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- 🤖 Fine art, supercomputers, and the future of HR
🤖 Fine art, supercomputers, and the future of HR
Neon Pulse Team
February 21, 2023
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
Here's what we have for you today:
H.R. teams brace for recession
IBM’s A.I. plans
And the future of fine art
Fired by A.I.
As recession concerns continue to sweep through the economy, many of the largest U.S. employers have begun significant rounds of layoffs in anticipation of tougher economic times ahead.
From Amazon to Facebook to Google, hundreds of thousands of high paying workers have already been laid off, and rapid advances in A.I. are only set to accelerate this trend.
And while the idea of losing your job to A.I. is hard enough to swallow, how would you feel about being fired by it?
In a recent Capterra study, 98% of HR leaders said that they planned to rely on software and algorithms to reduce their workforce in 2023.
“Leveraged in the right way, data analytics and algorithms built into HR software can uncover useful insights that can’t be found through instinct or intuition alone—giving HR departments a significant advantage in making the best long-term decisions for their business in tough times.”
And the main criteria that HR teams are using to determine who gets laid off?
Performance and skills data.
“With prescriptive analytics, HR departments only need to feed their performance data into the system, give parameters on their desired result (such as how many employees to lay off), and the software will do the rest.”
Turns out there’s not much that A.I. can’t do.
You can check out the full findings from the Capterra study here.
Brought to you by Jasper.ai
If you have to write a lot for work, whether its marketing copy, social media posts, or marketing emails, there are a number of great A.I. tools that allow you to create powerful copy in a flash.
I’ve played around with a few of them and have been seriously impressed, yet I still write out this newsletter using nothing but my little monkey brain, day after day after day.
Why?
I suppose its because I’m a glutton for punishment, like an Amish guy riding his a horse and buggy down the road while a Ferrari blows past.
But if don’t like to punish yourself (which many psychologists seem to refer to as “healthy behavior”) I highly recommend that you check out Jasper.
Jasper is like kryptonite for writers block, helping you to turn out high quality content with perfect grammar in an instant.
If you don’t have to write much for work it’s not a must have, but if you find yourself staring at a blank screen for hours at a time, praying for inspiration, its definitely worth checking out.
If you’d like to take Jasper for a test drive, neonpulse readers can get 10,000 free credits by clicking here.
IBM and the future of automation
Once known as a pioneer in the artificial intelligence and super-computing space, IBM seems to have fallen behind in the A.I. arms race…
Yet IBM CEO Arvind Krishna is looking to change that.
Krishna’s vision is for IBM to become the leader in enterprise-level A.I. solutions, helping its clients to boost productivity through automation.
“If you think about most of the use cases for A.I., they’re all about improving the productivity of an enterprise,” Krishna said in a recent Financial Times interview.
By automating internal processes, from customer care to data analysis to regulatory work, businesses can free up significant cash flow that they can then use to invest in other areas of the business.
Yet as efficiency is increased, this opens up the potential for significant reductions in the workforce…
Which Krishna doesn’t necessarily see as a bad thing.
“I do think clerical white collar work is going to be replaced by this.” Krishna said.
“But we have a shortage of labor in the real world, and that’s because of a demographic issue that the world is facing. The United States is now sitting at 3.4 percent unemployment, the lowest in 60 years, so if we can find tools to replace labor, that’s a good thing.”
Whether the employees replaced by IBM’s technology view this as a good thing remains to be seen.
You can check out the full Financial Times interview here.
A.I. comes for the creative class
There seems to be no limit as to the types of work that A.I. is set to disrupt, and fine art is proving to be no exception.
While many artists have been skeptical about the ability of A.I. to create true works of art, Jason Allen felt that artists were seriously underestimating the power of tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and Dall-E-2…
And entered a fine art competition to prove his point.
“I wanted to make a statement,” he said. “Artists were saying that this would never happen, that ‘AI will never be able to do what I do.’ But it can: It won first place in a fine art competition.”
Jason’s Théâtre D’opéra Spatial
After Jason won first prize the reaction of the artists is about what you would expect, with many accusing him of “not playing by the rules” and others expressing concern that these tools would undermine their craft.
Yet what is really angering artists about these types of tools is that their own artwork is frequently being used to train the A.I. models.
“I found the works of over hundreds of artists, peers that I knew personally,” said Karla Ortiz, an award-winning concept artist, in a recent Politco interview. “People are utilizing our full names to evoke those works and this allows A.I. tools to generate media that is supposed to be like our work.”
This discovery led Ortiz and other artists to file a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney and the art website DeviantArt, alleging that “the unauthorized use of artists’ work to train the Stable Diffusion AI is a breach of copyright so massive to be comparable to historic art heists.”
And while the U.S. Copyright Office previously declared that artwork generated by A.I. could not be copyrighted (because of the works “lack the human authorship necessary”) as the technology continues to develop, the ability to copyright digital artwork may be once again up for debate.
And now your moment of zen
That’s all for today folks!
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