Derek Thompson Profile picture
Mar 24 7 tweets 4 min read
I'm really interested in the ability of AI like Midjourney to amplify artistic intelligence.

I've always been terrible at visual arts. Can't draw, can't paint, no instinct for design, or colors. Total black box for me.

So, I thought: Could Midjourney help me w/ interior design?
I really like leather-and-whiskey man cave vibes.

But I have no idea how to illustrate that, or describe what I like in detail.

So I gave Midjourney really basic instructions and it made this. ImageImage
My wife likes sunken living rooms and neutral colors.

I barely even know what those things are.

But I can just type "/imagine: sunken living room with neutral colors" and get this. ImageImage
Or how about a great room with bohemian textures and eclectic-global colors?

Lol like I even know what I'm talking about when I use those words.

Still made this in 7 seconds. ImageImage
A baby's room with jungley aesthetics or bright floral pastels.

I am literally an idiot typing random words I barely understand into a Discord bar.

These images popped out. ImageImage
I don't think the implications here are immediately obvious.

1. This is f*cking amazing? Midjourney expands my unvelt, giving me synesthetic intelligence I previously lacked.

2. I am a FRAUD, synthesizing what might pass for interior decorating expertise with minimal effort!
Great Q!

One advantage over Google is that you can specify things like room size and introduce the existence of furniture you already own.

Say, you're filling out a 10x10 room with a back window, carrying over an old grey couch, and want to add neutrals

ImageImage

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More from @DKThomp

Mar 22
New study: When superhuman AI beat human Go players, professional Go players adapted by making "significantly better decisions"

Conclusion: "... Development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies"
This is all larval and nobody has any idea what's going to happen, but. One possibility is AI will serve for some as a cheat sheet (replacing intelligence) and for others a cognitive co-pilot (complementing intelligence), as @cwarzel and I discuss here
open.spotify.com/episode/2KEFXK…
Link to full study: pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…
Read 4 tweets
Mar 21
To kick off today's pod with @cwarzel on his great GPT-4 reporting, I spent some time in the open discussing three implications of generative AI:

1. A ceiling-raiser for collective intelligence
2. A Star Trek replicator for content
3. A human manipulator

open.spotify.com/episode/2KEFXK…
When I first wrote the intro, I thought I was writing about 2 good things (it's acing tests! it's a creativity spigot!) and 1 bad thing (it can bribe TaskRabbits!).

Then I talked to @LauraMartin531 about it and decided the good things could be bad and the bad thing could be good
1. Yes, a pattern-matching inference robot could raise the ceiling of our collective intelligence.

But the very fact that it offers synthetic knowledge means a lot of ppl will use it as a replacement for knowledge. As a crutch, or a crib sheet, AI will also make some ppl dumber.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 18
This is the chart that has launched a thousand takes.

The conclusion seems obvious: Everything the govt touches goes to infinity in price. Everything pure capitalism touches goes to zero.

But there's another way of looking at this graph that dramatically changes the story.
As @mtkonczal finds, if you expand your analysis to 62 CPI categories and track their price changes in the 21st century, you get a slightly different story.

It's not just govt vs. capitalism

It's also services vs. goods.

mikekonczal.substack.com/p/a-better-aei…
What's gotten most expensive?

Delivery services, medical services, municipal maintenance, education.

The most expensive goods—education supplies, food served at restaurants—tend to be wrapped into services.

Some surprises: Auto repair inflation is higher than day care.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 17
New paper: "Negativity drives online news consumption"

Blended study of 105,000 headlines and 370 million impressions concludes "each additional negative word [in a headline] increased the click-through rate by 2.3%"
"We find that news headlines containing positive language are significantly less likely to be clicked on. For a headline of average length, the presence of positive words in a news headline significantly decreases the likelihood of a headline being clicked on, by around 1.0%."
Negative words are most powerful for political news stories.

Individuals are "especially likely to consume political and economic news when it is negative."
Read 7 tweets
Mar 10
Silicon Valley Bank thread.

This is a dire overview of the implications. Many tech CEOs rely on SVB for payroll—and often for their own individual wealth management.
Where did the money go?
- declining deposits among startups
- bad bets crushed by rise of interest rates
Read 11 tweets
Mar 7
New: Last year, demographers realized that, after US fertility had fallen to all-time lows, Americans were having more babies.

Nobody knew for sure why.

A new report from @ModeledBehavior and @lymanstoneky finds a surprising factor: Remote work.

theatlantic.com/newsletters/ar…
How might remote work increase fertility?

Consider 3 barriers to having as many kids as one would like:
- cost: infants are freaking expensive
- time: ... also, so fussy!
- distance: 2-income hhlds often sacrifice one partner's career bc they can't work in 2 cities at once
Remote work isn't some perfect sword slicing the Gordian Knot of all America's family and work problems at once.

But it might resolve the cost-time-distance problem of fertility—and help many parents have the family size they desire. Image
Read 5 tweets

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