Here’s some context for the question. When image generating AIs became available, I tried them out and found that the results were often quite uncanny or even straight up horrible. I ended up seeing my fair share of twisted fingers, scary faces and mutated abominations of all kinds.
Some of those pictures made me think that since the AI really loves to create horror movie material, why not take advantage of this property. I started asking it to make all sorts of nightmare monsters that could have escaped from movies such as The Thing. Oh boy, did it work! I think I’ve found the ideal way to use an image generating AI. Obviously, it can do other stuff too, but with this particular category, the results are perfect nearly every time. Making other types of images usually requires some creative promptcrafting, editing, time and effort. When you ask for a “mutated abomination from Hell”, it’s pretty much guaranteed to work perfectly every time.
What about LLMs though? Have you noticed that LLMs like chatGPT tend to gravitate towards a specific style or genre? Is it longwinded business books with loads of unnecessary repetition or is it pointless self help books that struggle to squeeze even a single good idea in a hundred pages? Is it something even worse? What would be the ideal use for LLMs? What’s the sort of thing where LLMs perform exceptionally well?
I’ve had some success quietly replacing middle-to-executive management with LLMs.
It’s not perfect, but the quality and coherence of the ideas went up a moderate amount. Obviously a good CEO is a valuable thing, but lacking that, ChatGPT does OK at defining company direction and strategy.
It’s not good enough to replace a half-decent copy writer though.
You severely underestimate the demand for crappy copy that AI is perfectly able to supply.
I see your point, and I agree there will indeed be a lot of demand. My own strategy is to move against this kind of trend, though. When the competition focuses on SEO, dark patterns, and cheap crud – double down on quality and customer loyalty. When they are over-focusing on quality, then make it cheap, cheerful, and easy to find :P
On the boards I advise (just a few, I’m not that influential), a lot of the use of LLMs has stemmed from (frankly) lazy executives not doing their job (their jobs are mostly judgement and delegation – this is a failure of both). Quality control balked at what they suggested publishing (it was really nowhere good enough, and off-brand). There’s this lesson I hold to heart, that once something stops doing the things that give it identity, it begins to fragment and fall apart. Whether its Greece, Rome, one of several Chinese dynasties, a company (Radio Shack! Sears!)… or all those executives and managers in retirement when there’s no more decisions to make or people to manage :D
So yeah there’s going to be a big demand for it, but that’s exactly why I consider our copy writers and designers more valuable now. It’s an opportunity for them to shine. Should be easy to retain them (or hire more) in the coming market too – and for the current executive, what a missed leadership opportunity! I’m not blameless either – my job is to persuade them, and I haven’t succeeded.
Anyway, that’s a little slice of my life, which I hope you found entertaining.
Don’t get me wrong though – I do love LLMs and also image diffusion models. I’m really excited by their future, especially for coding and high-level planning and reasoning! They’re not that good at these things yet, but I think it’s going to happen. I could make so many excellent things to share with the world – e.g. even if they just help me reliably debug faster, or if it codes and I write the unit tests by hand!