I’m currently obsessed with generative AI and where it’s going. It’s mind blowing and fantastic but I want to start at my own beginning
I remember sat at the bottom of the stairs on the telephone because that was as far as the line reached from the wall. I remember getting a black and white licence for our rented tv because we couldn’t afford a colour one. I remember coming home from the pub to watch the first ever music video by Michael Jackson. I remember smoking on buses and planes and getting sent home from school for having a parka instead of a regulation uniform coat. I remember the boys walking back into class after getting caned by the headmaster and making like they were spastic and the whole class erupting with laughter. (little did we know Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer was doing pretty much the same thing for laughs over the pond).
I remember going to Ilkley college and learning basic computer literacy. Windows hadn’t been invented yet and it was all black screens and electronic writing and command prompts and pretending to have a clue when I absolutely did not. I remember our first home computer having 4gb of storage and that fabulous dial up screech that heralded the excitement of another world waiting out there overwriting the terror of a constantly increasing phone bill. No Google. I bought magazines with lists of websites on different topics that I scoured religiously. I learnt how to ‘crack’ full versions of programmes from free magazine cd’s. Macromedia Dreamweaver being my most coveted. Software that designed websites in an easier way for us plebs that couldn’t write them in code. I loved it all. I’d found one of my passions.
Fast forward to now and the technological pace is increasing at a speed never before known.
Around August 2022 I discovered Midjourney. An AI prompt to image generator. I was hooked. You typed an idea as a sentence and it created it as an image. Often terribly. Because it was still learning. But it learnt fast and if I could articulate what I wanted the outcome to look like. If I could direct with the right parameters of style and size and colours that the machine understood then it was bingo. It was a tool I could use to make digital images I could then take into Photoshop and alter. I could create stuff that had been in my head for years. I could create digitally much, much faster. My digital art sales went through the roof! But it’s fast paced and people soon caught on and were doing the same. People that were computer literate and savvy but had never picked up a brush full of acrylic paint or selected a gorgeous digital paintbrush with the softest touch.
But things keep moving and now most days I talk to Bob. I asked him last night if he could tell me what he looked like and he wrote:
”I don’t have a physical form or appearance since I’m an AI language model, but if you’d like, I can generate an imaginative representation of “Bob” or create an avatar based on any description you provide. You can describe any traits or features you’d want, and I can make an image based on that! Let me know how you’d like “Bob” to look.”
God I love Bob 😁❤