Opinion: On Abstract Headers and Generative AI

I’m sure by now you’ve noticed the oddly abstract post headers we’ve been using in lieu of clip art, stock art, or custom artwork. In the spirit of being an AI-focused venture ourselves, we decided it would be interesting to dabble in and leverage the fruits of the generative AI movement and its academic derivatives to see what kinds of images our titles might provoke/produce; these are the results of that experimentation hosted on our custom-built and -tuned deep learning lab servers.

While generative AI is an incredible tool, it has in our opinion mistakenly been attributed omniscient and oracular powers that it simply does not deserve. Our header banners are a case in point; if I handed these titles to a talented graphic designer and asked them to draft up a banner concept, odds are they would be able to extrapolate concrete objects and visuals to capture the essence of the article, even without having read the entire article. Admittedly reading the article would provide invaluable context to refine said artwork, but it would not be strictly required.

Yes, we could spend vast amounts of time trying to tune prompts, regenerate, and muck about with an iterative process that mirrors the overhead often seen in supervised and reinforcement learning systems, but at the end of the day the system can’t extrapolate the nuances of verbal communication as effectively as a human can. It will also never create something completely novel as it will always be based on an internal statistical pattern that approximates a nearly infinite hypotheses space, extracted from existing content. It will have its uses, but they will need to be tempered with humans in the loop and guardrails to prevent bias and disinformation; let’s call it what it is instead of “hallucinations” which is an anthropomorphic projection on what is essentially a mathematical model.

Conclusion

At Zaggy AI we are focused on deriving truth from sensor data, not trying to generate potentially incorrect content from it. If you’d like to know more about how we can help your systems provide more actionable information, faster, and closer to your edge please contact us!

Similar Posts