I'm not at all tired of (all) artificial intelligence

Text Jiri Koivuniemi

In my previous column, I complained that I was tired of artificial intelligence, but I was wrong! I’m just tired of its overblown hype. The more I immerse myself in the possibilities of artificial intelligence, the more interesting it becomes – and I’m starting to get carried away with the hype myself, perhaps.

Lately I’ve been searching for new music using artificial intelligence. I got excited recently when I chatted with ChatGPT about its music recommendations. I’m used to using Google’s search functions, where I usually get a direct answer to my questions, which I can or should be satisfied with. With artificial intelligence, that’s not necessarily the case; you should ask for more information and be able to digest it more thoroughly.

I tried to ask ChatGPT what other music it recommends, as I really like the music of Silversun Pickups. At first, the AI gave me answers that were obvious and a bit “flaky,” as I already knew them beforehand, or else they were just vaguely similar music.

I continued engaging with artificial intelligence by asking for more detailed details and narrowing down the suggestions to representatives of the shoegaze genre in particular. After that, the responses started to be more interesting and offered more new information than, for example, what Spotify offers based on listening history.

Artificial intelligence can also be incredibly useful in image editing if you have the patience and time to learn and experiment. I am particularly impressed with the Lightricks app Photoleap for the phone. It is easy to fix and adjust all kinds of photos. It allows you to create sensible, small tweaks or truly extraordinary art works that embrace other worlds developed with artificial intelligence.

For example, the illustration made with artificial intelligence above depicts myself listening to music on the space station. Only my facial features remain from the original image, and everything else is created by artificial intelligence according to the instructions I wrote. Artificial intelligence also generates a variety of weird noises, but with practice you can often get rid of them. In the picture, for example, I’m thinner than I really am; I have a ponytail cut off, and the headphone cord is a bit of a mess.

Of course, AI images can be edited afterwards, so such small mistakes are easy to forgive. If I were a musician or a writer, I could very well imagine making a record or a book cover using Photoleap.

One annoying feature that plagues many AI programs is some kind of song-based or usage-based pricing or other resource limitation. In this regard, Photoleap is excellent in that it seems to work indefinitely and reliably after a $40 annual fee.

Ease of use is indeed very important when using artificial intelligence. I myself have long been bothered by the browser-based nature of ChatGPT. A change came just when Logitech added the free Logi AI Prompt Builder add-on to the Options+ utility that comes with their mice and keyboards. This significantly speeds up and simplifies the use of ChatGPT, as it can be opened with the press of a button. The small window that opens brings the AI functions literally to the user’s fingertips. The add-on’s interface is currently only available in English, but commands can also be given in Finnish.