Tracy Jackson, who runs a blog called Amateur Marketing, stood in line in front of us. I asked him the same question, will AI chatbots take over our jobs. “Never say never,” he said. “It still needs guidance, but never say never.” Before he started using the AI chatbot, it took him two days to write a blog post. Now it takes two hours, he said. (That is, if the Wi-Fi worked well; the love poems we all had to wait in line were suddenly no longer an option, due to a poor internet connection.)
I returned to the stage just in time to hear a group of CEOs, led by venture capitalist Sameer Dholakia, ponder how this new era of AI will reshape business. Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stable AINote that his company text to image model from taking 5.6 seconds to create one AI image last August to now generating 40 AI images per second. “These models are really not highly optimized,” says Mostaque. “We’re just getting started.” After the workshop, Anya Singh, who has worked on search products at Google for almost 16 years, eagerly showed me the website of the company she invested in called NeuroPixel.ai. It creates synthetic, realistic images of human clothing patterns for $1 a time. Another company Singh is involved with, REImagine Home, collects photos of your sophisticated home space and creates AI-generated luxury décor.
Singh told me, “I’ve been trying to use the internet to decorate my house since September and it’s really broken. She is creating vision boards and designing the rooms piece by piece. The estimated cost is in the thousands of dollars per room, and the designs still “didn’t fit the whole house or my budget or requirements.” Singh says REImagine Home doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it does remove some of the barriers. “I like to think this is making inefficient systems better.”
It’s enough to make any graphic artist, fit model or interior designer shudder. Or is it? Kevin Roose, one The New York Times The columnist at the GenAI event, said that FOLO, the looming fear of obsolescence, has clouded our shared vision of an AI-filled future. Extremely social or experiential or manual jobs will still require human contact. Humans are safe. Of course, Roose said this, quite confidently, two days ago Microsoft’s New AI Chatbot Tells Roose it wants to be alive, insists it loves him, and spits out a list of hypothetical destructive fantasies.
Jordan Harrod, an AI educator and doctoral candidate at MIT, told the GenAI audience, “Ultimately, when it comes to how we fit into the equation, the answer is just human connection. The human element is extremely important.” To emphasize this, Harrod called for an AI-generated graphic image of two people holding hands, with the words “Human Connection” to the left of it. The macabre image shows four wrists, two hands and at least 12 fingers between them. It was jarring. It’s also reassuring, if only for a moment.
