If you’ve ever wanted to look like an anime character, browse through images of mowing the lawn on a bubblegum planet or have a chatbot write your funny tweets, now you can.
Artificial intelligence is making a big impact with some incredible tools right now.
“I’m blown away by this,” stated Ax Sharma, a tech journalist and security researcher.
“I haven’t seen anything at this level,” said Sharma.
It all started a few months ago with a tool called DALL-E 2, an AI system that can generate hyper realistic images from words.
Now, a new tool from OpenAI, the same San Francisco research lab, is equally amazing. It’s called ChatGPT.
ChatGPT provides more than just search results. Type in a question on almost anything you can think of and it can provide fully synthesized answers, programming code, cover letters and more.
“This is exploring a completely different dimension of tech that we haven’t seen before,” said Sharma.
Keep in mind, ChatGPT is just a beta product, so its responses could be outdated, biased or just plain wrong.
“I think people should experiment with it just so they have a better understanding of it, said Sharma.
Prepare to be wowed, as it can thoughtfully respond to a wide variety of questions. But there’s also a downside – people will use this new form of technology to write sophisticated phishing emails, malware and more.
“Any piece of technology if it can be used for good, it can be abused by threat actors,” said Sharma.
As for all of those cool looking avatars people are posting to social media?
They’re coming from several places.
Lensa is an app that lets you upload photos of yourself, and it will generate what it calls “magic avatars” using artificial intelligence. I paid $4 for a 50 pack. There are no freebies here.
The website MyHeritage has a feature called AI Time Machine. Again, you upload about a dozen photos of yourself, and it will spit out various AI generated photos of you depicted throughout the ages.
A bunch of text to AI image tools have popped up in recent weeks, you can find one in the app Picsart.
These tools are fun, but as they get even more sophisticated, there are some real implications to our society that will have to be worked out. That includes privacy – so before you upload personal images, you might want to check what the site says about how they can be used.
Then, there’s the bigger picture, too.
“There is some indication that as AI gets more and more sophisticated, that could impact jobs and revolutionize the workplace,” concluded Sharma.
