Experience Director. Product Guy. Sports Dork.
Me: Based on what you know about me, draw an image of what you think my life looks like.
ChatGPT:
Pretty good job at the car and dogs and the kids. Wife nowhere to be found. Some sort of bonus three-legged kid out next to the car.
Been spending a good bit of time at work discussing measuring the value of various AI projects and in particular some GenAI stuff. I found Gartner’s Measuring ROI for Generative AI helped me wrap my head around a few things in particular about first categorizing as a quick win, differentiating, or transformational use case.
Want to not just throw money away investing in Gen AI? HBR article on The 6 Disciplines Companies Need to Get the Most Out of Gen AI says your company should focus on behavioral change, controlled experimentation, measurement of business value, data management, human capital development, and systems thinking.
Know what most of those sound like to me? Design. In other words, your company should invest in design.
Picked up John Maeda’s How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us and read through it pretty quickly, but I’m not sure it was a worthwhile read for me and I don’t think I’d recommend it for anyone already familiar with modern software design.
Maeda spends the majority of the book’s 200 pages explaining the basics and extolling the value of UX research, product design, agile delivery, and iterative development and comparatively little on the actual premise of the book.
Both Amazon and Maeda frame the book as a way for designers to understand “the complex world of AI and machine learning”, but while it hints at AI’s transformative potential these mentions are more speculative than practical. There really isn’t any actionable insights or detailed explorations of how AI can concretely impact design work today.
Been enjoying using Snipd lately for capturing podcast notes/highlights.
Anytime there’s something I want to capture I mark it and their AI generates transcripts & highlights. Those highlights are then automatically exported to my PKM (Obsidian) making it easy find later for future reference. Worth checking out if you listen to a lot of podcasts and especially if you’re already using some sort of system to save the highlights to.
Check out this example of a snippet from a recent episode of Cal Newport’s podcast:
I still use Overcast for all my tech/sports/entertainment podcast listening, but having a separate app for my business/design/productivity shows that helps me remember what I learn has been really useful.
Humane’s AI Pin tech looks kinda interesting, but mostly pointless. And even worse, in their prerecorded demo they featured multiple factual AI errors. The fact that they didn’t fact check the AI responses and then released their big reveal video with errors in it, seems like a worse sign for the company than making the errors in the first place.
It just seems like all of this will be part of your smartphone well before the mass market is interested in a device like this.
When I was learning webdev in the 2000s you could view source and copy paste pretty much anything. Learning by emulating is perfectly normal part of the process.
Adobe’s five minute demo of their new AI-based Generative Fill feature in Photoshop is absolutely incredible. Check it out:
I think using AI for iterative creation like this could be the more interesting new capability AI gives us, at least for for a little while. Fabricating new images from thin air still has so many obvious flaws (ethically, technically, and artistically) so this type of use seems like it could be both more successful while also less ethically murky.
My mind was completely blanking on the methods/terms we used “back in the day” to target Mac IE 5.5 with CSS overrides and I even struck out on DuckDuckGo so I asked ChatGPT 4. In addition to giving me the answer I was looking for and code examples, it also first spent several paragraphs first telling me how ancient that browser and what a terrible idea it was to even try to support it.
And then closing with reiterating AGAIN how “strongly it recommended not targeting such an old browser” and told me to convince users to upgrade to Chrome, Safari, or Firefox. 😂