Member-only storyManuel BrennerFollowTowards Data Science--ShareI like to think about what the inhabitants of Renaissance Italy, aflame with passion for the possibilities of the human imagination and rationality, would have found most astounding about our present-day technology. Leonardo da Vinci, dreaming of flying machines, would have surely been impressed by an Airbus 380 soaring through the air, with passengers comfortably reclining in their chairs, watching movies, and complaining about the Wi-Fi not being fast enough.But out of all the technologies that would have seemed like witchcraft in medieval times, the wonders of generative AI might be among the most witchcrafty. What would Leonardo, after laboring endless years on the portrait of the Mona Lisa, have said if I showed him a device that could paint a portrait of a woman in his style in mere seconds? Lo and behold:While admittedly, this woman does not smile quite as seductively and mysteriously as the real Mona Lisa (and looks, upon further inspection, somewhat ridiculous), many of us have encountered astonishing instances of AI generations: from ultrarealistic images to eerily convincing deep fakes of voices or even entire essays written by AI.Generative AI models are the silicon equivalents of dreamers: they can envision something from nothing, make meaning from noise. They have learned to dance the dance of order and disorder. They have already changed how we think about human creativity and have opened the door to thousands of new applications, threatening entire industries and creating new ones.And we are just getting started, with most of these models still in their infancy. With the writings of ChatGPT, the images of DALL-E and Midjourney, and, most recently, generative models for music like Stability AI’s StableAudio, we are looking at an era where an increasing amount of the sensory signals we load into our brains on a daily basis are in some way altered or even fully generated by AI.In this article, I want to lift the lid off this magical black box, diving into the…----Towards Data ScienceI love new ideas. My podcast: https://anchor.fm/acit-science Connect via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuel-brenner-772261191Manuel BrennerinTowards Data Science--4Damian GilinTowards Data Science--24Khouloud El AlamiinTowards Data Science--18Manuel BrennerinTowards Data Science--1Damian GilinTowards Data Science--24Jim the AI WhispererinThe Generator--72Will LockettinPredict--90Haifeng Li--AL Anany--372Wenqi GlantzinBetter Programming--4HelpStatusWritersBlogCareersPrivacyTermsAboutText to speechTeams