On January 24th, the Office of Research hosted “The AI Tsunami – Where will it take us?”, a panel discussion on the future and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Jobsite Brewing Co. in Stratford, Ontario. Dr. Will Zhao (Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business) and Evan Jones (GI Advisory Board Member) were among those speaking on the panel.
Dr. Zhao focused on the impact of chatbots and noted that before the advent of “generative pre-training transformer” (GPT), there was a general nonchalance or rejection of chatbots by the public. After the advent of GPT technology, Zhao said that AI is finally able to convincingly imitate human conversational abilities. He called for further consideration of the consequences of trusting AI too much as nonchalance and rejection toward AI and chatbots have turned into enthusiasm, addiction, and the treatment of AI chatbots as authoritative sources of information.
Evan Jones, founder of Stitch Media, spoke about incorporating AI into storytelling and virtual reality. Jones spoke about his experience using the method of “photo bashing” where elements of multiple images are taken to form a brand-new image. This method was used on Stitch Media’s collaborations with the GI for Rival Books of Aster, and Terrorarium projects. This step of Stitch Media’s prototyping and brainstorming process has been streamlined greatly by AI generated art. However, Jones did note that this is something that must be treated with caution as copyright law falls severely behind technological advances.