- Why Steroids Are NOT Functional – Don’t Trade Your Health for Muscle
- How to Keep Leveling Up INFINITELY – Like Sung Jin-Woo
- The Ideal Physique is Easy for Most Guys When They Learn This – Toji Workout
- How to Train Your FOOT Muscles for Balance, Power, & Injury Prevention
- How to Do Sit Ups CORRECTLY for Ripped, Powerful Abs
- How to Train Your Nervous System Like a NINJA
- Pike Push Ups are Good and You Should Probably Do Them, Maybe
- Supercharge Your Mitochondria for Energy, Endurance, And Longevity
- Calisthenics will change you.
- How to Track and Progress Multiple Goals at the Gym… And Win!
AI + Human Creativity – An Amazing Opportunity
When I first learned to program, the feeling was intoxicating.
With each new command I learned, I was able to see countless possibilities. Countless new things I could make and achieve. As soon as I learned about IF statements, I realised I’d be able to create my own computer games. I couldn’t wait to race home and try it!
After trying ChatGPT for the first time, I feel that way again. For the first time since I was a kid with a ZX Spectrum.
SO much possibility for each of us. But it’s probably not for the reasons you think…
***
Artificial intelligence is the talk of the town at the moment (the internet town), ever since OpenAI released the one-two punch of Dall-E and ChatGPT. The former, a tool capable of generating AI based on some human-language prompts; the latter, a natural language AI that can engage in human-like conversation while drawing from a vast database of knowledge.
Without going too in-depth, these tools are based on machine learning. They have been “trained” to look for patterns across huge amounts of data, with a little help from human trainers. They have no understanding of what they’re creating but simply know that certain strings of words, for example, tend to occur after one another. They can then recombine words or artistic elements to bring forth entirely new* creations. Thus, they are examples of “generative AI.”
The results are pretty amazing. You can go to ChatGPT and ask it to write you an article on pretty much any topic and it will produce something pretty darn convincing. It will sound like it was written by a human, it will have an interesting structure, and it will be 90% factually correct (ChatGPT is definitely not immune to factual errors).
You can ask it to write you a poem including random elements and it will spit out something that actually has a great flow, that rhymes, and that makes sense.
Let’s try it!
“Chat GPT – write me a ten line poem that includes a caterpillar and a mouse that both love gaming.”
A caterpillar and a mouse, Both love gaming in their house, They play for hours on end, Chasing quests, foes, and friends.
ChatGPT
The mouse clicks with nimble paws, While the caterpillar moves with slow crawls, Yet together they make a great team, With strategy and skill, they reign supreme.
Their screens aglow with vivid light, As they game well into the night, For these two unlikely friends, Gaming is where their bond never ends.
Okay… that’s just straight-up fantastic…
This technology isn’t new, per-say, but it’s the first time it’s been so openly available to the general public. This has resulted in mass-hysteria, pretty much, as every media outlet is now reporting on the disruption that awaits so many industries.
Already, companies are laying off writing staff. My old job as a freelance copywriter would now be completely redundant. (I used to write high-volume, low-quality SEO content for brick laying companies, car windshield repair, and the like.) I even tried to develop a simpler, more basic tool myself at the time – with some limited success. (This was not based on machine learning but rather a method to turn prompts into sentences and paragraphs and thus save me a lot of time.)
But while certain, less-skilled, work is likely to go the way of the sharovipteryx, I don’t think traditional content-creation is about to go anywhere.
Why I’m Irreplacable
ChatGPT cannot replace me as the Bioneer. That’s because most of you don’t read my content for my witty writing style: you read it for my unique perspectives. We’ve built trust over many years, hopefully, and I’ve demonstrated that I have some interesting things to say about human performance. These are unique perspectives you won’t get elsewhere.
As much as ChatGPT is amazing, it is only recycling content that is already out there. It can’t makle novel connections and have breakthroughs – yet.
As such, any fitness content I have asked it to write has thus far been generic. I am still needed to come up with unique and interesting topics that I think my audience will enjoy. But even if I handle that part, the best ChatGPT can come up with is something relatively generic that you could have worked out by browsing the web.
For example, I am going to be writing a script about training the traps very soon. Out of curiosity, I decided to see how ChatGPT would handle the task. I even asked it to write it in the style of charming and good-looking YouTuber, The Bioneer.
While the resulting article was technically correct, and pleasingly included specific exercises for the upper, middle, and lower traps, it of course omitted what I think is the most original and interesting contribution I have to make.
Which is that you can train both the middle AND upper traps in a very effective way by carrying a sandbag gripped to your chest. And, of course, it wouldn’t know that I got this idea after a chiropractor told me that my left trap was significantly more developed – in all likelihood from carrying my son in one arm (I carry him that side so that my right arm is free to do things). A fun anecdote that simultaneously reinforces one of my key messages: that what you do outside the gym is more important.
That is what people come to the Bioneer for; not generic information about muscles that they could get from Wikipedia. It’s the novel connections combined with experience and expertise that make the best human-created content irreplicable.
ChatGPT even signed off on the script as “Thanks for watching, and see you in the next video!” That’s not what I say! I say “Thanks for watching, and bye for now!” Close but, eerily, just slightly off.
And, just to be absolutely clear, there is absolutely zero chance of this thing developing consciousness. It is a mathematical model and we don’t even know how our consciousness arises. Anyone who predicts otherwise, likely doesn’t know what they’re talking about (and I rarely make such definitive statements).
So, I’m not about to outsource my content to ChatGPT any time soon. Many people will. But those sites will be lost in a sea of noise (a sea that’s about to get a lot more crowded).
In fact, in this new era, more and more people are going to start going directly to the sources they trust when looking for specific information. Search will be less useful for things that really matter because 90% of what it churns out will be AI-written.
Of course, Bing is soon to have ChatGPT integrated directly. But even Google, unable to distinguish between human and AI-generated content (despite its best efforts – mark my words!), will be serving up the same standardized answers henceforth.
Human Creativity + AI is an Insanely Powerful Combination
But if AI is so middling, what makes it such an intoxicatingly powerful opportunity?
Well, it’s all about how you USE it. And this is incredibly apparent when it comes to coding.
Because ChatGPT is also capable of writing code. In pretty much any popular programming language. What’s amazing, is that it told me this occurred as a by-product of being trained on forums and tutorials – it wasn’t intentional!
Either way, the results are, once again, middling. I’ve asked ChatGPT to program things for me and been amazed. But I’ve stumped it just as many times.
Once it made me a very complex Python script, but neglected to call the first function anywhere in the code!
But some of the things it HAS done, have been incredible.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to write me a version of Conway’s Game Of Life in C# for Unity. I specified that I wanted to be able to set the grid size and number of cells myself and that I would provide one prefab to use as the graphic for the live cell.
For those that don’t know, this Game Of Life is a cellular automation that populates and empties cells based on some predefined rules and updates each of them every “turn.” This can result in some surprising patterns and even a form of natural selection that is fascinating to behold.
ChatGPT delivered perfectly. Not only was it able to complete the code, it also understand and was able to implement the rules of Conway’s Game Of Life. That level of context sensitivity is amazing. It even gave me instructions for implementing the code in a Unity project.
In another instance, ChatGPT created a script for a 3D Unity project that spawned spheres and then had them clamour together to form a central mass. I asked ChatGPT to make the spheres move in an erratic, organic manner. It did a pretty amazing job of this and, again, I was impressed by its ability to follow creative cues.
Later on, it made a fully working game of Breakout!
Force Amplifier
To be clear, none of these are things I wouldn’t have been able to do on my own. And, in each case, I DID have to troubleshoot (sometimes significantly).
But that’s not the point. The point is that these projects would have taken me days or even weeks. There would have been bugs and stress headaches. The 3D sphere biomass thing is actually imagery I want to use as an animation for an upcoming video. I hadn’t done it until now because it wasn’t work putting in that much work for a two-second clip.
But now I’m able to do it in ten minutes, while watching TV.
THAT is what I find so exciting about this technology. I built a calorie calculator in less than a minute. And anything I don’t understand, ChatGPT can explain to me in extremely simple terms.
This is what you call a “force multiplier.” That’s something that can greatly increase your output, with no additional effort required on your part (like a hammer – which lets you drive nails far more effectively than you could with your fist using the same force).
It’s not just about coding either. Writing jobs can become significantly faster and easier as ChatGPT provides structures, outlines, and research.
I’ve even been able to use ChatGPT to create software tools and then have it operate those tools!
Suddenly, the scope of what one person can accomplish, has expanded tremendously. Again.
And they’re only going to get more powerful.
To thrive in this upcoming AI era, I highly recommend becoming a jack of all trades. As I always have! By being a “digital polymath” and understanding enough of a wide variety of topics (editing, coding, writing, publishing), you’ll be able to outsource the technical parts to the AI while spotting unique connections and opportunities.
THIS is how we need to view these new AI tools. And if you understand this potential, you will be ahead of the competition… at least for five minutes.
Thanks for reading… and see you in the next article.
I’ve honestly ended up becoming overwhelmed by ChatGPT. My mind has actually blown out from the sheer possibilities of what can be done now, and in particular what I can personally do now, for exactly the reasons you’ve outlined here.
I’d been working on a game in Unity, got terribly side-tracked by other projects and interests, and started coming back to it. I used ChatGPT to help me plan it out better and to help me improve the coding, then it started hitting me that I could up my scope for the game, or work on an app idea, or on new AI-utilising apps, or to develop new skills, or hone current ones, or…
This is the start of a new era and I’m super excited. I could do all of these things! But once I start moving, things will progress scarily fast… I imagine this is what it feels like when any new “force multiplying” technology arrives, like the typewriter for writers.
Awesome!Yes, exactly. I think that’s what a lot of people are missing. It can massively increase the scope of what an individual can create – particularly in the realm of coding. It’s only going to get more powerful, too, which is pretty mind-blowing!
Last night I made an audiovisualizer while watching Love Island. That would have taken me days and days, normally. Just crazy!
Having a tool like, if it works, this is going to destroy the capabilities of most people to do anything useful and worthwhile on their own.
Its like having a robot spot you while you lift weights bigger then you can truly handle and then having the Robot lift most of the load….or using a motorbike to do 80% of a marathon.
How much progress would most people make like that?
Its the same as the internet making a few people much more educated then they could have hoped to be even as it turns masses of millennials and zoomers into Do-Nothing, mentally ill dopamine addicts who can not even muster the will to have sex anymore.
I would rather be the maker of my own, junky, thing then the project manager of a wonderful product that I have no true understanding of. This tech is going to go thru the lower classes the same way Crack and Gin did and drain them of vitality and suck the very meaning out of their existence.
You just need to look at all the really good programmers and innovators…every one of them started out using a weak machine and crude tech which forced them to become skillful at squeezing every last drop of performance out of their machines…compare how snappy XP is in comparison to bloated Windows 10 even though windows 10 is running on (almost) a super computer in comparison to the old hardware.
Embrace the ZX Spectrum again, 🙂 and ask yourself if you really get any MORE pleasure playing with a zillion core Ryzen then you got on the speccy.
https://retrovirtualmachine.org/ Best emulator ever.
hey Adam, do you have an opinion on how much could “A.I.” potentially impact professional visual artists?
this past half year I’ve been practicing my skills because I found interest in digital art, but after I learned about recent developments it’s been rather the proverbial kick to the balls of my motivation ????
perhaps the more narrative-driven professions won’t be affected by A.I. as much?