Sunday 23 June 2024

"AI for the rest of us", Part V


While I described opportunities AI gave in prompt engineering and text processing (ending at previous post here), I tried for fun to create a billboard from an advert I saw in TX or CA 20 or 30 yrs ago: it was Home Depot's "got wood?", after the wildly famous "got milk?" campaign from the Milk Board. 
Showing folks  sporting white 'mustaches' from drinking milk too eagerly, it was the dawn of the photoshop era: milk was traced into mustaches or smiles... "and no milk was spilled in the production of the advert".

Just for fun chatting with a friend, I enter this text in Copilot, Microsoft's handy AI tool that come with their Edge browser:

"show me a Home Depot billboard saying "Got wood?" and showing the midriff of a man w a tool belt and hammer handle at an angle"

This is what it produced in a jiffy:

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 Not only that, it helpfully suggested "change to a woman with power tools":

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Blatant sexism aside, this raises all sorts of red flags for me with friends in the art & design space! Sure anyone could Photoshop a pic they took or scraped off the internet, but what about the Home Depot design, future photo shoots, or showing a billboard it is not?

Did the era of word processing usher in the end of printing? No it didn't, as more paper and ink were used afterwards  by pushing usage to the masses! Did Photoshopping and digital cameras  kill the design  world? Likewise it democratised the creative process! 

But the key is that human creativity was preserved, even enhanced with tools. This short exercise, as well as others posted in my blog here and on my Medium channel here, show the danger in letting machines take over the creative process... and eventually replace the creators! Let me close with showing this is just the beginning, when moving from the  static to the dynamic. Feel free to comment below.




Update: this will be my last post as I quit socials and move onto the next phase of my life. Thanks for your reading and bringing hits over ½M in 15 yrs this Sept., averaging 5K hits per month... and topping 15K when I posted my AI explorations!

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Wednesday 27 March 2024

Web maps for the rest of us

 The previous post on Community Engagement updated the rebranding of cambridgeshire.ai, with accompanying use of "AI for the rest of us" (work backward from here) this blogpost title came from. One of the mentioned changes were working with Wikimedia, OpenStreetMap and Climate Central - my Esri Developper or Non-Profit stacks are free and frozen, respectively - I had a whole lot of work put on ice, the same time I relinquished my original website www.zolnai.ca. This blog is OK however.

Monday 25 March 2024

"AI for the rest of us", Part IV

Update: follow on Part V.

 The previous post (here) recapped our purpose to use current lessons-learned in new tech to help our community engagement. Here is another way to use AI, to summarise and to decant - summarise in a structured manner - information from an article my colleague asked me to try using Google Gemini (formerly known as Bard, their AI tool).

Monday 26 February 2024

"AI for the rest of us", Part III

Update: follow on Part IV.

 Part II (here) showed a small but significant use of AI in preparing our Prospectus (link in that post). Let's look at how we're taking this further now.

The Spectator did a great state-of-the-AI here, including basically what we did above on steroids. They also highlighted Google Gemini, Bard's successor we signed up for. We also joined Wikimedia UK in open data space.

Monday 29 January 2024

"AI for the rest of us", Part II

Update: follow on Part III.

 My previous post (here) showed a useful if trivial example of Bing AI (here), not only replying in the addressed language but also quickly & easily teasing a relationship among related items.  Now let's look at a non-trivial common task, to summarise a 110 page document.

Saturday 27 January 2024

"AI for the rest of us"

 Update: follow on Part II.

In my other blog (here) Language and mores, Part VII (here) described what I found out about my family's status as immigrants in our complex story of a pregnant mother's escape from Hungary and my siblings ½ generation later. When I later discussed how I thought my marriage ended, my family saw a Jungian influence in my thinking. Jung's disciple Adler apparently inspired Kishimi & Koga's recent best seller "The Courage to be disliked" (Google books). Ensued a three-language dicussion to understand what this was all about... Mum prefers our mother tongue Hungarian, my brother lives in Montreal and my sister in Paris.

Saturday 20 January 2024

Community engagement and social prescribing

 This follows an update on this blog here.

We recently rebranded Cottenham.info to Cambridgeshire.ai: the domain name is acquired but page not done yet finished; we have a prospectus as an evergreen document, meaning ever evolving.

Our community involvement over 5 years in March is one object of this blog starting  here (follow the links) and listed here. We engaged with various community interest  parties at the impact of climate change then the pandemic on social isolation in East Anglia.

Thursday 30 November 2023

Fun with puzzle maps, part II

 Having moved from Cambridge to my family home in SW FR, I found the historic map puzzle i described here on a previous visit. 

Tuesday 31 October 2023

Community Interest Company blog recap

As I move away from Cambridge to SW FR in my family home, I will also exit socials and rethink my online engagement, where I lost all my pensions! I have also moved my domain to a new provider, which preserves this blog, Mind the Map and My Year in Kuwait above, but loses the superseded web page and my email now on Yahoo. I do, however, stay engaged with my Community Interest Company Cambridgeshire.ai at right. See following post here.

Monday 30 October 2023

AI Prompt Engineering Trial 2

 

Community Engagement 1,... 202122 & 23


Updates: Medium prof channel reflects this here.

My post here, starting my experiment to convert my CIC (non profit) from Cottenham.info to Cottenham.ai, showed how can we use AI (Wikipedia) for good. My CIC started to address rural isolation in East Anglia in light of climate change and the pandemic (here and here). After a COVID hiatus forced this reassessment, the advent of AI piqued our interest beyond the hype in the press - see my companion Medium series on this topic, following four posts from The future is digital… only it’s not what you think! here - this lead into a curious interaction and my partner finding a new direction.