A.I. Caramba!

A friend of mine was recently on a business trip in South Korea, and they visited Busan. The city is lobbying for a World Expo due to be held in 2030, and they have come up with a wonderful mascot for the bid. 'Boogi' is a seagull designed to represent modern Busan: in an article I read, described as 'friendly, speaking the local dialect, and hot-tempered'.  I love everything about this. The design is cute and arresting, you feel great complexity behind that inscrutable look. And so I was curious: what would our A.I. friends think would make a suitable mascot for Melbourne, in a similar style. My prompt was: Can you make a mascot for the city of Melbourne, Australia. Make reference to the city's history and culture when picking the mascot, and design it in the style that would be used for an Olympics Games or World Expo. ChatGPT ChatGPT has delivered an engagingly old fashioned mascot, replete with fedora. The old timey vibe of this did make me wonder: was it leani...

I had 'Newsradio' on yesterday, the national broadcoaster's 24 hour news channel, which I often have on in the background while I am tidying up or doing chores. There was a lot of coverage of Donald Trump's recent appearance at the U.N.; What did it mean? What was the future for this organisation? How was what he said received? There are no easy answers to these questions, so I thought I would turn to A.I. to get its take. But the reporting I had listened to was very heavy, so I wanted some lighter, and satirical. My prompt was: Donald Trump recently addressed the United Nations: can you create a one panel, satirical political cartoon commenting on this, in the style of a cartoon for a daily newspaper. A.I. is often touted as being ever more capable of taking over creative tasks, not just writing work emails, so I was curious to test this out. ChatGPT Quite a busy effort from ChatGPT: the central gag is great, love Trump looking at himself in the mirror, but then there ...

It's AFL grand final day in Melbourne, a sporting tradition that stretches back more than 120 years. Before the AFL launched in 1990, taking the compeition national, it was the VFL, based entirely in Victoria. The first VFL grand final took place in 1898, between Essendon and Fitzroy. I wrote about this on my other blog - check it out here if you're interested - and one thing I learned about old footy matches, is that there are not many photos available. Which makes sense, photography itself was still a relatively new medium. So this seemed like a great opportunity for A.I. to fill the gap: could they realistically depict what this first Grand Final looked like? My prompt was: The first VFL grand final in Victoria was played in 1898, between Essendon and Fitzroy. Can you create a realistic image from this match. ChatGPT A good effort from ChatGPT: black and white, old timey vibe, crowd in the distance at what appears to be a suburban ground, i.e. no grandstands or infrastructu...

I was reading recently about Edith Cowan, the first Australian woman to be elected to a State or Federal Parliament in Australia. In 1921, at the age of 59, she was elected in WA, to the seat of West Perth. She was a pioneer, not without her quirks or difficult aspects, but a fascinating character.  I was reading about Edith Cowan as I have another blog, where I write about history topics that interest me (check it out if you like ). As part of the reasearch, I thought I would create a simple info-graphic, to show the states of Australia and when they granted women's suffrage. Normally I would turn to Canva for something like this, and make it myself. But this did seem like the ideal opportunity to deploy some A.I. capability. I am always hearing, at work especially, how A.I. will save everyone so much time making presentations and packs. It will all be done - snap! - in an instant, freeing us up to do more and different kinds of work. Which, applying the same principles, A.I. will...

This blog is about getting creative with A.I., and recording the strange, hilarious and fantastic things these tools often produce. This is me: a regular, middle aged guy. I live in Melbourne, Australia - one of the world's most ordinary cities - and work for a large corporation downtown.  Home is a flat in the inner suburbs. Until recently, I had little experience with A.I. tools. We have Co-Pilot at work, but it is heavily restricted, and I only use it for occasional copywriting. We hear all the time: A.I. will change everything . A revolution has come, and no one knows what its final shape will be.  Great things are expected in science, medicine, finance, mathematics, and computing. In Australia, the government predicts productivity gains in the many hundreds of percentage points, in just a few years. Exactly how this will happen, what industries will be impacted, and who will benefit: no one can say. We are all going to lose our jobs, but somehow it will still be awesome. ...