Malignant Intelligence
Prompt engineering and software archeology
Transcript and video of the opening keynote I gave NDC Oslo in May 2023.
We’ve reached a tipping point when it comes to generative AI. Looking back, I think the first sign of the coming avalanche was the release of the Stable Diffusion model around the middle of last year. It was similar to several things that came before, but with one crucial difference: they released the whole thing. You could download and use the model on your own computer.
At the beginning of last year if I’d seen someone use something like Stable Diffusion — which can take a rough image along with a text prompt to generate artwork — and use it on a TV show, I’d have grumbled about how that was a step too far. That is was a classic case of “Enhance!” the annoying demand of every TV detective when confronted with non-existent details in CCTV footage.
But instead of being fiction, it’s real now. Machine learning generative models are here, and the rate with which they are improving is unreal. So if you’ve been ignoring them so…
