(Preview) The Delights of Images in GPT, The Future of Graphic Design, Signal and Multiple Dimensions of Security
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Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. What is interesting to me, though, is I feel like we've, should we presume it's only a matter of time before everyone else in consumer AI can offer this functionality? Like the example from Google,

It came earlier. It looked worse than what I was seeing from OpenAI, but they're clearly in the same ballpark already. Is it only a matter of time before we can all generate horribly explicit images with Grok? Yeah, we need Grok to come flying in. I think they do have something along this line in mind.

in the pipeline. Yeah. I mean, this, obviously this is going, this is going to be everywhere. I mean, it was pretty interesting that, you know, open eye was pretty explicit that we're taking the breaks off a little bit. You can like, it's interesting because the number one objection you hear this from, from people in DC is politicians are just terrified of like fakes of like being in there. And so they're,

And so that's always been, you know, and by and large, the AI companies have adopted a, okay, just don't put celebrities in there at all.

Open AI in this case was like, okay, now it's an opt-out. You can render celebrities, but if the celebrity or whoever can reach out and say, don't allow me to be rendered, and then that will sort of go into the system, which I'm sure some people will be all over. It does accelerate, though.

Just this very rapid ongoing, arguably been the case even before AI, but AI is making it a gazillion times worse since that everything on the internet is fake. And, and,

The ones that resonate, what resonates has some connection to reality, but the actual output is not reality. And that fake content is just multiplying very rapidly. Well, and it's funny. I think that is why there was more virality with this new update, because like I,

I enjoyed seeing your cat stylized. I enjoyed seeing people post photos of their kids stylized or a guy with his wife on a boardwalk. Like that's more interesting to me. And some of the Dali images, including some stuff that I saw on Stratechery, it felt like we had sort of plateaued in terms of what was possible there. And it was all kind of a steampunk aesthetic that didn't really resonate with me. And,

And so personalizing it definitely makes a difference in terms of striking a chord with the mainstream. Yeah, there's something about this connection to something real that I think resonates with people more than just sort of pure ethereal generating something and –

Which, again, I'm still wrapping my mind around this. I feel like there are some takeaways about why this happened to go broadly, generally, that we should continue to unpack. Okay. But alas, I was thinking too much about dumb, stupid stuff. About Signal? Yeah.

Well, I mean, the other thing that you wrote on Wednesday was the images in chat GPT actually makes real a lot of the fears that accompanied the first wave of image generators. So essentially, by having the ability to craft images in more detail or alter images in more detail, that's where the concerns around deep fakes become more urgent. Is that right?

Well, I was thinking more of the graphic designer angle that I was talking about just a couple of minutes ago where you could theoretically see image generation is bad for graphic designers. I was like, well, part of being a graphic designer is actually being precise and getting the information right. Obviously, not just text being right, but the positioning and the balance and all the things that go into graphic design. This is a workflow.

Like it's not just a one shot prey, cross your finger, hope it comes out like you wanted to. It's a, okay, here's a starting piece. Now we're going to iterate at this. We're going to do this. We're going to combine this, put this together there. It's it. And the emergence of a workflow is, is arguably the more, the more concerning part. Again,

It's kind of a dumb point to index on because once you got to image generation, it was inevitable we were probably going to get here. But it does feel like a step change to me in how much control you have. Totally. Well, and control is what's required in order to deploy these tools in a professional setting and rely on them. And it's similar to like

Sam Altman, you interviewed him about this a little bit, but he came out with the OpenAI Fiction Generator, which is kind of interesting. And I'm curious to see what emerges on that front over the next couple of years. And the idea of hallucination being a good thing is kind of fun, but like in a work setting,

You want something like deep research and deep research is what makes you sort of sit up in your chair. You still worry about hallucinations, to be clear. To be clear. We should add that disclaimer every time we mention deep research. But you know what I mean? Where it's like the ability for AI to play God and create something whole cloth is cool. But in terms of practical impact, at least in the short term,

the ability to just do exactly what you want and reproduce a good idea in eight different ways and let you choose, like that's a real game changer. You're helping me collect my thoughts on this. I think you just identified a couple of things. So we already established

A connection to reality resonates more. What you just put your finger on is the sense of feeling in control, I think, is something that is important and resonates. And number three, I would say, is this sense of

The needing a prompt is an obstacle. Like a blank page with a cursor has been the fodder for nightmares for students for ages and ages and ages. Right. Like the, you know, what I've dealt with graphic designers in the past or, or deal with people that are doing things. It's always the just generate something. And that will prompt me to,

to figure out what my actual thoughts are. And, oh, no, this should be there. This should be that. If you just want me to give you my opinion from scratch, it's actually very, very difficult. And it's interesting. I wonder if there's an aspect of the design of these tools is mistaken in that they're predicated on a user prompt. And maybe the real breakthrough is the system prompt.

Now, the system prompt in the context of AI is what's hidden in there. It gives the AI all the instructions of what to operate. When I say system prompt in this context, I mean the prompt they give the user. How do you trigger the user to do this sort of thing in a way that's not annoying and whatever it might be? You go back to those viral apps.

It was pretty straightforward. Put a headshot in, right? And there's a constraining of what you can do that actually meets far more people where they are. And this is part of becoming a product company. It's part of like not just having an API that you can do whatever you want with. It's actually making choices, constraining your product and making it clear to someone what they can do. Now, in this case,

Open AI didn't, you know, as far as I know, it wasn't some open AI AstroTurf campaign to get people doing Studio Ghibli. This was a viral moment, but it was easily enough achieved that it felt like, oh yeah, get a photo, put it in your chat app. And people know how to get photos and put it in a chat app. And then it took off. But that is...

It's just, I don't know. There's lots of, like I said, I just think there's lots of really weird, interesting little lessons with this entire episode. Okay. Well, I look forward to continuing all of this conversation in the weeks to come. Do you want to hit the signal thing with the second half of the episode here? I do. Look, like I said, I put a bit of a mea culpa at the top. Uh,

When this whole signal thing drops, so let's just sort of zoom out big picture. And you're the DC guy, so feel free to jump in.

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