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Art and creativity has been my exploratory space ever since childhood. Having loved painting, passed advanced level singing exam as well as a trained Bharatnatyam dancer; art will always remain special to me. I have always taken keen interest in what is new and upcoming trends in this arena. While one might think that art is something extremely human specific and quality differs from person to person, I was in for a huge surprise when I noticed that technology has made its entry over this space as well.

When I recently met my Bharatnatyam dance teacher after long, she made me realize that how choreography has become so easy these days, and you don’t need to put in hours behind synthesizing a beautiful dance. She mentioned that motion capture technology with generative AI is able to sense dancers’ movements, explore and generate completely unique sequences and assist in choreography. In fact, the world-famous British choreographer Wayne Mcgregor has created an AI powered tool in collaboration with Google which feeds on Mcgregor’s past dance performances to identify patterns and inspire new steps and sequences.

Since she knew my interest in music, and how I loved to dance on my own sung music. She told me about a new AI system named IBM Watson Beat which feeds on dance performances, analyzed the emotional content and generated appropriate music compositions for the dance. This really surprised me regarding the extent technology has reached.

When I went back home, I had to put my research glasses on and dive deep into how has generative AI disrupted art further. I came to realize craft was also not let alone. There is a generative AI application named DeepArt which can transform regular photos into artwork. It needs some reference artwork and can apply the style, precision and visual characteristics to an ordinary photograph submitted by the user.

This entire new piece of news took me by surprise and lead me to think whether generative AI can replace human talent. I still think not quite so, because the kind of uniqueness and creativity a human mind can bring on the table is quite impossible for AI since it ultimately feeds on reference work. But there is still a lot of time in the future to explore and probably a lot of surprises planned for us by emerging technology!

5/5 (1)

Hailing from IIM Bangalore, I interned at Citibank as an investment banker for 2 months. Finance industry in general is perceived to be extremely strenuous; relying severely on human labor. My first corporate experience with GenAI was during my internship itself. During this period, I realized how GenAI like ChatGPT, assists investment bankers in reducing their workload, increasing impact and efficiency simultaneously.

I was staffed on a project to create a company pitch for private placement of an Indian bathware firm. During this project, for the purposes of preparing the industry overview, the analyst working on the project used ChatGPT for generating research reports on Indian bathware industry and its past performance. ChatGPT also collated market commentary regarding the future of this industry. I was surprised at how this saved a lot of time that could have been spent in internet research pertaining to market conditions. ChatGPT also helped in providing auto-document summarization wherein the analyst uploaded 2-3 broker reports commenting on industry projected financials; this assisted him in scanning through these lengthy reports efficiently and gaining significant data at such low time and effort.

Moreover, the use of GenAI did not only limit to the research portion of the pitch, in-fact; it surprisingly extended to the financial or quantitative modelling portion as well. ChatGPT was used to create extreme scenarios and stress test the model under adverse scenarios. This helped to build robustness and made the pitch stronger by accounting for multiple possibilities.

Thus, during the course of these 2 months I realized how generative AI like ChatGPT is so helpful in the day-to-day life of an investment banker. It helps to accelerate tasks and can be used in tandem with the human mind. Investment banking industry is heavily reliant on human mind and touch, since successful client relations are a must; however, tools like these can help relieve them by reducing their burden and increasing the work quality simultaneously.