Food for Thought on AI, Creativity, Writing, and More…

A few links to articles and more that I have found useful in my research over the last couple of months.

Photo by Osman Rana on Unsplash

Let me try and group these in a vaguely sensible way:

First up, mentally enriching content!

1. Let’s start on a non-AI related note. A lovely documentary on Fermilab, no physics knowledge required:

2. For the creatives out there, an awesome take on Basquiat’s approach:

3. A great breakdown of the different components of the AI industry:

The Four Wars of the AI Stack (Dec 2023 Recap)

4. An alternative, long-term take on the economic impact of AI:

AI Could Actually Help Rebuild The Middle Class | NOEMA

Next, AI readings I enjoyed

1. A fun Midjourney exploration for fiction writers looking at classics from literature:

Visualising novels using Midjourney v6 and GPT-4 - Part 1: Characters

2. Not a resource per se, but Shimmr is an interesting AI startup in the publishing space. I had the pleasure to chat with their founder, who has developed a great approach for building an AI product that does not scare publishers off! He also wrote a book about it, linked on their site:

Home

3. A recap of the most popular AI tools last year:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/OC_AI-Tools_V1_NC.jpg

4. The AI-themed docuseries “Becoming Human” by CNA, a public channel from my current home of Singapore . I have ulterior motives for sharing this, but you will need to wait for the official news!

5. A very promising announcement on the first “clean” large language model that was not trained on unlicensed materials:

Meet KL3M: the first Legal Large Language Model.

6. A video the AI community has been raving about, with noted AI Prof Andrew Ng explaining the developments in agentic technology (meaning, more autonomous AIs):

Third, “Traditional” Book Publishing Trends

Good article with tons of great statistics on the publishing markets:

Who Is Reading What and Why

Fourth, AI stuff that made even me go WTF

1. The fantasy series Wheel of Time is being turned into an LLM+chatbot. I have not read the series, but I could not see the use case:

https://venturebeat.com/ai/true-source-unveils-ai-llm-service-based-on-the-wheel-of-time/

2. Fresh from a few days ago, Microsoft put out its own video model, called Vasa. You feed it a single image of a person (real, artistic, or made with AI) plus a text, and an avatar will say anything you want. The results are scary/horrifying. I am sure there are legitimate uses for this, but I just don’t know how this, on a global scale, does not upend human interactions. For now, it is for research only, they say (along plenty of other disclaimers):

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/vasa-1/

Finally, Personal Growth

1. From an Australian YouTuber I like quite a lot, struthless. His “Inevitable Goals” framework-as-a-site was a great exercise:

Inevitable Goals

And, to close it all off, an out-there piece that had me ruminating well after finishing it:

AI Could Be A Bridge Toward Diverse Intelligence

Thanks for making it so far!Let me know if any of the above were interesting or useful.

Till next time.

Peace,

Paolo