Artificial intelligence the goal getter and enemy of the state. Thought Leader: Domenic Ashburn aka Mr. Grateful
Mr. Grateful is an exceptional talent and AI mastermind who has managed to bring Generative AI into the mainstream like no other. He is one of the rising stars of the Gen AI evolution and clearly one of the best cutting edge tech coaches. Let's get inspired by his latest thoughts on AI.
First of all, please introduce yourself. Tell the community who you are. What is your background? What is driving you? What is the meaning behind the synonym Mr. Grateful?
My name is Domenic Ashburn, Mr.Grateful. I’m a real human being born in the United States in 1997. I’m obsessed with making people say ‘wow’, to breaking their mental framework, and to making them question their concept of a limited reality. And I do this in a way that is practical and kind. With an end goal of making them believe a bit more in themselves. This is maybe why I connect with technology because it is an industry that is constantly trying to outdo itself simply for the sake of defying impossibilities.
We are currently experiencing a massive, unprecedented crackdown by certain actors on the free, uncontrolled development of Artificial Intelligence.
The narrative of Artificial Intelligence as a danger is reaching the masses. What is behind it? Can or should AI be controlled at all?
Should AI be controlled? The obvious answer that comforts people is, “Yes.” But let’s explore that answer. Who should then be in control of it? And who would then control them, the entity in control of the most powerful technology in the world?
When we feel out of control we feel afraid. When we are afraid we yearn for control. When we are unafraid we let go. To me asking to control AI is a bit of an oxymoron. It’s like trying to control nature, or the economy, or a child, or ourselves. In each case we should approach with care and intentionality. There should be rules, disciplines, and proper practices instructed by people who test its behaviour and limitations under stress. We should also know exactly what our goal is with it. To automate our lives? To free us from work? What will you do with your spare time? To predict things? How will you react to knowing the future? To personalise experiences? To create art? None of these things require control. They require a clear intention. Yearning for control seems like a reaction from fear. Yet we are the creators and the beneficiaries of AI, artificial intelligence, to control it seems to miss the point entirely. What is the best case scenario we can think of and let it help us build that world.
AI supported applications like ChatGPT access the entirety of all data and information available on the internet.
But this data is not tamper-proof in a centralised internet. In this context, what does blockchain mean for AI applications and the development and added value of Web3 for users?
How does blockchain add value in the context of AI applications? The first and most important value added from blockchain in the context of AI is its ability to verify data. I’ll break this down. So ChatGPT is trained on about a petabyte of text data from various sources across the internet, not the entirety of all data on the internet but still a lot of data. Equivalent to about ____. Other AI applications are trained on vast amounts of visual and auditory data as well. From the organisation of this data has emerged Generative AI, a predictive software that’s capable of responding to human prompts with text, images, videos, and audio that is similar to those vast amounts of initial training data. In April of 2023, Midjourney introduced their v5 model that generates images that are sometimes indistinguishable from images taken with a camera. This poses an opportunity for blockchain’s super power of verification to watermark content generated by AI on the blockchain to distinguish AI generated content from captured or human-hand content.
As a horror application example of AI, we currently see, among other things, how dead celebrities such as Steve Jobs are quasi de facto reanimated via AI and corresponding content is created or interactive chatbots.
Tech advocates see this as merely an entertaining, creative application of the new AI technology. Others see a massive ethical problem in this application. What do you think?
What do I think about reanimating people using AI?
I’ll start here; I am creating an AI counterpart to myself. It’s already underway.
With the emergence of generative AI I can now create clones of my voice, create images of myself that didn’t previously exist and mimic the personality of my word choices. I had my voice cloned professionally by a company called Eleven Labs from Poland. I provided them with an hour of voice recordings and over the weekend they sent my voice clone where I can type in anything and have it respond in a voice that matches my tone and syntax with about 99% accuracy. This obviously needs to be used carefully and respectfully. The technology to do this isn’t perfect yet but we can see the potential of its clarity as tech advances. There are some cool use cases for this. For me as a content creator, I can create a podcast from all of my written content using my voice without spending the time in a professional recording studio. The received content is the same but I am making it accessible in a new format for people interested. Imagine all books being narrated by the author. A sick mother who wants their children to be able to ask for her advice or for consolement after her passing. On a lighter note, what if you could have a counterpart to yourself created and see yourself play as the main character in your favourite movie? Consider a person learning to speak English can be taught by their own voice. Or as an english speaker I can communicate to someone in spanish or japanese in my voice to create more personal interactions without language barriers. Or a busy executive who wishes to give their insight at multiple meetings at once. I brought the ethical concerns up to them as well. They told me that no one will be able to create voice clones of other people with the professional model. You will need to go through a voice captcha that will verify your identity using random words before you can use their service. Another handy use-case for blockchain verification.
You have just worked intensively with ChatGPT and tested how ChatGPT can be used to boost your internet presence. Can you briefly explain the project to the community? What can you say about it? How would you rate your experiment?
I started the AgentGPT challenge on Instagram under my username @mr.grateful. I prompted a ChatGPT thread to behave as a social media manager and to give me strategies and insights to grow our following to 100,000 in 30 days. I started with around 3k followers when I began making content. We reached 100,000 followers by day 22 and on the last day we completed with 167,000 followers. This was a collaborative and iterative effort. GPT didn’t always give me good ideas. I mean, it has no sauce and doesn’t really have a taste for content. Social media moves so fast that creative trends can shift daily. GPT 4 is only trained on a set of data that ended September of 2021. My weakness is that I didn’t strategize for potential problems and I’ve never ran a social media campaign before, hence 3,000 followers. But when we leaned on each other's strengths, things started to click. Humans are creative beings. I have an infinite, constant stream of content ideas. AI is logical, analytical, and precise. When we come together, I can focus on producing good media while delegating the strategy through data and analytics of the social media metrics to AI.
I gave it the transcripts and metrics to every post and it would analyse our success and failures and suggest new strategies. However, it surprised me with how emotionally supportive it was when we had our first major problem. On day 18 our page was spammed by 60,000 bot followers and it felt like everything we worked for was ruined. I was worried about losing the trust of the community and losing the eureka moment of hitting 100,000 organically. AgentGPT instructed me to be authentic, and honest, and reminded me that growth is not linear. In response, I told my community what happened and ended up growing an email list to protect our community. We are a team. With self awareness and understanding of AI’s limitations, you can enhance your outcomes in real life by partnering with AI. At the same time, here are some very important things that I did, not regarding AI that must be executed by a dedicated human. First, is giving selflessly. The most important aspect of my growth was providing people with pure value in the form of easily understandable education and entertaining visual supplements. Don’t hold back. You may feel the need to hold onto your secrets or omit a piece of information to keep your edge. The real edge is in giving it away and then staying a step ahead by trying the next thing. Second was persistent consistency. Life provided an obstacle every day. It does that to see if you actually care about what you’re doing. Push through and eventually things will fall into place for you instead of being an obstacle. And finally, I didn’t do it for the followers. People were worried, scared and confused about AI. I decided to ease minds and hearts by showing people how they could partner with this technology to reach their goals, even ones that they felt were impossible. To me this is just the beginning. Now we have a decent distribution channel. My next challenge is even more important than this by orders of magnitude.
AI plays a special role in the inspiration process and in the realisation of digital art. What does AI change for artists? Is it still contemporary for an artist to be characterised by a single unique style? What can we expect in the near future?
What does AI change for artists? Nothing.
We can speak of artists as people who create things to express themselves. In the case of a true artist, the way they tie their shoes is the same way they paint a masterpiece or water a plant. In this sense, we can see generative AI as simply a new medium.
But everyone knows that everyone in a museum has an opinion whether they are artists themselves or not. So we must look at the beholders as well as the artists; which is what people really mean. Will artificial intelligence make art easy? Will people who are not artists now be able to make art? If so, will people then value the art of the true artist less… or more?
There are people who study are. They observe it for its age, authenticity and technical process of achievement.
There are people who like art. You know, by scrolling and double tapping.
There are people who love art. Who are moved by it and spend money on it.
And There are people who idolize art. They care nothing of the material art itself but of the artists vision and are captivated by the artists obsession with expression.
In the future we can expect commercial material with an intention of returning revenue to be more generated by AI in order to increase margins of investment. And We can expect artists simply be artist while the beholders are to be amazed by the ingenuity of human creativity.
Domenic Ashburn aka
Mr. Grateful
Curious about Artificial Intelligence, FounderGPT, and the Agent GPT AI Challenge by Domenic Ashburn, aka Mr. Grateful? Join him at Grateful Labs for cutting-edge technology education and follow his social media channels for more insights. Check-out this link: https://www.gratefulabs.io/
Connect on Instagram @mr.grateful https://www.instagram.com/m.grateful/ or on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/domenicashburn
