Is Our Future Dependent on a Series of Prompts and Commands?
In September of last year, Jason Reposa was given access to the beta of Stable Diffusion, a now-prominent image generator powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Using his son’s gaming PC with a powerful graphics-processing unit, Reposa started feeding prompts into the generator. The founder of Massachusetts beverage brand Good Feels began studying AI in college in the late 1990s as a computer science major, and he had maintained an active interest and foothold in the community over the years. But when Stable Diffusion started spitting out impressive images based on his commands, Reposa was stunned by the nascent technology’s latest leap forward. “I had a full-on panic attack once I realized the impact,” he said. “I had a whole day where I just couldn’t function. The world literally just changed, and I was one of the very few people at that time who could see it. It was like walking around in the Matrix.” Fast-forward just nine months, and many of us now see what Reposa saw. The re...