![Google IO Image](/assets/images/blog/2023/05/10/00-cover.jpg)

I watched the Google I/O keynote event tonight. I used to watch these religiously with a bottle of wine and fire out hot takes on Twitter but I've not really been interested the last couple of years for...reasons.

But this year I couldn't wait. I was hoping they might reveal some of the AI tools they were building and I certainly wasn't disappointed on that front.

They dedicated the entire keynote to AI. To improvements in Bard and Pathways Language Model (PaLM) 2, and the many integrations they've built into all their other apps and services. I suspect the entire Google I/O event this year will be focussed solely on AI.

A lot of what they showed was pretty cool, but I have some concerns...

Let's start with what I thought was cool. 

## COOL THINGS

### AI MUSIC 

The keynote began with a weird DJ Music+Video experience complete with weird dancing ducks and swans with lips. The music was generated by AI. The accompanying music video was generated by AI. Both with input from the DJ. The end result was the product of a great many iterations.

Immediately I thought what this means for the future.

- With AI/AI Tools literally anybody can now become an artist.
- You don't need to learn play instruments, you just need to learn how to prompt the AI tools and iterate.
- Can't write lyrics? Don't worry, you can just keep prompting AI and it will write them for you.
- Need a music video to go with that new banger you've just made? Just keep prompting AI until you're happy with the results.
- ...
- PROFIT!

### SMART COMPOSE

They then showed some of the advancements that have been made to some existing AI powered features that we've been using for a while. I'm sure by now everybody has had Gmail suggest a sentence for you before you have to write it manually. Well its just got quite an upgrade thanks to Generative AI.

They showed a demo where they were replying to an Airline company requesting refunds for some tickets. AI wrote the entire email based on information it picked up itself and it didn't stop there. You actually have options for how much detail it goes into. You can ask it to elaborate on the initial email if you think it didn't go far enough. 🤯🤯🤯

### IMMERSIVE VIEW 

Google Maps has been updated with some nice new AI features too. They showed a demo where you can input a future journey you intend to make. It will then generate a fully 3D fly-over so you can see exactly where you are going and what your route will look like. It looked pretty nice and funnily enough I was doing the same thing manually on Google Maps about an hour before the keynote!

### MAGIC EDITOR

Google have been giving us super cool AI powered photo editing tools for years. I used to love my Pixel phones and the photo tools were unparalleled. Over the last few years both Google and Apple have given us advanced editing features where you can remove things/people/objects from photos. I think Google called it Magic Eraser. Well Magic Eraser has grown and is now Magic Editor!

In Magic Editor you can change pretty much anything you want in your photos. In the demo they showed a photo of a lady sat with her hand out with a waterfall in the background. They then used Magic Editor to completely redo the image so that the waterfall looked liked it fell right into the ladies hand. AI changed everything. You couldn't tell it wasn't the original shot. 

They also showed that you can edit the sky, move objects further into shot, out of shot, you can change anything you want really! 

### BARD

**We really are getting to the realm of the Computer from Star Trek and other futurist movies**

Bard has been developing at quite a pace it seems. It's now learned 20+ programming languages!
It's also been given a dark mode. I had to laugh at the excited cheers this generated. We're talking about world changing AI tools and people got excited over a stylesheet. 🙃😂

Bard has been extended and integrated with many more Google Services now and is about to get a lot more visual. For example you can now give Bard a photo and ask it to generate captions for you. It will even make jokes and funny captions. 
 
Bard has also been integrated with selected third-parties such as Adobe. 

Other Google services now include Bard such as Maps, Gmail, Docs and Search!

For example Search is now getting loads of Generative AI features.

They have also massively upgraded Google Shopping. Google Shopping has 1.8 billion updates an hour to its Knowledge Graph. Now Bard has access to all of that to give you an pretty insane shopping assistant! It even has a new conversational mode where you can keep asking more questions to refine you results until you get to what you want. 

Then just because why not? You can ask it do other things like 

- Build me a quiz on the product I just bought
- Think of a name for club based on the think I just bought.

I guess Google really weren't happy with Bing+ChatGPT stealing the limelight. 

### GOOGLE DOCS - (DUET AI FOR WORKSPACE)

The Google Docs tools have also been integrated with Generative AI features. 

For example they showed an example where AI can now write a complete job description for a business that's hiring a position. I bet it would do a better job than most HR departments currently do as well, being that it understands the technology we use in the jobs! 😂

They showed some cool improvements to Slides as well. Say you've written some content into a slide but need an image to go with it. AI will now generate images for you automatically based on the content you put in the slide. You can even change the style of the images it produces. You can have realistic photos, illustrations, clip art etc.  Pretty cool. 

If you're making a presentation for a talk it will even generate speaker notes for you! 

This type of functionality isn't limited to Slides. If you were writing a story/novel it can generate images/illustrations for those too. It can even prompt you with ideas for your story when you get writers block!

### BUSINESS

They also briefly discussed how businesses can use Vertex AI + Enterprise Search to build Generative AI tools and products based on your own private data. I'm interested in this. 

## NOT SO COOL THINGS

So there is a lot of good stuff there. So why am I so concerned? 

I can't help but worry about what all this means for the mental well-being of society going forward.

Let's look at a few of the cool things from above from another perspective.

### AI MUSIC

Immediately this made me realise that the days of listening to music and knowing it was created by our fellow artistic human beings are numbered. Going forward the music you hear might be completely made by AI. Initially I guess humans will prompt the AI so we'll have a kind of levelled up human music creation experience. But in the end you won't know, humans might not be involved at all.

Think about this; If we don't need humans to make music but music still makes money. What incentive do companies like Google, Apple, Spotify etc have to pay royalties to human artists? Why wouldn't they just rig the algorithms to ensure only AI generated music gets plays? 

It's not just music either, this will apply to everything. Everything you read, every article, blog post, tweet. Every video you watch, every conversation you have that isn't face to face. AI will be generating "content" everywhere and the disconnection that has messed so many of us up already is only going to get exponentially worse. 

I predict a sharp rise in depression in the human experience as everything becomes synthetic, fake, EASY. Human beings do not cope well when things are too easy. Joy comes from working hard at something and achieving something at the end. 

I fail to see how humans will achieve happiness when it feels like we've reached the end of our species usefulness and productivity. 

### MAGIC EDITOR 

The same concerns I just talked about apply here too. The power of these photo editing tools to "fix", enhance and tweak photos is way beyond just fixing a blemish or a lighting fault. These tools mean nothing we see will represent reality anymore. People aren't capturing images of the world as it is that they live in. They are creating fake versions of reality, the world as they wished it was instead of what it actually is. 

Did we learn nothing from the damage we now know Instagram Filters caused?  

I do not see how this is going to be a net benefit for society.

### GOOGLE DOCS - WITH GENERATIVE AI - (DUET AI FOR WORKSPACE)

The last thing I want to mention the new Image generation features now built into Google Docs and other AI powered tools. Whilst it's awesome from a personal end-user standpoint being able to have AI generate images on the fly to match your exact requirements. I think it's going to be pretty disastrous for artists. Especially younger artists who sell their early works like logo designs and website illustrations on websites. This allows them to build a portfolio so they can get better paying work in the future as they improve. This is gone now. If anybody can just ask the computer for their perfect image for free no less, what happens to the artists? 

## CONCLUSION

I honestly don't know how I feel at the moment with the rate of change in AI. I see the benefits and how cool it all is. But I do worry about the speed that we're hurtling into all this. I do not think society is prepared for the rapid change that is about to hit us, and I am deeply concerned that it is only ever going to get faster and harder to integrate. 



GOOGLE I/O - 2023 - KEYNOTE THOUGHTS

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