This is a very modern magician trick. Create SXSW talks out of nowhere with the help of generative AI. That’s what Worley did in Austin this year.
Austin tech scene staple whurley took nine weeks to create and prepare his keynote at SXSW 2018. Five years from now, generative AI will complete the task in just hours.
And it was actually pretty good. The 45-minute speech was comprehensive and interesting, with a Worley-like tone. There was one swearing (fuck) and a few jokes (including two lawyer ones) that made the audience laugh. It seems that it was (Whurley is known for his freewheeling style on the SXSW stage and is a regular.)
Kicker? He waited until the end to deliver the punch line.
“Everything today, from the slides to the speech I’m reading right now, is created by generative AI,” he said on stage, explaining all the hows and whys. Whispers, wows and laughter filled the room filled with hundreds of his SXSW attendees.
Strangeworks may be the first startup to use generative AI for all of its on- and off-stage content at SXSW. While this is a novel and fun demonstration, the experiment also demonstrates the flexibility of AI tools and their growing popularity.
Why bother? About exposure and education, whurley told TechCrunch after this week’s event.
“We are about to enter the greatest period of technological progress in human history. “I wanted to shine the spotlight,” he said. “The next 10 years will see more change than the last 100 years. It will be one step function, if not several, for scientific discovery and progress.”
process
As many people do, the experiment started on a limited scale. Whurley used Generative AI in his October 2022 writing description for his SXSW talk titled “Quantum AI: Why Your Future Depends on Quantum Computing & Artificial Intelligence.” No, he didn’t tell his SXSW organizers.
“It all started with a prompt,” he said onstage. “I told them to write an 800 word South by Southwest abstract. All created by ChatGPT and submitted.”
ChatGPT is an AI model that understands images and text, powered by GPT 3.5 and developed by OpenAI. A new version of his underlying engine, GPT-4, was released on his March 14th.
Here is his prompt:
Wrote an 800-word summary of the SXSW keynote for a session called “QuantumAI: Why your future depends on the convergence of Quantum Computing & Artificial Intelligence”, in which the speakers will discuss advances in quantum computing and artificial intelligence, facing our species. Discuss the issues you are facing. And the inevitable convergence that could lead to quantum superintelligence that will change our world forever.
A few days before the SXSW featured session, Whurley decided to take it one step further. He asked his AI to use the abstract to create an outline of what the presentation would look like. After a few tweaks (or “re-prompts” as he called it), the outline got his approval.
his prompt:
This is great. You should have enough slides to discuss this topic for an hour. Can you give me an overview of the 1 hour talk on this?
Whurley shared it with his team at Strangeworks and everyone decided to get on board.
Whurley also used Midjourney, an AI generative art tool, to create slides and graphics for the presentation. And he raised expectations again by having Midjourney create the story and graphics in a seven-page printed publication featuring Strangeworks’ mascot, the Schrody Cat. A brochure was distributed to the participants.
Image credit: Kirsten Korosek
“Then the night before last, I thought, if you’ve done the outline, the abstract, all the slides, you shouldn’t be saying the word,” he said. Whurley took all his previous prompts and put them into his GPT-4 released Tuesday.
So, the morning of the keynote, the final script, graphics and slides were created. And they cut it down. “When I arrived at the hotel near 11am, I took out the final version of the script, cut and pasted it into the teleprompter his software downloaded to my iPad,” he wrote on TechCrunch after the event.
“This is definitely the biggest risk I’ve ever taken at SXSW,” he said.
Generative AI was also used to create whurley’s personal website. This his website debuted Wednesday and features hundreds of blogs voiced by whurley. He worked with collaborator David Hudson of Big Human on his blog his project.
Those blogs have been removed to make way for another project that started on Thursday. The CEO of Strangeworks once again prompts through ChatGPT, this time asking them to publish their website and blog in 10 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Italian and Arabic.
According to Whurley, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. He noted that a small number of opponents of AI/technology have made defamatory comments and veiled threats via social media, but “there are very few detractors.”
