RIP creative jobs

This year has been particularly interesting for folks interested in AI, especially when it comes to image generators. After OpenAI’s release of DALL-E 2 a few months ago, we’ve continued to see similar products spring up.

The latest one making the rounds on Twitter is Stable Diffusion, an image-generating AI from the DreamStudio team. What makes Stable Diffusion different is the fact that it’s open-source. That alone has brought up a lot of concerns as to how the tool could be used in harmful ways. But something that’s been even more controversial is how these types of AI tools might abolish creative jobs and stock image websites.

An interesting article from Washington Post tells the story of how maker Jason Allen, who runs a tabletop fantasy games company, submitted an artwork generated by Midjourney (another AI tool) and won a fine-arts competition. It’s hard to tell how this will play out in the long run and whether technology like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion will completely remove the need for creative jobs or will simply be used as a tool to enhance creativity.

Expert opinions seem to lean towards the former case. Back in April, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, shared his thoughts on the matter: “Although I firmly believe AI will create lots of new jobs, and make many existing jobs much better by doing the boring bits well, I think it’s important to be honest that it’s increasingly going to make some jobs not very relevant (like technology frequently does).”

Safety concerns around the ethics of AI could be what delays the process though. And just like ATMs replaced bank tellers, change is inevitable as technology advances.

Which camp are you in?

• Prospective polyglots: Luma Language uses AI and viral content to help users learn the first 1,000 words of a language.

• Browser extension Suggesty uses AI to generate human-like answers to your Google searches. Ask a question and receive an answer from Suggesty at the top of the search page.

• Need to organize your inbox? Emailgurus helps you classify emails coming from outside of your contact list by watching your inbox in realtime and filtering out unknown senders.

• Tella for Slack lets you share Tella links with your team and watch them directly in Slack.

Maker Sebastian Stamm was bored of his typical daily walk routes, so he created EarthQuest.

The web app randomly generates coordinates to walk to. After each coordinate is reached, users “level up” and receive a new set of increasingly difficult coordinates. It also provides turn by turn navigation and uses heatmap statistics to show users where they’ve been in the past.