Those who studied alchemy looked for ways to transform matter. The goal was to transform something less valuable into something more valuable, like gold.

Transforming physical matter is hard, and requires heavy investment in infrastructure, experimentation, labs, and time. Not to mention the whole “turn lead into gold” thing still hasn’t been solved. Applying alchemy to bits of information is faster and cheaper. Transforming words into new words (Chat-GPT), words into images (DALL-E), and audio into words (podcasts, for example), all involve bit-level alchemy. The specifics require careful experimentation, and learning the underlying models is a resource-intensive process. But these digital philosopher’s stones can let just about anyone experiment with information transformation. The question is, can you increase the value of your information by passing it through AI with the right incantation prompt?