FEATURE
Takeaways from Stanford’s 386-page report on the state of AI
- AI development has flipped over the last decade from academia-led to industry-led, by a large margin, and this shows no sign of changing.
- It’s becoming difficult to test models on traditional benchmarks and a new paradigm may be needed here.
- The energy footprint of AI training and use is becoming considerable, but we have yet to see how it may add efficiencies elsewhere.
- The number of “AI incidents and controversies” has increased by a factor of 26 since 2012, which actually seems a bit low.
- AI-related skills and job postings are increasing, but not as fast as you’d think.
- Policymakers, however, are falling over themselves trying to write a definitive AI bill, a fool’s errand if there ever was one.
Unlocking human creativity with AI: how artificial intelligence will transform the creative process
Fiverr’s Head of Audio and Music, Adam Fine, believes that AI will allow people to be artists.
“We're gonna see how people, freelancers, professionals, experts, continue to use this tool. Ultimately humans will be the winners and we'll see humans continue to get more creative and more productive…AI can be used in music to enhance production, consumption, many different things. and I think the possibilities are endless,” Fine says.
yahoo.com
CREATIVITY
One of Steve Jobs’ best ‘innovation’ tricks
Apple CEO, Tim Cook, said he admired how Jobs held everyone at Apple to the same standard of creativity and boundary pushing — no matter whether they worked in engineering, marketing or any other department.
“One of the things I loved about him was he didn’t expect innovation out of just one group in the company or creativity out of one group,” Cook said. “He expected it everywhere in the company.”
Designerly behaviors can help anyone be creative...
cnbc.com
When innovation goes south: The tech that never quite worked out
Author Vaclav Smil's newest book, Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure , is a tale of thwarted promise. He focuses on the categories chosen to demonstrate the limits of innovation. Although astoundingly rapid progress has been made in the fields of electronics and computing over the past 50 or so years, it does not follow that we are thus in some unprecedented golden age of disruptive, transformative growth in every field.
Smartphones are cool and all, but innovations in areas that could meaningfully improve many people’s lives—agriculture, transportation, energy use and storage, drug discovery—have mostly seen incremental progress. Not only that, but we don’t even actually need radical new inventions to get clean water, micronutrients, and a decent education to kids in the developing world, which would radically improve their quality of life. We can mitigate extant inequalities by tweaking the tech we have, if we would only choose to do so.
arstechnica.com
CURIOSITY
What happens when ChatGPT starts to feed on its own writing?
Generative models like ChatGPT are trained on gobs and gobs of text from the internet — most of which, up until now, has been created by human beings. But if we fill the internet with more content created by ChatGPT, and then ChatGPT and its successors learn from that content, and so on and so on, will the narratives that frame how we see the world become a closed loop — ChatGPT all the way down — characterized by infinite regression to the mean? Will that homogenize our writing, our thinking, and ultimately our ways of being? Will it spell “the end of originality”?
vox.com
OBSERVATION
Beyond Algorithms: Skills Of Designers That AI Can’t Replicate
I wrote about designerly habits that AI can't replicate for Smashing Magazine.
The recent explosion of Artificial Intelligence tools for everything from writing to design has creators and designers concerned that their job functions can be replaced by AI. While AI has been programmed to perform well at certain tasks, it cannot replace the skills and behaviors of designers that are crucial to the human aspect of design. This article highlights non-technical skills like curiosity, observation, empathy, advocacy, visual communication, and collaboration that designers routinely use in their process to make a difference through design. AI can be used to augment designers’ workflow instead of replacing people.
smashingmagazine.com
UX
Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose
In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can't find any answers. A simple search for "best pc for gaming" leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Facebook and Amazon have similar issues with their core offerings.
All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user's experience has become subordinate to the company's stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users. And instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors. As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse — it's harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for information, and more difficult to socialize with people.
ampproject.org
The upside of bad design
The Museum of Failure’s latest exhibition is an epic portrait of failures big and small—from the Ford Edsel, to CNN+.
Although the exhibition isn’t focused on design, curator Dr. Samuel West says design can make or break an innovation. A great example is Philippe Starck’s postmodern sculpture, otherwise known as the Hot Bertaa kettle, which he designed for Alessi in 1989. With no ability to gauge the water level, and an oversize spout that spewed hot steam, the kettle has become a pariah among designers. Even Alessi has called it “Our most beautiful fiasco.” West, who once owned a design company, says that Hot Bertaa is “the clearest example of when form triumphs [over] function.”
fastcompany.com
INCLUSIVE
eBay just created a shortcut for building accessible websites
eBay launched a new open source tool called Include that aims to help designers take accessibility into account from the start of product development. Created as a plug-in for the popular cloud-based design tool Figma, Include can help designers and engineers from across the tech industry check their products for accessibility concerns like whether websites are compatible with screen readers, whether color schemes allow readability for people with low vision, and whether clickable elements are large enough to be clicked or tapped by people with motor skill impairments.
fastcompany.com
