Sneak Peak 👀 Creativity in the age of AI with Hamza Shaikh

0:00The average person might look on social media and see something and immediately recognize that it's AI and they don't have to be an AI expert. So I think we're becoming more accustomed to understanding the nuances around AI. However, there's a part in the book, there's a chapter in the book that talks about, actually it's in the opening chapter that talks about how the breeding ground for a technology like mid-journey, Dali, and all those early stable diffusion models and something image generation. now it's nano banana everyone's crazy over that right but the breeding ground for that was a world that was obsessed with images and content hence the book's called image generation because it's a play on words that yes it's image generation technology that unlocked all of this and we can talk about that a bit more if you want but we're also the generation of people obsessed with images so we are the image generation and so there's a healthy critique in the book as well as well as talking about the optimistic sides of things.

1:00When the AI boom happened, I mean, when I first saw Midjourney and I was one of the early beta users, like one of like 6 ,000 or whatever,

1:10Hamza Shaikh:and now it's like millions and millions, I remember typing some words in and then seeing this thing go from abstract noise and suddenly making an image of what I wrote. Now today that sounds like so what but just remember three years ago that was sorcery that was sorcery because that paradigm was new you know you type something into google like you know a pink elephant riding a horse on a cloud falling through a black hole in the jungle it's such an abstract weird thing to say you put that into google google be like like are you okay right you put that into these image generation models you will get it so for dreamers and people who are visually exploring you know a million miles an hour like me i've been the common theme for me is i've been drawing for as long as i can remember it was just mind-blowing and i became obsessed with it i became fearful of it i became panicked because of it but that only pushed me to get more and more deeper deeply involved with understanding even the mechanics of like what how is this actually working from a technology standpoint if i ever do a talk i say to try and make things very simple my passion is experimental drawing methods and that extends back all the way to when i was a kid like i would do a drawing that took three or four days and i would have no issue ripping it up and throwing it in the bin because for me it was never about oh look at this amazing piece to me it was about that cathartic process of doing something where an idea becomes some sort of visual representation to me the process and i think that's probably the reason i've ended up in technology is because creative process now is is is in the realm of technology the result of all that experimentation was the only reason the only way i'm not going to be fearful of this is if i somehow maintain agency and authorship.

3:18Hamza Shaikh:And that's what that book focuses on, of how to maintain agency and authorship. You know, students are in the education system for seven years. Yes, that's a huge portion of your life. Doing things that aren't necessarily going to actually give you value in the real professional world. And that's me being nice. It could take a much more extreme take on that. Some people say it's a massive waste of time because when you go into profession, you need to be ready for construction drawings and documentation and understanding client's needs, whereas all you've done at university is do fictional drawings of utopia.

3:55That's not my take exactly, but that is the correct sentiment, right?

3:59Hamza Shaikh:Which is students are not prepared for the professional world. And now we're in a stage where AI has made things even more turbulent. I just feel like I need to give students some sort of manual, some sort of kickstart to understanding what the hell's going on with AI. What it means to actually be in charge of your own data. Right now, you don't have access to your data. And when I say your data, you might think, what do you mean? I'm talking about the steps that you took to get to the office today. That's your data that has been reported on your apps. it's yours from a moral ethic standpoint but it's not yours from an ownership standpoint yeah yeah so i i really love to explore the idea of like what does it mean for us to actually be in charge of all of our data and then we become the vendors to the big companies who actually want our data to me that's an interesting concept but can you generate an actual built detail can you generate an actual built space and root no you can't and the reason is is because there's a lot of data engineering data science that needs to go on in order for you to create those systems that's one thing the other thing is we still haven't seen enough inference power which is basically the chips that nvidia have made that really have been part of this boom they actually need to get more stronger at least in the commercial availability and you know the price of those those chips for everyone to have machines and models that can do very complex 3d data rich generative tasks so we're not there yet and we've seen a boom but only in a very small area of of actually what ai is capable of yeah and it's kind of the start of the process is the start yeah i think the reason you've seen a lot of urgency and i mean i at least i felt a lot of urgency is because i don't I think if we don't get our foot in now and start to think proactively about even just these technologies that are impacting us, then we're not going to be ready for what comes next.