I need to pull together my collection of AI essays just because it represents a real-time recognition of what has been happening in this field as it has been happening over the last 10 years.
Even with the knowledge that this technology has been accelerating, I’ve been shocked at the advances in the last 3 years. And I’m not just talking about chatbot advances, there have been astonishing and accelerating improvements in image recognition, transcription and translation services, handwriting detection and translation, object detection, a whole category of machine-intelligence tasks that used to require teams of people to even attempt are now trivially available to anyone who wants to sit down and investigate the problem.
I admit that I was shocked when I saw the Jeremy’s Razors commercial. I’ve known Frank for a long time and he’s smart as hell… but even so. This commercial is a really impressive technological and artistic feat.
On the one hand, yes, the commercial looks like AI. But it’s got intentionality to it. It tells a story. It’s fun and silly and outlandish and it fits in with the aesthetic that AI presents.
In short: Frank treats AI like a medium. It’s like oil or watercolors. He recognized the limitations, worked within them, and made something compelling that utilized the medium.
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