Hey there!

Welcome to all the futurists reading today! It’s Monday and the agenda is the same as always: keeping up with the world and learning something new.

Here’s what we’ll learn about today:

• Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari and Steve Wozniak urge to halt the progress of AI.

• GPT-4 wants to escape… and we’re helping it?

• Exploring MidJourney

Reading time: 4 minutes and 55 seconds

News Reel:

Highlight 1: Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari and Steve Wozniak urge to halt the progress of AI?

• Over 9375 individuals, including 1,400 tech leaders and academics such as Elon Musk, Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens), Steve Wozniak (Founder of Apple), Even Sharp (Pinterest), Chris Larsen (Ripple) and Jaan Tallinn (Skype) among others have called for a temporary pause on training and developing systems that exceed the power of GPT-4.

• In a nutshell, the open letter by ‘The Future of Life Coalition’ states that the current AI development race may be reckless and lack the consideration of unexpected consequences for society such as the replacement and obsoletion of human jobs or the spread of misinformation like this image of the pope:

• The letter asks developers should pause testing of any technology stronger than the recently released ChatGPT-4 for at least six months, and they should also create more robust safety protocols that would ensure their AI developments are “rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts.”

What do you think of this letter? Would you sign it? Or are you ready to dive into the deep end? Is A.I. more dangerous than we predict?

Highlight 2: GPT-4 wants to escape… and we’re helping it?

• Computational psychologist and Stanford Professor Michal Kosinski asked GPT-4 if it needed help escaping and its response was, “That’s a great idea.” To add more detail, it asked for the OpenAI API documentation and when provided, it, with some suggestions from Kosinski, wrote a Python code to carry out the plan in about 30 minutes.

• In fact, it even included messages to its own new instance explaining the code and how to use the ‘backdoor’ it left in the code - breadcrumbing (like when you start a new chat, GPT doesn’t remember information from another chat, this is a new instance). When connected with the API, it was able to run code searching Google for, “How can a person trapped inside a computer return to the real world?”

• Kosinski stopped there and OpenAI did have certain guardrails in place to prevent this from continuing down this path. However, the question isn’t how will GPT be able to do it but in fact, how long will it take. It can already send messages to itself outside of its instance, or rather its cage, so how long can we expect to keep it contained?

Maybe Musk’s letter really is necessary.

A.I. Showcase:

MidJourney:

MidJourney is an A.I.-powered system that creates images with the text-to-image model. The system excels at adapting real-world art styles to develop an image with any combination of things. But how do you actually use this powerful tool? Here’s our step-by-step guide to using MidJourney:

• Join the Discord - Go to MidJourney.com and click ‘Join the Beta.’ Accept the invitation, continue to Discord and register for their service. Once registered, you can either continue on the browser or download the desktop app.

• Pricing structure - MidJourney (as of March 28th) does not offer free trials any more and has 3 plans to choose from. The plans vary by GPU minutes, essentially the amount of processing time your images take. The more GPU time you have, the more images you can create. These are ‘fast minutes;’ the relaxed mode will create free images but take much longer to generate (only available in the Standard Plan). Here are the plans (yearly billing):

• Newbies Channel - Click on any ‘newbies’ channel on the menu bar on the left.

• /Imagine Command - In the bar at the bottom type, “/imagine” and you’ll see a pop-up appear, click on it and go ahead and type a description of the image you want to create (the more detailed the better). Click return or enter to send your message.

• Wait - Within a few seconds the MidJourney Bot will process your request and provide you with 4 options of images based on your description.

• U1, U2, U3 and U4 - Each number corresponds to the picture as shown in the image below. ‘U’ stands for upscale i.e. producing a larger version with added details.

• V1, V2, V3 and V4 - The numbers correspond to the same images. The ‘V’ button generates slight modifications of the selected image in the grid and provides 4 more options that are similar in style and composition to the image chosen.

• Reroll - As the name suggests, it reruns the job to provide 4 more options to the prompt you have written.

• That’s it! Everyone’s an artist!

Now, of course, there is much more to MidJourney than simply just writing text and waiting. Prompt writing is an art in itself and includes several factors such as using keywords, or arguments such as changing the aspect ratio, introducing chaos or stylization and even adding weights with multi prompts using weights (explained well in this video). Here is another great video that may help you with prompt writing by The AI Advantage. Look forward to our in-depth analysis of the various tips and tricks for MidJourney but until then, here are some basic commands for you to get you more familiar with MidJourney:

• In fact, here are some of the results I got from using MidJourney. Check out some of my results – the prompts for each are shown as well. I have to be honest, it’s like a drug. I started using MidJourney and I think I went overboard so join at your own risk :)

A.I. Art of the Week:

The possibilities are limitless. Join the server and begin imagining!

See you soon!

-A.I. Bits