Generative AI is a Fantastic Tool

Less than 24 hours after I posted my latest story a fan made an audio version of it using AI narration. It is great!

You can also hear it at the old HPMoR Podcast feed, here.

This is 50% a post to brag about how awesome my fans are (thank you Askwho!!!). He paid his own real money for this! (You can support further such projects at his Patreon btw)

It’s also, however, 50% a post celebrating Generative AI. I don’t know if you guys remember the olden timey days of pre-summer 2022, but we once had to draw every single pixel of an image by hand, or speak every single syllable of a story by mouth. It was barbaric! A 67-hour audio book would take an amateur ~1000 hours of labor across 4.5 years to complete! A single image for a book cover took two weeks and cost $800! Nowadays an 8,000 word story with multiple voices can be conjured in hours. That story can be illustrated with a few minutes of dicking around and $1-2.

It’s a Galt! See previous two posts for Ares and Cheshire

The wealth we have is unimaginable by standards of just 18 months ago. Yeah, it’s not as good as what a human would do, nor as customizable. But it’s 92% of the way there, at less than 1% of the cost! We can create art like never before, letting AI take care of the parts that add an extra bit of value and fun, while freeing us to focus on the parts we are passionate about.

I am marveling at this because over the weekend I was reminded just how revolutionary all this felt 13 months ago. The things we did with DALL-E 2 and GPT-3 were straight-up mind blowing. Now they’re just Tuesday. Hell, both of those have been superseded by even better versions. The future is a hell of a drug, I’m glad I’m here for it.

For reals tho