For all the terrible stuff humanity has already done with artificial intelligence, there’s an undeniable awe to it now that I haven’t felt since I first started tinkering with computers back in the ’80s, when I wrote my first “Hello World” program.
Back then, there was a prompt in which you typed esoteric lines of code using BASIC to make the computer display programs. It felt magical to make things out of words made of electrons. Today, using a text-to-image synthesis AI app like Midjourney and DALL-E, you type in another kind of prompt: a few words describing what you want these AIs to draw for you in plain English. That sentence might be “popcorn man navigates a sea of cheese hunting candy sharks” or “father and son riding retro spaceships race through a field full of T-rex as a meteor enters the atmosphere in a blaze of fire.” The AI interprets these words and turns them into a visual reality, like a genie casting a spell.
“/imagine”
I followed that command with the first two verses of a Tom Waits song and hit enter. Four blobs appeared in a two-by-two grid. Slowly, images started to twist into focus. A few seconds later, four otherworldly landscapes appeared. I was hooked.
Some counter that all these fears are exaggerated. That AI is not going to destroy jobs. And everything is a remix, anyway: this is just a new digital tool making that remixing faster and easier. There are even people who argue that there’s no point in arguing: AI is the next step in human evolution, the homo superior to our homo sapiens, the final answer to the last question. We may as well accept it and let our future essence surf the cosmic waves inside von Neumman probes till entropy ends it all.
It seems to me that I’m not the only primate fascinated by this new intelligence. I’ve seen many declaring how hard it is to stop creating new images from words. And I have yet to find a single person who didn’t smile after writing a description in The Prompt and seeing the results. It feels as if the pure joy of the experience instantly makes them forget about the potential doom that artificial intelligence may bring to all of us in the far future. Maybe I’m just reflecting but, in their eyes, I can see the same light I feel in mine.
Now I find myself having new sorcerer dreams: I want to dive into those images and explore what’s going on in there. They feel like they are windows to new universes. It’s not mad to prophesize that, one day—once the computing power, storage, and AI sophistication reach the right point—they will become actual portals to an infinite metaverse. I see vast parallel realities in which worlds and characters are connected by physics dreamt by AI, following the orders of future human gods. Perhaps we are living in one of those universes now. Or maybe I should just stop using The Prompt before I go nuts.