Yesterday I was invited to give the final talk of the year for the Tech Leader Chats meetup group, which is run by Multitudes from NZ. I had a righteous rant about generative AI and creativity, and I think I did a pretty good job with it! My references are below, and you can watch the talk online here:

I also wanted to share the list of references and news stories that I mentioned during the talk:

• “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” by Roald Dahl
• Google’s “Dear Sydney” commercial that ran during the Olympics
• Alexandra Petri’s response in The Washington Post to Google’s ad
• Forbes‘s article suggesting you use ChatGPT at the Thanksgiving table
• The Verge‘s review of Google’s Pixel 9 phone
• The Guardian’s story about LJ Hooker’s hallucination-filled home listings
• The Harvard Misinformation Review‘s article about GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar
• The Atlantic‘s exposé revealing that AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work
• The Verge‘s article about OpenAI engineers accidentally erasing critical evidence from a lawsuit
• Study in Nature about how AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
• Bruce Sterling’s blog post about “Delvish”
• Wired‘s story about the prevalence of AI-generated text on LinkedIn
• International Business Times story about the environment crisis the AI industry is exacerbating
• Dr. Linda McIver’s keynote from PyconAU 2024
• Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
• Ted Chiang’s essay on why AI isn’t going to make art, from The New Yorker
• Slate article about this year’s NaNoWriMo AI controversy
• The Bookseller article about new startup Spines aiming to disrupt publishing
• Issue #218 from Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files
• The Economist article about the AI investment bubble
• Procreate’s AI statement