Yours vs. AIs' Imagination

I know many of you who've been reading my articles might think I'm against AI.

One cautionary tale after another, all I seem to talk about are risks, warnings, or how LLM is not ready for mass implementation.

Let me be clear. I'm bullish on AI, not the AI bullshit.

For 10 years, companies paid me to identify strategic intervention points to transform digital products. So it's only natural that whenever I research something, I see things we can improve or do better with AI.

AI, especially GenAI at this stage, is hardly a shovel for a gold rush. There is not yet a killer app that shows AI operating with full autonomy.

Today I want to discuss something I’ve observed.

This article has sat in my backlog for months now, I tweak it once every few weeks. Only now, I thought I had finally found a way to talk about this fascinating paradox.

When an AI produces something factually incorrect, we call it a hallucination, with a heavy tone of negative connotations. When AI produces something aligned with the request or even supersedes it, we call it imagination or creativity.

Underneath, these two are inseparable in GenAI.

And based on how it is currently built, you can't separate one from the other. Read this to understand the fundamental,

The Valuable LLM Apps Excel At Being Wrong

For millennia, we've paid premiums for human imagination. Novels, paintings, and scientific breakthroughs. Most of these products of the mind connected dots in ways that weren't strictly factual.

For example, I don’t think you will deny that the The Creation of Adam was a made-up scene?

There was never a live/dead cat in Schrodinger's lab, nor were Einstein's thought experiments initially grounded in experimental data. They were what-ifs that changed physics forever.

GenAI has kick-started the era of industrialized imagination. This doesn’t come without impact on how the world operated previously. This is a long story, and I will tell it in two parts.

So today, I want to bring a bit of history (because I know you enjoyed it), and why the industrialization of imagination isn’t necessarily a bad thing:

• Hallucinations vs. Creativity. Human history is the thin line woven by both madmen and geniuses. And could Sam Altman be telling the truth, for once?

• The similarities and differences between yours vs. GenAI’s Imaginations.

• From life to pennies, stories of how imagination's cost has decreased due to technology.

• Where is AI’s imagination champion?

Shall we?

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Human Imaginations. Mad Men vs. Geniuses

Evolution selected hallucination as a survival strategy.