Thinking on AI, over the seasons
Ever since we started our podcast Thinking on thinking, a persistent theme for us has been AI and with the recent boom in the LLM space, it has changed how we work at joyus and how we are living our lives day to day.
Back in ‘22 the main reason for me and Kahran to start thinking on thinking was that we were having way too many valuable conversations with each other that we wanted to keep track of. The first ever episode we did about AI was back in Nov’22 (and boy has the world of AI come far far ahead since then) where we talked about AI and future of work. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1UuBNJifG8i5GMg5TvsuUp
It was interesting listening back to this episode where the biggest fear we talk about is people’s jobs being replaced and while the fear was and is very real, as time has passed and the AI has become a reality, it is also slowly becoming obvious that it is the most rote, repetitive parts of the so called “creative” jobs that are being replaced. Now, the structured thinking parts are in even higher demand. One could say that junior level jobs are being automated with the use of AI, but there is increasing demand for art directors/ product builders.
Another interesting opportunity that we could possibly see emerge in the future is super powered IC roles. Right now, productivity is the major limiting factor for independent contributors, and with AI and automation we are seeing a significant increase in what a single person can make. So it would totally makes sense if we start seeing “professional unicorns” more commonly.
By the time we were at the end of season 2 (which is when we made another episode about AI) https://open.spotify.com/episode/5643wvOcrXNvzF77gn5d1T we had both been using AI for a lot of everyday thinking and tasks, though it was still at the beginning phases of its integration in our lives. Looking back it has been almost a year between when I am writing this article and we released this episode. At the time of the podcast, we were fascinated by AI but it was still a cognitive mindful task to use it in our day to day. Today I have subscriptions to about 5 different AI tools and I use them multiple times a day. With a year of using AI under our belt, it has become a “let me ask my friend” (the friend here being GPT) whenever presented with something new/interesting.
I has also started working on a movie at that time (as a creative producer) and it has been an interesting time to both learn and adapt to a new pipeline and to see the AI tools being incorporated in the pipeline too. Where earlier one probably would have collected references on google or pinterest, and photobashed in photoshop, now that process is much faster on midjourney and then bringing it to edit with firefly. Being in the middle of these types of pipeline evolutions gives such a closer look on how AI is changing work. It isn’t removing the job, but instead of the job requiring 4 people and doing it in 7 days, now it is more like 1 person who knows a lot about the specific domain and them taking a day.
Normally our seasons tend to be about 6 months apart. When we got to the end of season 3, https://open.spotify.com/episode/50BKcOPxxn8Dnl8K7emgDc where we discuss more in our day to day of using AI, it becomes clear that now it is a part of our lives, and we are using it almost as an extension of our minds. Often if you speak to musicians or craftspeople of any domain, they will tell you that after a certain point the tool just feels like an extension of your body, and the neural pathways to access what would be possible with the tool are much more obvious. In this episode it is obvious that both Kahran and I are now using AI to elevate our abilities on a regular basis, whether to enhance our creativity, or to expose ourselves to new information or find inroads to our nostalgic memories of songs or forgotten phrases.
And that is still where my relationship with AI stands today. Ofcourse there are issues around the copyright of “who owns this information” and “who profits from this data”. There are also privacy and security concerns as well as hallucination concerns. But despite all of that AI has still made me a better creator, connected me to other like-minded people and enabled me to expand my definition of what would be possible.
Some other interesting episodes might be this conversation with Computational Mama, who along with many other things, is an AI artist and evangelist (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0g670uTzZPGkdNoKvuElnD) where we talked about coding and creativity.
— Divya