firefly

As I continue my hunt for a fulltime job taking advantage of my deep UI Engineering Experience, I've taken a nightshift role as an instructor at Computer Systems Institute. We had our In-Service meeting the other day, and the topic was AI; the possibilities and pitfalls for the teachers and students of the organization. 

Obviously AI should be deeply in the mind of anyone who puts something on a computer screen for a living. While I suspect we might be near the top of an S-shaped curved for performance in this generation of LLM, people will still find surprising new applications for what is available now.

During the discussion I was introduced to https://firefly.adobe.com/  - right up there with Dall-E in terms of capabilities of generating original works. (Also with a unique "Text Effects" mode (shades of the old Micrsoft Word "WordArt" feature) - an endrun around LLM's notable problems in displaying text. ) 

At the very least, these generative art systems are kind of a highly customized replacement for stock clipart. And there are big philosophical issues on the training material used for these systems. I don't want to wave those concerns aside, but it reminded me of when Mark Twain wrote to Helen Keller who was facing charges of plagiarism (of her story "The Frost King" which seems to have drawn from Margaret Canby's "The Frost Fairies", which Keller had "heard" but forgotten about):

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, *except* plagiarism!…For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.

So I wish I had better answers about what we as individuals, or society, should do in this landscape, but I suspect at the very least these systems are going to be a part of nearly every knowledge worker's toolkit.