The Role Of AI
In my last full-time position, after I had automated and integrated about everything that I could, my manager had me tackle AI as leadership was excited about the technology and its potential for streamlining workflow.I was not excited about this development.
Already AI was being touted as the best thing since sliced bread while programmers like myself were rightfully concerned about our long-term career prospects. As I worked AI into my workflow, I found some benefit in some areas and huge gaps in others.For example, as a programmer, I write code in steps, starting with developing base functionality and adding in more complex features while testing throughout. With AI, you tell it what you want and a few minutes later, it spits out "complete" code. The thing you quickly figure out is that AI is not testing anything. It analyzes the ask, searches through its vast database for code that does what it thinks and writes out something you hopefully can use.
It doesn't analyze or test. The code may not compile - it mostly doesn't. Ironically enough,the process is similar to how a beginner programmer starts. Knowing what you want to accomplish, you start off with little pieces. Maybe you need to open a text file and read the first line. So, you Google something like "c# open text file" and one of the results will explain how to to do it and probably provide a code sample. You copy that code, drop it in your own, test, etc. AI is basically doing the same thing - it's just saving you steps.
The thing is, you still need to be smarter than AI. I've started "small" programming projects thinking I'll just use AI to do the whole thing and after 15 iterations with less and less usable code, I'll throw the whole thing out and start all over coding myself. Other times, AI can help with bits and pieces shortening the project timeline considerably.
On the creative side of things, I've been less impressed with results from the various graphics and video AI generation platforms. Within the IT world, we've laughed at how consistent AI has botched hands - it's been the kryptonite of the technology and the sure tell something has been generated.As I continue to play with it, I'm equally impressed and dismayed since results can be spot-on or a little to way off. And if you ask it to make changes, well, good luck.
But, here's the thing. It's all improving. By leaps and bounds. I started a subscription with Runway about six months ago. It's mostly a video and graphic generation platform and again, I've been amazed and frustrated equally. Early experimentation with the image and then full video generation of a character from a rough sketch I made was impressive at first, but as soon as I asked for additional videos of my new character, the character's features changed significantly on each iteration. This wasn't going to be sustainable for say, a marketing campaign using a virtual spokesperson.
With results that strayed further and further, I all but abandoned Runway as I moved on to other things, but I'll come back to that. I've been using Gemini quite a bit over the last few months and it has been a big help with a variety of things including migrating from a legacy physical dedicated server to a Google VM. That proved to be far more of a cluster#@! than I ever would have imagined, but about what I've experienced with AWS and Azure. Without Gemini, I would have been working through ongoing issues for months rather than just weeks.
So, there have been enough AI wins, that I decided to circle back to Runway to decide whether I wanted to continue my subscription. I came up with a simple idea for a video and gave it a few line prompt and overalll did a pretty good job after a few early rendering mistakes. Once I had a fairly decent result, it handled changes with no discernible differences in the character. Yes, the timing could be more natural and it lacks some natural intonation, but it all looks promising.
All of this is just to lead up to AI's role within SMT Creative. I've always thought I can do something better than AI and I still thinks that's the case. But, if I can use AI to deliver results more quickly and economically, I owe that to my clients.
