AI know what you did last summer.
<p><em>[This is a long read, I was also interviewed on this essay on the exceptional Macrovoices podcast recently if you’d like to listen:</em></p>
<p><a href="https://www.macrovoices.com/1230-macrovoices-390-matt-barrie-the-awesome-power-and-risk-of-artificial-intelligence" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>https://www.macrovoices.com/1230-macrovoices-390-matt-barrie-the-awesome-power-and-risk-of-artificial-intelligence</em></a></p>
<p><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/macro-voices/id1079172742?i=1000625553151" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/macro-voices/id1079172742?i=1000625553151</em></a></p>
<p><em>Feedback on my interview:<br />
“One of the most important podcasts I have heard.” </em><a href="https://twitter.com/SteveBigpond/status/1696650970631938117?s=20" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>@SteveBigpond</em></a></p>
<p><em>“(Macrovoices) This was one of your best podcasts. A strong contender for #1 actually. Thank you.” </em><a href="https://twitter.com/kdogni/status/1696369813885731195?s=20" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>@kdogni</em></a><em>]</em></p>
<p>On 22nd of August 2022, Skynet went online and started learning at a geometric rate.</p>
<p>At least, that’s what I’m sure it felt like for graphic illustrators.</p>
<p>On that day, <a href="https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-public-release" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Stable Diffusion</a>, a deep learning text-to-image model was released. Like many others, I downloaded and started playing with it.</p>
<p>You’d type in a sentence like “man riding a motorbike, being chased by a bear”. What came out, at least for me, looked more like a nightmare- artistic yet often horrific images of people with extra body parts and warped faces in dream-like scenes. Reminiscent of a Picasso if drawn by Salvador Dali, the fusion of people and objects was striking, yet unnerving.</p>
<p>There was however something truly <em>breathtaking </em>about the software’s uncanny ability to manifest <em>any </em>typed-in concept into an illustration.</p>
<p><a href="https://medium.com/@matt_11659/ai-know-what-you-did-last-summer-255176dcd1bc"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>