Issue link: https://nbm.uberflip.com/i/1491554
G R A P H I C S - P R O. C O M M A R C H 2 0 2 3 • G R A P H I C S P R O 8 7 Fear Vs. Reality I remember the fear in the graphics industry in the late 1980s when comput- ers became user-friendly and graphic soft- ware programs such as Quark Express, Illustrator and Photoshop emerged on the scene. In their minds, new technol- ogy threatened to replace the jobs of graphic technicians, designers and production art- ists who pasted up "mechan- icals," operated huge process cameras and stripped nega- tives on light tables. In reality, however, their jobs were not replac ed. eir job titles and descrip- tions changed. ey had to relearn their craft. As tech- nology advanced new hard- ware and software had to be mastered. Graphics became less manual and more auto- mated and the entire work- flow was reinvented. Today, as graphic technology has more-or-less stabilized, there are still fears. Now the trepidation is about total automation. If it can be imagined and stated, it can be generated automatically, untouched by human hands. What I'm talking about is Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world! IQ Test Putting the fear of new technology aside, I wanted to test the power of arti- ficial intelligence to see for myself how smart it is. In essence I performed an AI IQ test. To create a better understanding of AI for this article, I generated the next Fig. 1: Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, the image created by Jason Allen with artificial intelligence that won first prize at the Colorado state fair. (Images courtesy of Stephen Romaniello) few paragraphs in an AI writing program called ChatGPT available at http://CHAT. openAI.com. My question was simple: "What is Artificial Intelligence?" After a few tries rephrasing the question each time to extract more detail, this is what it wrote. (Fig. 2) Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the field of computer science that focuses on creat- ing intelligent machines that can perform tasks without explicit human instruction. ese tasks may include learning, prob- lem solving, decision making, and other activities that require human-like intelli- gence. AI systems can be trained to per- form a wide range of tasks, from simple tasks such as recognizing patterns and making decisions based on data, to more complex tasks such as language transla- tion and self-driving cars. AI systems can be classified into a two general categories; narrow AI, which is designed to perform a specific task, and general AI, which is designed to be able to perform any intellectual task that a human can. Fig. 2: The ChatGPT AI interface allows a user to ask a question from which the program will write a well-researched answer.