A few years ago, I took a Halloween photo that I really like. It’s of my wife Merri, dressed as a hot dog:
I recently wanted to use it as a wallpaper on my iPhone, but its landscape nature didn’t really play nicely with the modern lock screen.1 Then I remembered that Photoshop has a bunch of AI tools, and after some tinkering with its generative fill feature, I had something that worked pretty well:
Last week, news broke that the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) planned on firing its staff and volunteer helpline folks and replace them with a chatbot named Tessa, less than a week after the workers formed a union.
That is going about as well as you would think, as Chloe Xiang writes:
As of Tuesday, Tessa was taken down by the organization following a viral social media post displaying how the chatbot encouraged unhealthy eating habits rather than helping someone with an eating disorder.
Searching for it in the App Store is a mess, as there are a ton of other apps using the service and its name, but if you want the official experience, there’s an app for that.
via 9to5Mac
Federico Viticci has created something wild:
It’s the inaugural week of the second annual edition of Automation April, and to celebrate the occasion, I’ve been working on something special: today, I’m introducing S-GPT, an advanced conversational shortcut for ChatGPT that bridges OpenAI’s assistant to native system features of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS.
S-GPT (which stands for Shortcuts-GPT) is free to use for everyone, but it requires an OpenAI account with an associated pay-as-you-go billing plan since it takes advantage of OpenAI’s developer API, which has a cost. S-GPT was built with the latest ChatGPT API, and it can be used both with the existing ChatGPT 3.5 model or – if you have access to it – the ChatGPT 4 API.
I love macOS wallpapers, so when I saw that Bing had incorporated image creation into its probably-not-going-to-kill-us-all-but-maybe AI tools, I took it for a spin with this prompt:
Make some wallpapers in the style of Mac OS wallpapers from Jaguar, Panther and Tiger
I got these back:
That’s not really what I had in mind, so while the AI’s reading of my prompt made me laugh, I decided to try again:
Back in 2017 I had created a site which took the the audio of some of my favorite podcasts and tried to make them searchable by passing them through an automated speech-to-text engine.
In the original version of this the transcription was done with very rough, slow, low accuracy system which resulted in transcripts that were fit for keyword searching but not much else.
Thankfully since then OpenAI has released Whisper a powerful speech-to-text engine that I can run right on my Mac and results in transcripts that are shockingly good. They aren’t quite at the level of a human transcriber but they get darn close in many instances. Getting close to the level where you could use them to grab a pull quote with only a little bit of tidying up to do.
I recently asked ChatGPT a complicated question:
Which Performa was the best?
Here’s what it replied:
It is difficult to say which Performa model was the best, as it ultimately depends on individual preferences and needs.
The Performa line of computers was introduced by Apple in 1992 and included a range of models with varying specifications and features. Some of the most popular Performa models included the Performa 600, which featured a 66 MHz PowerPC processor and 8 MB of RAM, and the Performa 6116CD, which featured a 120 MHz PowerPC processor and 16 MB of RAM. These models were popular among home users and were known for their speed and reliability.
The folks behind OpenAI have opened up a new AI tool that can return text when given a prompt. Naturally, I asked it to write about Apple products.
Prompt #1: Write 5 paragraphs in the style of a news article written by about Apple’s new iMac computer, complete with quotes from experts
Apple has released a new iMac computer, bringing updated hardware and a renewed focus on performance to the iconic all-in-one desktop. The new iMac features the latest Intel processors, with options up to a 10-core Core i9 chip, along with AMD Radeon Pro 5000 series graphics, delivering up to 55 percent faster performance than the previous generation.