Innovation Profs - 8/29/2023

Your weekly guide to generative AI tools and news

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Innovation Profs
August 29, 2023

Generative AI News

LinkedIn Says Generative AI is Reshaping Tomorrow's Job Market

"Future of Work Report: AI at Work,” a report recently put out by LinkedIn, describes the impact of generative AI on the global job market. Key findings include:

  • 51% of US executives are excited about AI developments but are unsure about how they will put them to use.

  • 47% of US executives think that using generative AI will increase productivity.

  • 44% of US executives are planning to increase the use of AI in their company in the coming year.

  • 40% of US executives believe that using generative AI will lead to more revenue and growth opportunities in the coming year.

  • 4% of US executives plan to reassess roles and reduce headcount in light of new AI developments.

Prompt engineering: is being an AI ‘whisperer’ the job of the future or a short-lived fad?

Although prompt engineering, the task of effectively prompting content out of AI models, has not emerged as a standalone career, there is certainly value in the skill of writing good prompts. This article highlights two types of experts that are well-equipped to produce successful prompts: domain experts, who understand the nuances of a given field in order to ask the right questions of an AI model, and technical experts, who understand how AI models work and use that knowledge to improve prompting results. Ultimately the author concludes that learning the formal details of prompt engineering may not be necessary, instead recommending specifically focusing on using generative AI in one’s area of expertise, but he also acknowledges that developing basic generative AI skills may still be valuable to employers.

Young professionals are turning to AI to create headshots. But there are catches

With generative AI, a user can upload a photo and receive a headshot as output. However, commonly used tools for creating headshots are subject to the problems that plague AI-powered image generation tools, namely, performance issues with hands, fingers, ears, and teeth, as well as complications of bias, for instance, by modifying the appearance of non-white users in problematic ways.

An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to decide which books to ban

The Mason City Community School District asked ChatGPT to determine whether certain books contain “a description or depiction of a sex act” in order to comply with the new state law SF 496, which prohibits any such books from being held in public school library collections. As a result, 19 books were removed from the Mason City school libraries. As noted in the linked article, the findings of the Mason City CSD administrators were not replicated by The Verge, as upon their own query with ChatGPT, they were told that several of the books identified for removal did not contain sexual content. (Editorial Note: This is a gross misuse of LLM tools such as ChatGPT, which should not be relied upon to produce accurate results about matters of fact.)

Judge rules that AI-generated art isn't copyrightable, since it lacks human authorship

Judge Beryl Howell ruled that a piece of AI-generated art is not eligible for copyright protection due to its lack of human authorship. The piece in question, A Recent Entrance to Paradise, was generated by the Creativity Machine, an AI model developed by computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who had sued the US Copyright Office, which did not grant a copyright for the piece. Questions remain about how much human involvement in the production of an AI-generated image would qualify the image for copyright protection, as well as the status of pieces of art generated by AI systems that include copyrighted material in their training sets.

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Tool of the week: Ideogram

Toronto-based artificial intelligence startup Ideogram launched in public beta last week with a mission to help people become more creative through generative AI. Unlike tools like Midjourney and DALL-E, you can currently use Ideogram for free. There appears to be a waitlist, but Professor Snider has a some invites. Email him at [email protected] if you want one.

AI-generated image of the week

If you are like us, you’re celebrating your kids going back to school. Here’s a take on that via Midjourney. 

Prompt:  parents celebrating in a parking lot while dropping off children for the first day of school, bright colors, pen-ink, futurism, Bird's-eye perspective, Polarizing filter --ar 16:9

Generative AI tip of the week

Google is adding generative AI tools directly into Google Workspace with Duet AI. Duet AI can help you write an email in Gmail, add custom visuals to your Slides presentation, create a custom template in Sheets and more.

To access Duet AI in Google Workspace, join Google Workspace Labs.

Get starting with Generative AI

New to generative AI? Here are some places to start…

What we found

We love seeing what others are creating with generative AI. This week, we found a video using AI to design Lego sets. Watch the video here.