Reading AI Chatbots Are Coming to Search Engines. Can You Trust Them? by Chris Stokel-Walker for Scientific American got me thinking about truth. Chris's beautifully written and well-argued post is wrong on its face. I'm not picking a bone with an intelligent journalist who writes for a living. Chris is brilliant, and he gets it. I followed him on LinkedIn because reading thoughtful, well-crafted articles is the sine qua non for my chosen profession - digital marketing and web development.
The problem, and the reason I'm writing on a Saturday morning in a quiet office, is Chris's enlightened prose sits on top of a mountain of worrisome drivel warning AI, in general, and chatbots, in particular, will rot our brains while crushing intelligent discourse and human interaction. But, while those things may happen, chatbots won't be the reason because:
Using ChatGPT reminds me of Saturday morning cartoons. But, at the same time, the cartoons were mainly junk designed to keep children quiet while fostering the next generation of brand-conscious consumers; learning happened by mistake, happenstance, or plan.
ChatGPT is entertaining, fun, and helpful. Still, it's a cartoon, and I trust OpenAI's too much like my childhood brain trusted cartoons - sparingly, with some suspension of disbelief, and always sitting too close to the TV with a focus on having fun. Cartoon fun took many shapes. Watching the road runner outsmart the coyote, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Superman sparked my imagination, provided great fodder for games with friends, and kept me and my brother Drew out of our mother's hair, so mission more than accomplished.
I didn't believe a man could fly, the coyote got hurt, or Rocky or Bullwinkle would make everything feel better when I fell out of a tree. Cartoons were fun fantasies that did funny things my friends and I loved, copied, and added to, but we never left our nascent skepticism at the door. We know, can articulate, and understand differences between cartoons and life, so why are so many writers worried OpenAI's chatbot cartoon will be the LSD humanity unknowingly drinks, spinning reality into a series of bad trips?
Johny is a animation wizard. He lectures in animation & digital design at the University of Salford in England. Here are Jonathan's magazines. Thanks for the follow Johny send me a link video of one of your animation lectures and I'll share with our readers.
Love this video, but watch carefully or you'll miss the cool character running a little late to this meeting. Too good!
Refrence3 from Johny Byrne on Vimeo.
How A.I. and Chatbots Can Benefit Your Small BusinessesA guide to streamlining operations, enhancing customer service, and driving growth by Carlos Gil for Inc earned the most shares this week. Here are my thoughts on each of their ChatGPT recommendations.
Streamlining Operations Inc recommends Zapier, a great way to connect two systems via API, and we second that recommendation.
Customer Service Inc recommends Dialogflow, a free Google tool, and ChatGPT to create conversational A.I. for your website. We are working on Ask Eric, a project to create a personalized ChatGPT for B2C and B2B websites. Join our mailing list to be notified when Ask Eric is out of beta.
Driving Growth We'd recommend marketing automation with Salesforce or Marketo over Inc's recommendations of Survey Monkey and Google Analytics. Granted, Survey Monkey is inexpensive, but we've seen broadcast email whither in value, and G.A. is free. Unless you've got a year to spear, we suggest automating your customer relationship management (CRM) to deliver targeted messages when they convert.
This February week was an exciting week for the WTE Startups Incubator. We've always helped startups such as the Stock Whisperer and Lady Golf figure out a minimum viable product (MVP) and develop a digital-first development and marketing strategy. This year is no exception. We are working with one startup and an established company to create a skunk works-like project. And on Friday, we meet with Dean Verhoeven, creator of the perfect temperature Joeveo coffee mug. More about the WTE Incubator and our meeting with Dean soon.
7 AI Writing Tools on Writesonic for Web Design received a lot of attention, so I checked out Writesonic, and they will get you started with 2,500 words for free. If you're like me, that's two blog posts since we have to write for SEO, so not a substantial free offer. However, once you blow by the free limit, Writesonic will charge you $33 a month for what I pay $20 to OpenAI for - a conversational AI chatbot to help research and write.
I use four tools to write these days:
Promise I'll write a longer post on exactly what I'm doing with all those tools soon.
I would have KILLED for a ChatGPT tool during my seven-year Director of Ecommerce tenure. Managing a multimillion-dollar website may sound fun, but organizing many moving parts with a small team and limited budget meant eighty-hour work weeks and hardly leaving the office from October through Valentine. So instead, I retired to ride a bicycle across America, and trust me, that trip was easier than figuring out where we would find the next million bucks. I've been using ChatGPT for months and suggest five ways any ecommerce team could save time, energy, and money with OpenAI's powerful new chatbot. Here are tips I shared in Using ChatGPT for Ecommerce: Why Your Business Needs It:
The Best JS Development Tools for Developers in 2023 from Abdullah Mangi for DataScienceCentral.com rocked the WTE Ecosystem this week. I'm a marketing guy, so most of this post was Greek to me, but I checked with our founder and CTO, Eric, and he said the post was a good share of essential JS tools for 2023.
While we love Robin Yayla strange digital art such as the lemon juicing on a Viennese building, the real revelation this week came from artist Refik Anadol Unsupervised exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Here is how MoMA describes the show.
What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? For Unsupervised, artist Refik Anadol (b. 1985) uses artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art at MoMA. Known for his groundbreaking media works and public installations, Anadol has created digital artworks that unfold in real time, continuously generating new and otherworldly forms that envelop viewers in a large-scale installation. Unsupervised is a meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art. Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection. As the model “walks” through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come. In turn, Anadol incorporates site-specific input from the environment of the Museum’s Gund Lobby—changes in light, movement, acoustics, and the weather outside—to affect the continuously shifting imagery and sound. AI is often used to classify, process, and generate realistic representations of the world. In contrast, Unsupervised is visionary: it explores fantasy, hallucination, and irrationality, creating an alternate understanding of art-making itself. The installation is based on works that are encoded on the blockchain, a distributed digital ledger, which stands as a public record of Anadol’s art. “I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future,” the artist has said, “and to make the invisible visible.
What would a machine dream about after seeing the collection of The Museum of Modern Art? For Unsupervised, artist Refik Anadol (b. 1985) uses artificial intelligence to interpret and transform more than 200 years of art at MoMA. Known for his groundbreaking media works and public installations, Anadol has created digital artworks that unfold in real time, continuously generating new and otherworldly forms that envelop viewers in a large-scale installation.
Unsupervised is a meditation on technology, creativity, and modern art. Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection. As the model “walks” through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come. In turn, Anadol incorporates site-specific input from the environment of the Museum’s Gund Lobby—changes in light, movement, acoustics, and the weather outside—to affect the continuously shifting imagery and sound.
AI is often used to classify, process, and generate realistic representations of the world. In contrast, Unsupervised is visionary: it explores fantasy, hallucination, and irrationality, creating an alternate understanding of art-making itself. The installation is based on works that are encoded on the blockchain, a distributed digital ledger, which stands as a public record of Anadol’s art. “I am trying to find ways to connect memories with the future,” the artist has said, “and to make the invisible visible.
Bet you're sensing the AR invades everything them for this week's Flipboard Friday. Photos came from MoMA site.