Visualising the 1800s or designing wedding invitations: 6 ways you can use AI beyond generating text

By T.J. Thomson, RMIT University

As more than half of Australian office workers report using generative artificial intelligence (AI) for work, we’re starting to see this technology affect every part of society, from banking and finance through to weather forecasting, health and medicine.

Many people are now using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to get advice, find information or summarise longer passages of text. But our recent research demonstrates how generative AI can be used for much more than this, returning results in different formats.

On the one hand, AI tools are neutral – they can be used for good or ill depending on one’s intent.

However, the models powering such tools can also suffer from biases based on how they were developed. AI tools, especially image generators, are also power hungry, ratcheting up the world’s energy usage.

And there are unresolved copyright claims surrounding AI-generated outputs, given the content used to train some of the models isn’t owned by the organisations developing the AI.

But ultimately, there’s no escaping generative AI. Learning more about what these tools can do will improve your digital literacy and help you understand their full impact, from benign to problematic.

1. Imagining what lies beyond the frame

Adobe’s recently developed “generative expand” tool allows users to expand the canvas of their photos and have Photoshop “imagine” what is happening beyond the frame. Nine News infamously experimented with this tool for a broadcast featuring Victorian politician Georgie Purcell.

Here’s a video that shows how that tool works:

https://youtu.be/JjVoW3sXPmM?si=zdSG2PXV8T9FpZcV

But it can also be used more innocently to extend the borders of a landscape or still-life image, for example. You might do this when trying to edit a square Instagram photo to fit a 4x6 inch photo frame.

2. Visualising the past or the future

Photography was only invented within the past 200 years, and camera-equipped smartphones within the last 25.

That leaves us with plenty of things that existed before cameras were common, yet we might want to visualise them.

Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/visualising-the-1800s-or-designing-wedding-invitations-6-ways-you-can-use-ai-beyond-generating-text-228089