From the Editor’s Desk: Just Make It ⭐️

There's a scene in the original The Matrix in which Trinity, one of the movie's protagonists, calls in to the operator and tells him she needs "a pilot program for a B212 helicopter." The operator does some typing and within seconds he wires Trinity's brain so that she knows how to fly that helicopter. And off we go.

Science fiction like The Matrix can be escapist fun, and this scene is a great example. But watching this in 1999, we saw it for what it was, a fictional and impossible scenario, and part of the world building of that film. Flash forward over 25 years, however, and The Matrix feels a bit different. Not like a documentary per se. But more like a premonition of where technology would take us.

No, we're not going be jacked into a computer system that will directly wire our brains anytime soon. Though, be honest; that feels more realistic and possible today than it did in 1999. But we've moved quickly from Internet search, which lets us find the answer to any question, to an AI-based reality in which we can now make almost anything to solve almost any problem.

As is always the case with technology, this capability was at first a theory, and then the result of research and experimentation, and then it moved into what I still think of (inaccurately, I'm sure) as the white lab-coated world of the tech elite before being fed to the unwashed masses. It started innocently enough with grammar checking, AI-based writing tools, and image generation. But it's evolved quickly to include conversational iteration, the ability to keep working with AI to solve a problem without having to start over from scratch with each prompt.

But this is different. Something radical is happening.

Consider my go-to explanation of why generative AI can be so useful. I have this website, Thurrott.com, and we publish several articles every day, each of which needs a thumbnail or hero image of some kind. If we're covering an industry news story, there's a good chance that the source of that news provides images we might use for this purpose. But we used to subscribe to services that provided massive collections of stock photos we could use as well. Now, I could simply use whatever AI to generate an image, and not only is the quality incredible now, with massive improvements over the past few years, but that image is unique to me. No one else will use it.

But what about the jobs, you ask? Well, I do have a few graphic artist friends, and I'm sure either would be happy to take me on as a client. But I can't afford that, and they cannot generate images to my exact specification like AI can, and certainly not at the speed AI can. They can't sit there with me and iterate through a design until it's exactly right, they're time is too valuable. What I'm doing isn't stealing a job, that job never existed.

For AI to be effective–meaning, for it to benefit mankind by taking away drudgery or busy work–it needs to save us time and save us money. Generative...