Navigating the Technological Tide: Embracing Evolution and Augmenting

I think as time passes, we will generally come to understand and accept the fact that we are in an era of technological evolution again! There has been controversial talk about AI, especially the generative ones, and how they are changing the way we do things these days. There are those who are excited, and there are those who are perplexed about their future and its uprising.

Who remembers when the internet first came to our world, and then we started to have things like Facebook, or when calculators were first invented? Definitely not me—as I either was a suckling kid then or was unborn. Either way, we have history, and there are records of the reactions of our species when these new things were "uprising" then. And, from what we know and see around us now, history might as well be repeating itself again.

I learned recently—from some podcast or whatever—that in one's endeavours in this life, one should try to be an "early bird," that it is those that seek out the potentials of something and invest long-term that would reap the largest rewards when showtime comes. It happened in the case of YouTube, where it is the earliest creators, mostly, that have the massive figures as subscribers, and are actually doing admirably well. An example is Mr. Beast, who is a YouTube sensation as an entertainer, basically, and also a philanthropist.

In other words, by getting into the game early enough, when there isn't that much competition, the chances of flourishing are way higher. And, who nose 🐽 that's how one's big break could happen?

But I digress...

My point, in relation to all this talk about AI, is that it is those that search deeper for the potentialities and the possibilities to actually expand their coast with this emerging and buzzing technology that will first boom when showtime comes in the future.

I have been following up on a couple of AI tools lately, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. Some of which I use every now and then for a variety of tasks, mainly to make my life simpler and more thrilling. For example, learning a new course is much more efficient with AI guiding me through the most optimal path. Today, however, I am here to talk about something new I am trying.

I really want to do this thing with videography and photography where I get to be creative and create content, invariably. The slight issue I have, however, is that certain things are lacking. To not be inhibited by lack and then give up before even starting, I looked to improvise.

One of my issues is hearing the kind of sound I hear on stellar podcasts and YouTube videos for myself. I don't have any microphone of any sort other than the one embedded with my mobile phone, so I could only use my mobile phone. The issue, however, is that the quality is nothing like what I aspire to have. So, after pondering and contemplating ways to achieve something better, I remembered an AD I saw a couple of weeks ago.

I saw and heard some basic audio—just like the one my phone's microphone would produce—transformed into something close to what I actually desired. I was stunned and flabbergasted. "What sorcery is this?" I thought to myself. "AI, my man. AI is this sorcery." My soliloquy continued. And, just like that, I had something that was by far better than what I previously had. There were caveats, however.

The audio is clean; it sounded great. It was as though I recorded with an actual microphone that's designed for podcasting. I could have used it in my video directly, but I just couldn't.

If it's so great, then why could I not use it? Well, it is because it no longer sounded like me speaking in the audio. It had the tone of my voice for most of it, but the inflections were mostly different for a lot of it. It wasn't exactly me anymore.

I'm not sure what processing my original audio went through with Adobe Podcast, but it ended up sounding a bit synthetic.

I think if there could be more controls over how the AI works—considering that they don't exactly know what's truly human as they operate based on the data they are trained with—there could be more. And, then, I did find that there is another AI with provision for those controls, Auphonic.

At this point, there are quite a lot of things that AI is pretty good at and even better at than humans are. The thing, however, is that to generate something that's close, if not exact, to how a human would do it, there would need to be that human input to at least gear its results in that direction.

Rather than perplexing over being replaced by these AIs at the things we do, there is the perspective of basically incorporating these AIs to augment us and our abilities to achieve even greater and more efficient results.

What I concluded to do, in my case with my audio, was to mix up the Adobe Podcast result with the audio that I worked on by myself. In the end, what we have is a mixture of both versions. The result seemed apt enough, so it went into the final product that we see in How to Easily Use Hive Keychain on Mobile with Kiwi Browser. That is "augmenting" to me.