What Can AI Do?

For the past couple months, I’ve been toying with some “AI” apps and doing some reading on artificial intelligence.

My take: no matter what the celebrities say, I don’t see “AI” achieving Skynet status anytime soon.

AI can do scary good stuff faking sound and picture, and it can beat humans at extremely narrow task sets like playing chess and Go. But I don’t see us putting our ICBMs under robot control anytime soon.

Here’s what I’ve played with:

AI art can be fun - for a while. My sister has been doing some beautiful stuff with it.

I tried Jasper, an AI blogging platform. I found that it was generating wildly inaccurate quotes and pumping out bad information. No bueno.

However, I’ve been using an AI (deep learning is probably a better term) app called Descript to edit sound and video, and it’s one of the most valuable apps I’ve found in years. It probably saved me a couple days’ work when making this anniversary video for my church. I was able to edit the video by copying and pasting transcribed text. When I had a solid narrative using a temp voiceover track (using an AI copy of MY VOICE), I rerecorded the voiceovers, then laid in the b-roll and remixed the sound. I think it turned out really well. It’s the funnest and most effective media app I’ve found in like twenty years. Highly recommend.