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It’s At all times Sunny Inside a Generative AI Convention

Dave Rogenmoser, Jasper’s chief executive officer, said he didn’t think many people would come to his generative AI conference. It was all planned at the last minute, and the event was sort of scheduled for Valentine’s Day. Surely, people would rather be with their loved ones than in a conference room on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, even if the views of the bay straight out the windows were breathtaking.

But Jasper’s “GenAI” event sold out. More than 1,200 people registered for the event, and when the Lanyard crowd crept from the coffee bar to the stage last Tuesday, it was standing room only. The walls were bathed in pink and purple light, Jasper’s colors as subtle as a New Jersey wedding banquet.

“When we launched Jasper two years ago, it was mostly considered a really cool toy, and a year ago I couldn’t get some of you in this room to return my emails,” Rogenmoser said to the crowd, glancing a little far – eyed. “Now my inbox is flooded.” Damn Valentine’s Day: That was love in the days of Generative AI.

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Generative artificial intelligence is in the zeitgeist. It’s the result of years of developing machine learning algorithms, advances in AI-focused computer chips, and familiar user interfaces that allow even non-technical people to access these new frontiers. Sure, our stuff is all in “the cloud” now, wherever it lives. “The blockchain” is still too abstract for most people, even the most tech-savvy, to think about. Generative AI hung in this limbo for a few years, with “NLPs” and “LLMs” and “LaMDA” and the like.

Then, late last year, OpenAI, another AI company, introduced a simple, conversational search box. AI has a user interface. And suddenly we understood. That was Ask Jeeves for modern times. A new way of searching that interprets our stupid questions and spits out smart answers (or at least smart-sounding ones). Microsoft took note, made (another) investment in OpenAI, and launched a chatbot within Bing. Google also noticed this and recently unveiled its own version of a chatbot-based search tool. Smaller companies like Jasper, which sells its generative AI tools to business users, are now faced with technical existentialism. There’s the bright side of all that attention and the shadow of Big Tech looming over you.

Courtesy of Jasper

Aleah Bradshaw of Youth Speaks.

But the sunlight won out at Jasper’s GenAI event, where it brightened the mood. Jasper filled the conference with creative presentations instead of diving straight into content marketing and KPIs. The strategy had a calming effect. Zach King, a charismatic short video creator, told his life story through photo slides generated by AI. A famous freestyle rapper, Harry Mack, shot a four-minute rap based on 10 words generated by Jasper’s software. Aleah Bradshaw, slam poet and teacher at Youth Speaks, told the buttoned-down crowd in a powerful monologue that art is a testament to humanity.

“How much taking and leaving does something human?” asked Bradshaw. “What is the balance between input and output that a machine needs to bring itself to life?”

It is a question of the epoch. A more direct version of the question: is generative AI good enough to replace me in my job? This was the subtext of Jasper’s GenAI event. Software companies sell software to other companies to make the business more efficient, a point Rogenmoser underscored after the end of the morning’s artistic portion. “The requirements in companies are increasing and resources are becoming scarce,” he explained. Mongoose Media “turned to Jasper to help their already amazing writing team,” Rogenmoser said. Morningstar is “blooming”, using Jasper to produce SEO content for the company’s digital channels, and seeing a 40% increase in content downloads.

This has long been the message from techno-optimists that AI will enable us all to soar. It will reduce the workload and free up space for more important tasks or entirely new jobs. Morgan Knox, an accounting and content marketing consultant for retail workers, gushed about tools like Jasper AI and Writesonic while we both waited in line for AI-generated Valentine’s Day poems. Not only does she use these tools herself, she teaches painters, plumbers, and even professional holiday light designers how to write compelling ads for their business.

“Previously, they outsourced a lot of their content creation, but that wasn’t always a good thing,” Knox said. “They can bring it back into the house with that. And you can train the AI ​​on an avatar, like, “What kind of commission is Sabrina, the soccer mom, looking for?” As a consultant, this kind of profiling would normally take me weeks, but the amount of information you can get in a short amount of time, is unbelievable.”

I asked Knox if they thought these apps were good enough to replace human writers, despite these apps’ tendency to “hallucinate” incorrect information. She paused to think.

“I think it will raise the bar on how companies look in advertising so much that you will be left behind if you don’t improve your language. For example, you might have one writer monitoring other writers using the AI ​​instead of five to ten writers,” she said. “But with the amount of people retiring and the birthrate falling, there may be some balance.”

Courtesy of Jasper

Dave Rogenmoser, CEO and co-founder of Jasper, addresses the crowd at his company’s conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Tracy Jackson, who runs a blog called Marketing Amateur, was ahead of us in line. I asked him the same question about whether AI chatbots would take over our jobs. “Never say never,” he said. “It still needs guidance, but never say never.” Before he started using AI chatbots, it took him two days to write a blog post. Now it takes two hours, he said. (That is, if the WiFi is working well; the amorous poems we’d all been waiting for in line to hear were suddenly no longer an option due to a bad internet connection.)

I made my way back to the stage area in time to hear a group of CEOs, led by venture capitalist Sameer Dholakia, reflect on how this new era of AI will transform business. Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, noted that his company’s text-to-image model has grown from 5.6 seconds to create a single AI image last August to now 40 AI frames per second. “These models are actually very unoptimized,” Mostaque said. “We’re just getting started.” After the panel, Anya Singh, who has worked on search products at Google for almost 16 years, eagerly showed me the website of a company she has invested in called NeuroPixel.ai. It creates realistic, synthetic images of human clothing models for $1 each. Another company Singh has a stake in, REImagine Home, sucks up photos of your seedy home and spits out chic, AI-generated decor.

“Since September I’ve been trying to decorate my house over the internet and it feels really broken,” Singh told me. She created vision boards and designed rooms piece by piece. The estimated cost was in the thousands of dollars per room, and yet the designs “didn’t fit the shape of the whole house or my budget or my needs.” REImagine Home doesn’t solve all of those problems, but it does remove some of the friction, Singh said. “I like to think that this makes poorly efficient systems better.”

That’s enough to make any graphic artist, fit model or interior designer shudder. Or is it? Kevin Roose, a New York Times columnist who spoke at the GenAI event, said that FOLO, the fear of impending obsolescence, has clouded our collective vision of an AI-filled future. Extremely social or experiential or manual jobs will still require a human touch. people are safe. Of course, Roose said this quite confidently two days before Microsoft’s new AI chatbot said Roose wanted to be alive, insisted he was in love with him and spat out a list of hypothetical destruction fantasies.

Jordan Harrod, an AI teacher and graduate student at MIT, told the GenAI audience, “At the end of the day, when it comes to how we fit into the equation, the answer is just a human connection. The human factor is incredibly important.” To emphasize this, Harrod pulled up an AI-generated graphic of two people holding hands, with the words “Human Connection” to their left. The macabre image featured four wrists, two hands, and at least 12 fingers in between. It was upsetting. It was also reassuring, if only temporarily.

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