Ethan Mollick Profile picture
Nov 26, 2022 14 tweets 8 min read Read on X
If you last checked in on AI image makers a month ago & thought “that is a fun toy, but is far from useful…” Well, in just the last week or so two of the major AI systems updated.

You can now generate a solid image in one try. For example, “otter on a plane using wifi” 1st try:
This is what you got a month ago with the same prompt. (MidJourney v3 vs. v4)
This is a classic case of disruptive technology, in the original Clay Christensen sense 👇

A less capable technology is developing faster than a stable dominant technology (human illustration), and starting to be able to handle more use cases. Except it is happening very quickly
Seriously, everyone whose job touches on writing, images, video, or music should realize that the pace of improvement here is very fast & also, unlike other areas of AI, like robotics, there are not any obvious barriers to improvement.

We should be thinking about what that means
Also worth looking at the details in the admittedly goofy otter pictures: the lighting looks correct (even streaming through the windows), everything is placed correctly, including the drink, the composition is varied, etc.

And this is without any attempts to refine the prompts.
Some more, again all first attempts with no effort to revise:
🦦 Otters fighting a medieval duel
🦦Otter physicist lamenting the invention of the atomic bomb
🦦Otter inventing the airplane in 1905
🦦Otters playing chess in the fall
(These AIs just came out just a few months ago)
AI image generation can now beat the Lovelace Test, a Turing Test, but for creativity. It challenges AI to equal humans under constrained creativity.

Illustrating “an otter making pizza in Ancient Rome” in a novel, interesting way & as well as an average human is a clear pass!
And I picked otters randomly for fun

But since some comments are pointing out that nonhuman scenes may be easier; here are some of the prompt “doctor on a plane using wifi” - we are good at picking out flaws with illustrations of people, but they are impressive & improving fast.
People keep asking what system I was using: it is MidJourney (I mentioned this in the thread)

If you want to try it, you get 25 uses for free & a guide is below. Be sure to use —v4 at the end of your prompt to use the latest version, which is the one I use throughout the thread.
Here👇 is a thread with more comparisons between MidJourney a month or so ago, compared to MidJourney now. The pace is fast!

If you are trying MidJourney, the way to use the new version is to add --v 4 to the end of your prompt (I have no association with it or any AI company)
And I generated every one of these images from my phone in seconds & most were done over plane wifi (appropriately).

As to what this all means? There are many different ways human work will be impacted by AI, including boosting our capabilities 👇

But change is coming quick!
If you want more connections between what is happening in research and how it effects the real world, I have a free Substack you can read.

For example, here is a post on boosting creativity… oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-be-mo…
Otter reacting to a viral Twitter post.
Reminder: if you want to use the new MidJourney version 4, rather than the old (from a month ago!) version add “ --v 4” to the end of the prompt. The spaces are vital

Interestingly, version 4 “just works” making it easier for everyone but power users who learned to craft prompts

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More from @emollick

Dec 13
ChatGPT 5.2: "Build an interactive Excel spreadsheet where I can pick two D&D monsters to fight against each other and the spreadsheet simulates the combat somehow, including special abilities. Give a D&D look"

Thinking took 60 minutes(!) & had to have it fix an error, but cool Image
Image
Image
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Claude 4.5 Opus followed the same instructions very quickly, and with style, but simplified the problem to avoid using actual special abilities or status, just straight up rolls for damage Image
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Gemini 3 Pro. I really hope they add consistent ability to work with or download files. Image
Read 4 tweets
Dec 9
I did not expect that the PowerPoint killer would be something called Nano Banana Pro, but that is where its heading

It makes the major efforts by all the other AI companies, including Microsoft, to crack PowerPoint by using python seem like a dead end

ImageGen is all you need? Image
The thing is that NotebookLM can just take source materials, a topic, and an idea and make a very pretty, impactful deck.

Hallucinations are very rare, though there are still some spelling and graphics issues. Editing capability is apparently coming, but the direction is clear.
The slide deck is the result of me throwing my entire book into NotebookLM, by the way.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 23
Voice is one of the most useful ways to interact with AI to do work but it seems to have been semi-abandoned for serious use outside of the “chat with a friend” case.

All of the voice modes only access weak models with low latency, making them zippy & fun but kind of useless.
If you don’t think of voice models as a fun chat, but rather as a way of working, it suggests that pauses are fine, even preferred (don’t talk with me unless you have something to say). And alternative UXs beyond “talk with your AI about the weather” become possible to explore.
Also I want to turn off the breathing, giggling, and disfluencies. Anthropomorphism can be helpful in many cases but it gets to be too much, especially for serious discussions. The tone is off and it feels ingratiating and slows things down.
Read 4 tweets
Nov 21
I think my “otters on a plane using WiFi” may be a saturated benchmark now that nano banana pro can do this. Image
Prompt: Scientists who are otters are using a white board to explain ethan mollicks otter on a plane using WiFi test of AI (you must search for this) and demonstrating it has been passed with a wall full of photos of otters on planes using laptops
Read 4 tweets
Oct 27
Since there are so many AI announcements, my advice is to focus on those expanding what folks can do with AI (& especially tools that democratize who can use AI) rather than every single UX improvement

Skills, connectors & agents with file access/CLIs are especially interesting.
Next up: pay attention to expansions in artifacts/vibe coding for non-coders, specialized AI tools for industries outside of coding (see Claude Finance) and systems that take software people use every day and radically transform how they work using AI (Excel agents, for example)
Also interesting to watch ambitious new applications that are AI-native. What Google is doing with NotebookLM, for example, is basically creating an entirely new interface for working with information that is a pretty strong break with older ways of handling large amounts of info
Read 4 tweets
Oct 14
I don’t have much to add to the bubble discussion, but the “this time is different” argument is, in part, based on the sincere belief of many at the AI labs that there is a race to superintelligence & the winner gets,.. everything.

It is a key dynamic that is not discussed much
You don’t have to believe it (or think this is a good idea), but many of the AI insiders really do. Their public statements are not much different than their private ones.

Without considering that zero sum dimension, a lot of what is happening in the space makes less sense.
This is not the only way folks justify the large spend on AI buildout (and whether there is a bubble seems very far from obvious), but it is a dimension that does not show up in as many economic analyses as it should.
Read 5 tweets

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