News Review - Hacking Generative AI for Fun and Profit

While stirring people’s concern about AI taking away their jobs, Generative AI is often less than awesome, at least for now. Commonly, ChatGPT merely comes up with mediocre slogans even when we include words like “original”, “creative” or “punchline” in the prompts, and Stable Diffusion generates hands with twisted fingers inevitably no matter how many negative prompts we insert.

In China, Generative AI has been deemed a journalism disrupter since 2017 when Tencent’s AI “DreamWriter” generated a report within 1 second on the "2017 Tencent Media Summit". However, since then the Chinese Internet has been gradually filled with lame, purposeless articles written by AI, which are also viewed and commented on by AI, never enjoyed a real-life viewership, but are used as baits for high-priced, low-quality “AI training sessions”, letting off traditional journalists from facing the once-predicted unemployment.

Admittedly, AI is the “first technology that has no limit” as Bill Gates points out, possessing capabilities beyond our imagination. Yet it still needs human researchers to “hack” it with creativity and insights and turn it into something truly “awesome”. Just like the AI Hound the Sundai Club built to assist reporters in identifying potentially interesting papers, our empathy to spot unfulfilled human needs and acumen to come up with fascinating big ideas are crucial to translating generative AI into useful tools, fun, and profit instead of job replacement.

News Link: https://www.wired.com/story/sundai-club-generative-ai-hackathon-group/

(Image Source: Wired.com)