Than greater than half of Australia's office staff When we report that we’re using generative artificial intelligence (AI) for work, we start to see this technology impacting every a part of society, from banking and finance to Weather forecasthealth and medicine.
Many people now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to get advice, find information or summarize longer passages of text. But our current research shows how generative AI may be used for far more than that, delivering results in several formats.
On the one hand, AI tools are neutral – they may be used for good or for bad depending in your intentions.
However, the models underlying such tools also can suffer from biases as a result of their development. AI tools, especially image generators, are also power hungry. driving up global energy consumption.
And there are unresolved copyright claims related to AI-generated results since the content used to coach some models will not be owned by the organizations developing the AI.
But ultimately there isn’t any way around generative AI. Learning more about what these tools can do will improve your digital skills and make it easier to understand their full impact, from harmless to problematic.
1. Imagine what lies beyond the frame
Adobe recently developed it Generative Extension tool. allows users to expand the canvas of their photos and let Photoshop “imagine” what’s happening outside the frame. Nine News experimented with this tool for a program featuring Victorian politician Georgie Purcell.
Here is a video showing how this tool works:
But it could possibly even be used more innocently, for instance to expand the sides of a landscape or still life image. You can do that in case you're attempting to edit a square Instagram photo to suit a 4×6 inch picture frame.
2. Visualization of the past or the longer term
Photography was only invented within the last 200 years and smartphones with cameras only within the last 25 years.
This leaves us with a number of things that existed before cameras existed, but that we’d still want to visualise. This could also be for educational purposes, entertainment, or self-reflection.
An example is the writings of historical figures resembling the architect Robert Russell, who carried out the primary survey of what’s now Melbourne in 1836. He wrote on the time:
The soil on this country is best than any within the colony, we now have good pastures and water supply: a advantageous harbor, a city on which a number of capital (I’m sorry to say how much) has been spent, enterprising settlers, and in flocks and herds growing in every direction, a climate well suited to Englishmen, and events hastening the need of a plan of in depth emigration, of which we will soon feel the profit.
We can feed this text from Russell's letters right into a text-to-image generator and see what the world might need looked like.
Conversely, we will probably want to look ahead and see if AI may also help us imagine what’s to return.
For example, a probe is currently en path to a never-before-seen metal asteroid, 16 Psyche. It is anticipated to achieve the asteroid in 2029. We can provide data to an AI tool an outline from NASA to get a rough idea of ​​what the asteroid might seem like.
NASA is currently working with artists illustrate concepts we cannot seebut artists could also depend on AI to create these renderings.
3. Brainstorm to visualise difficult concepts
Where once we might need turned to Google Images or Pinterest boards to seek out visual inspiration, AI also can help with suggestions on learn how to represent difficult-to-visualize topics.
Take the Mariana Trench, for instance. As one in every of the deepest places on Earth, few people have ever seen it firsthand. It's also pitch black and with artificial light you’ll be able to't see far.
But ask the AI ​​for suggestions on learn how to visualize this place and it would provide a spread of ideas, including adopting a more well-known landmark, resembling the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest structure, and placing a scale model next to the moat , to permit viewers greater access to understand its depth.
Or create a layered illustration showing the wildlife that live in each ocean five zones over the ditch.
4. Visualize data
Depending on the tool, you’ll be able to prompt AI with numbers and not only text.
For example, you would upload a spreadsheet to ChatGPT 4 and ask it to visualise the outcomes. Or if the info is already publicly available (e.g The population of the earth over time), you would ask a chatbot to visualise it without even having to supply a table.
This is an excellent strategy to speed up such tasks, so long as you be mindful that AI can “hallucinate” or make things up, requiring you to double-check the accuracy of the outcomes.
5. Create easy moving images
You can create a straightforward but effective animation by uploading a photograph to an AI tool like Runway and giving it an animation command, resembling: B. Zoom in, zoom out or trace from left to right. That's what I did with it historical photo held by the State Library of Western Australia.
Another strategy to experiment with video is to make use of Runway's text-to-video feature to explain the scene you ought to see and have it create a video for you. I used this description to create the next video:
Tracking shot from left to right of the snow-capped mountains of Nagano, Japan. The clouds hang low across the mountains and are about 50 m away.
6. Generate a color palette or easy graphics
Maybe you're making a logo on your small business or helping a friend design an event invitation. In these cases, a consistent color palette may also help unify your design.
You can ask generative AI services like Midjourney or Gemini to create a color palette for you based on the event or its mood.
If you might be designing an internet site or a poster and want some icons to represent certain parts of the message, you’ll be able to turn to AI to generate them for you. This applies to each browser-based generators like Adobe Firefly and desktop apps with built-in AI Adobe Illustrator.
Next time you interact with a generative AI chatbot, ask it what it's able to. In addition to those six use cases, you might be surprised to learn that generative AI also can write code, translate content, make music, and describe images. This may be helpful when writing Alt text descriptions and make the Internet more accessible to individuals with visual impairments.