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

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
Oct 6
Very soon, the blocker to using AI to accelerate science is not going to be the ability of AI, but rather the systems of science itself, as creaky as they are.

The scientific process is already breaking under a flood of human-created knowledge. How do we incorporate AI usefully? Image
Science isn't just a thing that happens. We can have novel discoveries flowing from AI-human collaboration every day (and soon, AI-led science), and we really have not built the system to absorb those results and translate them into streams of inquiry and translations to practice
A lot of people are worried about a flood of trivial but true findings, but we should be just as concerned about how to handle a flood of interesting and potentially true findings. The selection & canonization process in science has been collapsing already, with no good solution
Read 4 tweets
Sep 20
Some new theoretical economics papers looking at the implications of AGI.

These two papers argue that a true AGI-level AI (equivalent to a human genius), if achieved, would eventually displace most human labor and reduce the economic value of remaining human work to near-zero. Image
Image
Full conference play-by-play here:
Read 4 tweets
Sep 13
Hey Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini: "I am time traveling back to the 75 BC Rome for one day. I can't bring anything back. What is the one thing I could learn that would most advance today's knowledge and what is one thing I could do there that would make me richest today"

Pretty good Image
Image
Image
Summary of their views:
Gemini: Get how to make maritime concrete and provide an artifact proving time travel
Claude: Memorize specific texts and the formula for concrete and location of proscribed villas
ChatGPT: Figure out Etruscan language and the location of Alexander's Tomb
Read 4 tweets
Sep 10
Claude's new ability to work with Excel files is the best I have seen so far

I have given it existing spreadsheets to work with and asked it to create new ones. Good use of formatting, formulas, etc.

It created all of this, including 406 formulas, from one prompt (& its solid). Image
Image
Image
Image
This is like an assignment I give, and it would be a good result of a week-long team project for my MBA class. I can't promise it is error free, but I haven't found any issues so far.
If I were giving feedback, I think I would say that I think I would take a different tack to the business model (less money on instructors initially, more spend on marketing), but there are no technical issues I have spotted, more a difference of opinion over a vague prompt.
Read 4 tweets

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