The above is an image ChatGPT created based on the question "tell me how I've been using AI recently"

I’m capturing what I’m currently doing with AI as I’ll find it interesting in several years - I assume this will all sound quite twee looking back. I’ve been consciously trying to use AI more, partly as I find it fascinating, and partly driven by paranoia that I’ll get left behind.

Professionally AI and machine learning are major features of nearly all the builds I’m involved with. We also have an in-house instance of ChatGPT that I increasingly to summarise, explain and edit.

Image generation - this is probably the most natural and exciting at the moment, as it’s an extension of my illustration skillset. As somebody who always struggled with maintaining a single style, it’s very rewarding to have random ideas and then see what ChatGPT can create. I’ve used it for the following:

• Birthday cards / images for friends and family - having fun with a variety of formats including old VHS.
• Work related diagramming.
• Riffing on illustration work I’ve done myself - this robot was a variant of a screen print I’d done last year.
• This was one of several characters I generated based on an old life drawing, and then I generated a narrative to contain them all.
• Random ideas - I’d cycled in one day listening to a James Brown playlist, and had this idea in the lift.
• In this video I wanted a title image, so created a variant of the event badge and exported as a transparent png - this kind

Problem solving

Today for the first time I screengrabbed a particularly hard Wordle and asked AI for help - it didn’t provide much as it kept suggested letters that had already been ruled out, but it was a fun back and fourth.

And of course this website - it’s a constant conversation about how I make publishing posts like this easier, and generally move beyond the most basic kind of site.

Reflections

I will be shocked if I don’t look back at all of this as very minor and trivial. But for now it’s fun, especially coming up against the limits of the AI. Random breakages in image creation and miscalculations on simple requests are reassuring, proof that to replicate human creativity is no easy feat.

For June I plan to move from simple image generation into more involved automation - uncovering the productivity hacks that various instagram reels keep teasing. Maybe it’s snake oil, but it’ll be fun finding out.