Generative AI: The Force Surging AI to Cultural Prominence

AI is a field of technology that is never short of innovation. It is not only rapidly developing, but has the unique trait of developing itself. Systems of AI, once built, can continually take in data to further develop its own model. This general premise is best explored in something called generative AI. Generative AI is fed existing content to create new content. 

In the past this was very limited in terms of medium, but in recent years this has really opened up. This means it’s no longer just basic text that can be generated, but pictures, audio, and videos. Think of all the AI generated images that have become more and more popular over the past few years. Better yet look at the upswing in AI voices that replicate real people and characters. 

This is the power of generative AI and why it has become so incredibly prominent. It is AI that can be taught. It’s easy to wonder why this is seemingly a new innovation when it seems like a fairly obvious concept. The answer, data. ChatGPT, one chat bot that doesn’t even produce novel images or audio, uses 45 terabytes of data. This may sound like a generally big number but here’s something to put it into scope. This amount of data could fill one million feet of bookshelf space. Not only that, it has an estimated cost of over $12 million. 

The amount of data needed for these new generative AI processes was simply not practical before. Yet now that it is, the world of AI has opened up in countless ways. It’s no longer just something that used as a novelty, or in the world of tech exclusively. AI has become a pervasive force in a range of industries. Marketing in particular has been using generative AI to bring new flairs to ancient industries. Financial services, for example, has 24% of marketing now done with AI. 

More generally in the field of marketing, AI has become rampant in mass marketing. Imagine emails, for example. For many companies they already had email marketing automated, but now they can optimize with AI. The same applies to customer service and fraud detection. These processes have been made much more effective through the use of AI. 

There are, of course, the more obvious uses of generative AI. Imagine the chatbots that have been growing so much in popularity. While they’ve been around for years, before they were a fun gimmick. Now they are writing papers for college students across America. ChatGPT alone had over one million people sign up for its use in the first five days. This is just the first of the many advanced chatbots that are in development. 

Another incredibly popular AI is DALL-E. AI art has been the source of an incredible amount of controversy lately. The question of if AI art is novel, who deserves credit, and what it means for artists is incredibly complex. This AI is also incredibly popular, seeing over 1.5 million users. Yet these two, while the most prominent in the news lately, are just the beginning.

Make-A-Video, for example, while not as widely accessible, is another impressive modern AI. This bot generates video from text prompts or static pictures. While possibly the most primitive, it is also possibly the most impressive. It’s AI like this that starts to raise the question of exactly where the limits of this technology lies. How long will it be before AI music, television, and art are just as prominent as original work?

Well the answer, according to experts, is actually a long time. AI has opened up the doors for certain industries like marketing in an undeniable way. Yet it’s not some abstract piece of space technology, it has real limits and real definable uses. This is overall a great thing. AI doesn’t have to be so mystified. The situations in which it is useful can be clearly defined and it can be used for some real good in the world. The more AI develops the more small businesses and average consumers can use it. Just like any other technology, time will start to normalize its use.

This is the undeniable direction of AI. Currently people are still very fascinated with it as a novelty. It is undeniably cool to be able to write in a prompt and get a reasonable answer on anything. Yet the use of AI is slowly shifting away from that of casual chats and towards practical utility. For some this is a scary thought, for some it’s an exciting one. The reality is likely somewhere in between. AI is not a force of good or evil. It’s on the people using it to define what it is and can be. Only time will tell exactly what that ends up being.

Written by Brian Wallace.

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