 cases. The judge was not impressed.

Chat GPT 2 could already write code. The free version had a limit, and it had the disclaimer "this is just example code", but it 100% worked and was quite good. Obviously you pretty much have to be a programmer or at least know what you're doing to prompt it properly, but writing code is probably way easier than natural languange since there are only a limited number of ways to do most things, whereas natural language can have infinite layers of nuance and slang that spans globe as well as human history.

Your tangent cam work on this one was making me audibly chuckle. Nice work.

Been using ChatGPT for a couple months now. I'm a coder and found it very helpful, not so much for writing code ( its usually buggy ) but for brainstorming code. Its like having another coder in the room you can bounce idea's off and ask how they would do it.

Dude your tangent cam bit was oddly meaningful. I've spiraled into that wormhole of doubt, wondering if anything I make would be of any value, many times. Seeing a creator I look up to talk honestly about it happening to them too was really encouraging. I know this video is about AI but just wanted to thank you for that moment of honesty!

Thanks for the content Joe, we really appreciate your efforts, the sweat and time you put into while making this video

There is also a fundamental misunderstanding: there is NO real AI right now. It's programming, no "AI" actually thinks. And its not known if that will ever be possible.