‘Pictionary vs AI’ vs Chatgpt

I just had to shoehorn AI into the festivities, didn't I?

Actually, I can blame my mum for this one.

She bought me and my daughter a copy of Mattel's 'PICTIONARY VS AI': a zeitgeisty update on the classic scribble-to-score game often dusted down in the lull between Christmas and New Year.

Blimey, I thought, they really do think of everything, don't they? And, yup, that's coming from me...

So there we were. All set up with our board, counters, drawing pads, and various plastic stands - ready to go. On Daisy's card? Watermelon. A simple enough task and she did a fine job. Or that's what I thought.

We hit 'scan' on the game's accompanying web app. Nowt. A bit of position jiggling fueled by 'first game' patience later, and the results were in.

'You've drawn CHEESE'.

An easy mistake to make, I figured. My faith in technology knows no bounds.

My go. I turned my card to reveal the subject of my sketch: a ladder.

Right, I'll show PICTIONARY VS AI. [COMPETITIVE DAD ALERT]

'You've drawn a KANGAROO'.

A kangaroo? A f**king kangaroo?! (my internal monologue, clearly.)

Daisy looked at me. The cogs had been whirring through the two disappointing rounds we'd played.

'Should we just use ChatGPT to scan the pictures?' she suggested.

If you wanted any confirmation about how much I also bang on about AI at home, there's your answer.

We fired up the GPT app, started the next round, and goodness, it was like we'd suddenly brought in a quantum computer to play along with us.

'Pizza' was Daisy's first card in the new game. She drew a slice, then added a box to the pic:

'The drawing on the pink board shows a slice of pizza and a pizza box with the word "Dominos" on it, suggesting it's a Domino's pizza.'

My round. I got 'UFO'. Which looked like a hat when I first drew it, but after a few modifications and additions:

'The drawing on the yellow board appears to depict a UFO with beams of light coming down, possibly abducting something or someone.'

What does this all mean? I'm not entirely sure. But it does give us an insight into the rapid advances we're seeing with AI, and will continue to over the coming years.

Mattel released PICTIONARY VS AI in October 2023, and by January 2024, with GPT Vision, it was already WAY more effective to play the game using a home-made adaptation using capability baked into the latest version ChatGPT-4.

Who won? Daisy.

How did I lose, you ask?

ChatGPT-4 confused a picture I’d drawn of a shoe for a pair of pants. I woz robbed….

Bloody AI.

Cover versions: recreating Iconic album art with AI

I’m a massive New Order fan.

If you know me, or have ready any of the blogs on the Diagonal Thoughts website, you’ll probably know this already.

Bored, one Saturday afternoon, I set off on another AI experiment as I pondered how GPT Vision and Dall-E could work with each other. Or even despite of each other…

With Vision able to ‘see’ images, and Dall-E capable of creating images from a prompt, I figured it would be interesting to see if I could get Chat-GPT to look at artwork - plus a couple of photos - from New Order (and their predecessor Joy Division), describe it in detail, then re-create the art in a completely new thread using only the description that ChatGPT had provided.

Check the results out in the gallery here, and if you’re not familiar with the originals, check them out on your favourite music service.

My First Experiment with ChatGPT-4 Turbo: An Interactive Macbeth Experience

I’ve been mulling over the possibilities that the latest ChatGPT update, ChatGPT-4 Turbo, might offer.

I’ve not yet been able to access the GPT creator, so, instead, I’ve been exploring how the significantly increased context (ie prompt / training data you supply) will change what’s possible.

Blimey, it’s exciting.

I've created an interactive play-along version of Macbeth by uploading the entire script from The Scottish Play, then instructing CGPT to give me a version I can play, with the language updated for today’s audiences - just to make it a little more accessible for the purposes of the demo.

Check out the video to see how ChatGPT-4 Turbo can create immersive role-play experiences and support complex interactions. Whether for education, entertainment, or creative exploration, the possibilities are endless.

OpenAI DevDay, Opening Keynote: What's next for ChatGPT?

It's 6 November, 2023 and OpenAI's Sam Altman has just kicked off the company's inaugural DevDay with a keynote that was jam-packed with updates, giving us a window into the near future of Generative AI.

So what's new? And what might these latest developments mean for you?

The session started with a recap of some impressive figures; CahtGPT now boasts 100 million weekly active users, and over 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform. Then, taking straight out of Apple's keynote playbook, it quickly skipped to a video reel of users dolling out stories of how ChatGPT is changing their lives. Tim Cook, take note.

New stuff

But enough of that, what’s actually new?

Well, looking at the fundamental platform, OpenAI's latest AI model, GPT-4 Turbo has launched and will roll out to all users in the next couple of weeks. It features:

• Greatly improved context length, from 8k up to 128k tokens (equivalent to around 300 pages of text), means you can input more data, but fundamentally, GPT will be far less likely to 'forget' earlier parts of a thread.

• More control over responses and outputs. 

• Better knowledge - training data cutoff is now up to April 2023 (previously September 2021) and OpenAI is working to close the gap further

• New modalities - DALL-E3, GPT-4 Turbo and Text To Speech - are all now accessible via the API. 

• Increased rate limits.

And the fees for using the APIs are dropping whilst the functionality is improving. We can see some insane new apps being built on the back of these new updates.

ChatGPT improvements

Not a developer? Me neither, but you'll be glad to hear that OpenAI made some substantial announcements that will fundamentally change what we mere mortals can do with ChatGPT.

Unsurprisingly, all of the new features of ChatGPT-4 Turbo will be rolling out to GPT-4 users soon.

And one of the big changes to usability is a simple one: the annoying model picker is gone. Now, there will no need to select your model (ie Browse with Bing, DALL-E3, Advanced Data Analysis) - you'll be able to access all of these through a single chat request.

Custom GPTs

But the really big update coming through on ChatGPT is the ability to create - and share - completely custom chat agents, primed and ready to work on any number of tasks.

Examples listed on the ChatGPT website include bots trained as a Sous Chef, giving you recipes based on the foods you love and the ingredients you have, Tech Support, helping folk around you with everything from setting up a printer to troubleshooting a device. Man, I'm building one of those for my family the minute I have access!

Hey, there's even an example of a bot being created to act as a Maths Mentor. Wherever did they get that idea from?

GPTs can be private or shared publicly. And Enterprise users (those with a premium business account) will be able to create and deploy GPTs within their company. 

What's more, the GPT Store will be launching later this month. Whilst it's not entirely clear how creators will monetise their bots, Altman revealed OpenAI will pay the people building the most useful GPTs 'a proportion of their revenues.'

Seriously, this is huge.

NO CODING KNOWLEDGE REQUIRED

You don't need to be a coder to create your bot; you can programme a GPT just through a natural language conversation. You'll be able to feed in your own training data (docs, databases, spreadsheets) for it to draw insights from, and you can set custom instructions as to how it should behave in conversation.

Imagine being able to create a custom GPT to support your work, or the work your team does? There's huge potential here.

It also feels like the slew of basic 'wrapper' AI solutions - those built around simple API integrations packaged to a particular use case - are pretty much dead. 

That's all for now. I'll be itching to get my hands on this stuff...but until then...