AI Search Engine for Jewelry Questions

Jewelry Discussion
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perplexity.ai is a new search engine based upon artificial ‘intelligence’. I asked a few questions, such as how to solder silver, how to solder gold to silver, and it gave reasonable and detailed answers quickly. I have other things that need doing so that’s all the investigating I’m going to do for now, but it would be nice to know if it gets things wrong or not, or how often.

Even if it does an excellent job I don’t see it replacing the personal responses by experienced craftspersons on Orchid, but AI is here and I don’t see it going away. I think we are going to have to learn how best to live with it.

Neil A

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I did a little more exploring with perplexity.ai because of a recent article in MJSA Journal about using AI to design jewelry. Since there have been many news articles about fake AI images of famous people and other abuses it took me a bit by surprise that MJSA was endorsing AI design. What I’ve read about AI ‘engines’ is that they essentially steal copyrighted work from the internet to train the software, with the intention of making money from it either by ads or subscriptions.

So I ‘asked’ perplexity.ai how you can design jewelry with AI and got a detailed answer, but not necessarily a complete picture. For example, it said that Adobe Illustrator has AI design functionality, but no mention was made of source - one’s own images or images copied from others’ work on the internet.

There was also a link to AI designer software which I looked into and got quite a surprise, though it shouldn’t have been from what news articles have been saying.

Here is actual software one can use to generate designs: AI Jewelry Generator: Designing Jewelry with AI from Concept to Creation in 4 Steps | Fotor

If you scroll down to where there is a ‘sapphire’ and ‘diamond’ ring in ‘yellow gold’, at least to my eye it looks like a real and very well done photograph, not a computer rendering. Closer examination seems to show that some prong tips over the ‘sapphire’ are irregular, but only on close study. That’s really an amazing result from just asking an image to be generated using words not drawing tools.

Further down the page shows that the program can also generate fake faces, and presumably could also use faces of real people taken from the internet. And has been.

It is one thing to read about this in news articles, and another to see that basically anyone with an internet connection can do this, and that the functionality is based upon copyrighted work taken without license. I would add, by a tech industry that has habitually done whatever it pleases without regard to laws and basic decency, but that’s editorializing on my part.

For now using this kind of software will only generate an image, and it is still up to a person to actually make the piece, but I think it will not be long before AI software can take an image of a jeweler’s work and convert it to an .stl file for 3D printing and casting - copying.

If MJSA is advocating AI design in its journal then I’m really late to the party and very surprised. Things are happening incredibly quickly. I wonder if this will cause another Arts & Crafts movement the way industrialization did 100 years ago. Or where this is going.

Neil A

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Hi Neil,
interesting! thank you for sharing!
on a related note, i follow alot of interior design/ home design/ diy accounts on instagram, and have seen amazing interiors that are ai…

there is also a person who does ai that does amazing fashions on
cool looking figures…

jonas peterson…here is a link to his account

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julie

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Hi Neil,
Thanks for your very interesting summary of how AI may impact jewelry and, by extension, all the arts. In answer to your query, ‘where is this going?’…I think the answer is, “to court.” We already have an interesting lawsuit with the NYT suing over its articles allegedly being pirated by AI and there could be many more. If the precedents in these cases go the wrong way at the start, many artists and craftspersons could be shortchanged. Given the current political climate, who knows what might happen. I guess we should all keep on top of this and write to our reps as necessary.

My bit of editorializing on AI is these two vignettes. In the first, my Church used AI to generate a set of strategic plans and goals. These looked about like the ones that we Board of Directors members had brainstormed. Interesting and helpful. In the second, a friend of mine who is an African MD living and researching in the US founded a company to utilize AI to read diagnostic medical tests on cancer patients. Expert medical care is in very short supply in most underdeveloped African countries and now, thanks to AI, their medical tests…Xrays, MRI, PET scans and who knows what else, can be read quickly and efficiently by AI. Many lives may be saved, a lot of them those of poor people, because this development will be shared in a humanitarian way. So we’ve got to harness this beast to do good!

Me, I’m very happy with my hammers, files and torch and the centuries old alloys that connect me to a tradition that goes back thousands of years. I’ve even soldered (and will again!) with an alcohol lamp and blowpipe. However, I’m fascinated with niobium, titanium, etc., and 3D printing, etc. I wonder what would happen if AI could make jewelry that marries the style of the Gaskins with that of the Hopis and Navanho? But if that’s done, and AI does it, who gets the royalties and the credit, or are there any?
-royjohn

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Hi,

we must keep in mind the phenomena and potential of AI “hallucinating”…ie: making things up…!…

julie

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My bottom line on this issue is that AI starts with the word “artificial”.
Jo

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We’ll be having AI psychotherapists to treat the hallucinations and other ‘mental’ health problems of AI software next!

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Neil- I had the exact same thought about the Arts and Crafts movement too.
Jo

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Neil,
In regards to AI causing “another Arts & Crafts Movement the way that industrialization did 100 years ago” is concerned… We can only Hope that it does, otherwise, we will Lose even more of the Arts and the Crafts to the “Easy Way” of making objects, both beautiful or otherwise…

Fewer and fewer people seem to want to Take The Time That Is Needed To Learn A Craft and become good at it, most especially when AI, 3-D Printing and all the other Computer-Aided Technologies that are available now, can speed up the process and make even a person with no learned hand-to-eye coordination or Technical Abilities, into a “Designer” overnight…

Hopefully, this massive Technological leap forward will open up some eyes and rekindle the Love and Admiration of the the Handmade Object and the Hard-Won Knowledge and Abilities of “One Person” being able to Make an Object, By Hand, from start to finish… I know that there is some of this “Love and Admiration of the Handmade Object” out there now, there always has been, but it has to continue to Grow and to be continuously Offered Up as a More Traditional Artistic Option, otherwise the Quick, Automated, Technological Way will win, every time - people are just too used to having Everything Available to them, RIGHT NOW!

There is definitely a place for AI, 3D Printing and all the other Computer-Aided Technologies in the Arts and the Crafts, but I don’t believe that it’s “Place” is to Take Over for the Knowledge and Experience of a Trained and Practiced Artist or Craftsperson, because if it’s Allowed to, there will be fewer and fewer of those people in the world for Traditional Artistry and Craftsmanship to survive and without it, what would we really be left with?

I guess we shall have to wait and see how it all plays out, but a new Arts & Crafts Movement would be a very welcome change and a definite aesthetic step in the right direction, at least in my opinion…
Jonathan

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Is anyone here knowledgeable about the priinciples behind AI and machine learning? If they are please speak up, I do know about some of the AI and machine learning techniques used in medical care…but not a whole lot… if there is a generalist who knows about AI/machine learning please share.
This is a hot topic because regulations and laws are 19th and 20th century mindsets… this is a technology for the 22nd century. Widespread bipatisan support for big tech AI regulations has gone nowhere because of petty political infighting…I’m not going there any further. All that I can say about AI is that its data base is enormous, continues to grow exponentially, and it never forgets anything the way humans do. Machine learning refines the algorithyms it uses continuously… it’s a self improving technology. It can be both data based and mathematically based numeric modelling. they complement each other. AI has also been used to “fake” creativity… writing, design and painting are all within the pervue of AI.
There also is a generational gap… hand made, craftsmanship, artistry are being discarded for convenience, disposability and low cost. Intergenerational values are changing. What ever it all holds for the future is anyone’s guess… however, what I do know for certain, especially within my own professional field from which I just recently retired, is that technology is outpacing ethics by warp speed. The potential for abuse is incomprehensible…as is the potential to do good…humans have to be guardians of ethics as well as innovators of technology.

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Steve,

… the principles behind AI

…amount to some good programming, but especially to truly vast processing power by warehouses full of GPUs, and truly vast data storage.

In simplest terms data is represented by long streams of 16-bit numerals, 0-9 and A-F. Speech, images, text, all are just streams of 0-F characters in standardized forms (.wav audio file, .jpg image file…) to a computer program.

AI software recognizes patterns in those streams after being taught by people, and after many many many tries.

A picture of someone’s face is compared against vast numbers of other pictures of faces, which were ‘taught’ to AI - “these are faces, save them”.

Multi-level processing (hence the GPUs) simultaneously find eye patterns, nose patterns, chin patterns, etc. and then checks to see if each recognized pattern also joins together in the form of a full face pattern as the software was trained to ‘know’.

It takes an enormous amount of data to obtain enough patterns to check against, which is why AI outfits vacuumed the internet.

You can get an AI explanation of AI here: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/How-does-AI-BuOuxDcNQ3Ok4xiRIR8LhA?s=u

There is open source software (actual program code) available that anyone can use, including already gathered data sets. For one example see: Top 20 Artificial Intelligence Projects With Source Code [2024] - InterviewBit

In jewelry terms, there are stored images of diamonds, other stones, settings, etc. and programs that can combine them based upon what you specify. The rendering software is as incredible as the pattern recognition software.

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In my former field of medical subspeciality, AI is being used to analyze brainwave patterns. Recording 48 channels for brainwave data over days generates data sets that are too large to be analyzed visually by an expert reader of same. AI is used in several ways… One is to use mathematical techniques (fourrier transfromation) to break down what is essentailly a series of sinusoids, into their component frequencies,generating a power/frequency spectrum, which compresses raw data into a form being far more manageable to a human reader. Another is to obtain brain activity topography by using the Laplacian transformation. Both techniques are used simultaneous. Software is already commercially avaiable for doing this and has been invaluable in helping people like me analyze huge data sets on very ill people… It still has to be read by a human, who can verify what the software shows by toggling back to raw data…What really is both interesting and scary is that in principle, not just in theory, is that AI techniques like this, added to machine learning will be able to someday in the future, read someone’s thoughts. Network connectivity and coherence (senso stricto, mathematically) between hithero undiscovered brain regions involved in cognition are being intensively studied. The implications are scary, if not down right frightenening… Brain reprogramming is at a very primitive level but is still being developed for treatment of certain types of neuropsychiatric conditions with modest success. This is even more scary…all of the algorhythims are being enhanced by deep machine learning. Yes, there is a lot of repetition of cognitive tasks across many subjects to gather sufficient data for computed analysis to work… However, there was a research presentation, using a very simple system, not even brain waves, that a 70 predictive certainty that a certain intentional movement would be carrired out at a certain time was possible to derive from monitoring the movements over time in a volunteer…this was just a trivial example… as people have some consistent and predictable behaviour patterns (eg. waking up at a certain time, brushing teeth, going to bed, etc.)…but the point is that a machine could learn it from just a few inputs and predict the subjects future actions…As usual, technological innovation and research is running warp speed over ethics. reading thoughts and reprogramming them is more than a hypthesis, but an in principle possibility. The only impediment is human complexitity… But AI is ideally suited for complexity, Unfortunately, anyone can see that the abuse potential is staggering… that’s why I said that humans have to be not only guardians but GOOD guardians of ethics as much as the technology. Currently brain reprogramming is being used for the good…a hundred years or even two hundred years from now will tell us whether it still be used for the good or whether it’s applications have been seized by the few for self serving purposes.that leave everyone else in happy ignorance of how poor their quality of life has sunken. As technolgoy advances at an exponential rate, a dystopian future could arrive sooner than later…Intense propaganda has nothing to compare with developing the ability to actually read and control thoughts. I don’t want to scare anyone just for the sake of scaring people… but this is real… although completely retired now, I will still be going to the major medical conferences in my former subspecialty to follow the on going reserach and development… Sooner or later, sooner being preferable, both me and my colleagues will need to raise our voices about ethics. I don’t want to be an alarmist. But the pace of technological innovation advances exponentially.

Facial recognition, voice specturm recognition, for specifiic biometric security locks, AI transciption into words for the hard of hearing, all have been successfully used for good purpoes. On the other hand, facial recognition, voice print identification and monitoring of conversations are already being done in totalitarian regimes… China has ambitions to become an AI leader because the huge mass of data collected on monitoring citizens has been unmanageable. These kinds of applications are already in use now. They make the stealing of designs and copywritten material, and even “fake” term papers pale by comparison… The future is already here…

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thanks for your reply, see mine too…