"Don't Give Up on the Real World"

"Don't Give Up on The Real World" is a slogan from Nikon Peru's campaign to remind people that "our world is full of amazing natural places that are often stranger than fiction." In this campaign, they showed incredible photos of natural places taken by photographers using Nikon cameras. In each photo, a imagined prompt was given, as if they were taunting those who use AI to generate images.

For example, in the following photo of fly geyser, the imagine prompt is "multicolored surreal mini volcanoes erupting water like fountain"

Fly Geyser, Nevada, USA

I typed the prompt into DALL-E-2 and got the following images. The renditions are good, but DALL-E-2 generated images are not comparable to the real thing, not even close, more like a child's play. 

So the generative AI tool DALL-E-2, is not imaginative or creative as many believed, at least for many beautiful photos featured in this campaign. 

Let us look at what generative AI can do well, for example, writing or improving essays. In my recent blog posts, I utilized chatGPT to refine my drafts. I found that the improvements generated by chatGPT exhibit a graceful and sophisticated style, often impressing readers more than my original write-ups. However, in my opinion, there is a notable drawback: the improved essays frequently lack authenticity and sound somewhat artificial, using sophisticated words, expressing exaggerated feelings etc. As the initial novelty wears off, the essays improved by chatGPT lose their freshness and originality, leaving them sounding stale. (*)

When true human connection is needed, natural human intelligence beats Artificial intelligence.

What does this mean ?

While we should not stop using our own natural intelligence to create innovatively, to explore broadly, to think critically, we should take advantages what AI, as a tool, can help us with, to improve efficiency, to solve problems with existing solutions, and yes to generate images for illustrations, and decorations.


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* I still use chatGPT or Bard to improve my writing for word selection, for styling, but I write the full essay first to capture my thoughts fully, and only edit my original using AI generated text as reference.

** my chat with chatGPT

Appendix - another human vs DALL-E-2

DALL-E-2