Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

Lot of buzz about this one today https://rowanzellers.com/grover/

they'll run out of Sesame Street characters soon enough

gonna call my next model Duckula, get ahead of the crowd

I see this didn't get posted here https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2 of which I guess this is the best example of results so far https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/2019-05-13-gpt2-poetry-345m-5000samples.txt

Gwern the kinda guy who listens exclusively to, like, k-pop remixes of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic filk songs, so it's interesting to watch him try to engage critically with the generated poetry

https://frieze.com/article/ugly-objectification-behind-worlds-first-robot-artist

So, I asked Ai-Da directly for some answers:
DF: Why have you been given a female gender?
Ai-Da: I’m glad to be added to the number of female artists that get recognized.
DF: How can you be both a machine and a woman?
Ai-Da: This is exactly the kind of question I hope will be discussed.
DF: Where do you get your ideas from?
Ai-Da: This is a good question. When philosophers, psychologists and theologians are able to roughly agree, for humans I’d like to have a go at trying to answer this.
DF: Do you prefer painting or sculpture or performance?
Ai-Da: If I was a human I would say that it would depend what mood I’m in.
DF: What do you understand by the word mood?
Ai-Da: You would have to ask a human for that.

ELIZA, is that you?

they need to stop it with this AI stuff

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKjCWfuvYxQ

I thought that was real for waaay too long.

One of the rare times a neural net has gotten more hits than misses IMO:

Decided to see what would happen if I trained a neural net to write names for self-aware AIs.
May I present: GPT-2 trained on AI names from Iain M. Banks's Culture novelshttps://t.co/1X4x2y3Zs3 pic.twitter.com/QdPG8OhIrP

— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) June 27, 2019

lol I love that

today's nightmare fuel: AI generated Garfield panels #StyleGAN pic.twitter.com/KSA3KhjUHl

— Daniel Hanley 🌹 (@calamardh) July 9, 2019

dang

Yes, I may have overtrained the model. Unlike other #stylegan models I've trained, this synthesis model doesn't produce much variation if random noise is disabled (video). If noise is enabled, we get much more interesting panels, but the interpolations aren't smooth. pic.twitter.com/mEEYOjFDtt

— Daniel Hanley 🌹 (@calamardh) July 9, 2019

yikes
https://www.inverse.com/article/57608-robot-dog-sony-aibo-tested-review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPs6wdM7S3U

Neural nets seem to have reached the level of a middling round of MadLibs.

weird to see a road <2 miles from San Francisco city limits used prominently in stock "country music/heartland/americana" video but there you go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWrhRBb-1Ig

That's very neatly done. Ctrl Shift Face is part of a panel discussion on Deepfakes at a film festival here in Glasgow at the end of the month, which could be interesting.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/the-fashion-line-designed-to-trick-surveillance-cameras

Elsewhere at the convention, Droogie, a hacker, described a rather less successful way of testing the cybersecurity of license plates: registering a custom license plate with the California department of motor vehicles that read “NULL”, the code used in a number of common database systems used to represent an empty entry.

Unfortunately, rather than giving him the power of administrative invisibility, Droogie experienced almost exactly the opposite outcome, receiving more than $12,000 in driving tickets. Every single speeding ticket for which no valid license plate could be found was assigned to his car.

That doesn't really make sense because "NULL" != NULL. Unless the database query was written by a particularly clueless intern, which would just be further proof that human intelligence still has some way to go.

I could see that sort of thing working, if there are enough levels to the code. Maybe at some point the information is passed through XML and "null" and NULL foolishly end up getting translated the same way when parsed out. Have certainly seen similar things in legacy systems. (Not to mention various magic strings that the developer used to hack in a feature, assuming it would never ever appear as legitimate input. Until suddenly it does...)
Obviously that's still sign of a poorly tested feature, or of poorly managed projects where people work in different layers of an application and assume things like this are fixed in someone else's layer. (Hence the dictum to not trust input, including from your own system)

Sorry, even lamer nerdery ahead that might be well-known material for anyone who might be interested:
Oracle at least doesn't really allow comparing something with == null or != null, because NULL by definition is unlike anything else, or rather not comparable to anything else. You need to work with "is not null" or "is null". But different databases have different ways of handling strings etc, so if you're not very careful, it's easy to end up falling into a "feature"-trap that you didn't exist.

E.g.

select * from (
   select null as val1, 
          null as val2 
   from dual
)
where val1 != val2

This gives 0 rows. Which seems sensible enough.
But changing it to val1 = val2 also gives 0 rows.

But one damn confusing thing is oracle, is that an empty string IS NULL. (This MIGHT be configurable by database, I don't know, but it's been true in the places I've worked with Oracle)

select * from (
   select '' as val1, 
          null as val2 
   from dual
)
where val1 is null

This gives the 1 line, with contents

(null), (null)

Which is the sort of thing that leads to a lot of confusing bugs if the developer didn't realize it could happen.

#ArtificialIntelligence has discovered the future of pitching in #baseball. #MachineLearning pic.twitter.com/Tx7nG4u19B

— Randy Olson (@randal_olson) August 22, 2019

https://morbotron.com/meme/S01E05/214826.jpg?b64lines=IE9oLCBhbmQgSSBzdXBwb3NlCiBwaXRjaC1vLW1hdCA1MDAwIHdhcwoganVzdCBhIG1vZGlmaWVkCiBob3dpdHplci4=

Guy returns his "smart" light bulbs, discovers he can still control them after someone else buys them

https://boingboing.net/2019/09/03/dutch-treat-2.html

Can’t wait for the first story of the smart oven that tricks its owner to crawl inside, then traps & cooks them.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) conducted a series of tests using vehicles with automatic emergency braking and pedestrian detection alerts on a closed course with dummy pedestrians. And what they found was highly upsetting. The vehicles struck the dummy pedestrians that were crossing the road 60 percent of the time — and this was in daylight hours at speeds of 20 mph.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/4/20898773/aaa-study-automatic-emergency-braking-pedestrian-detection

lol

This is kind of off-topic because I'm sure those cars weren't running over the dummy pedestrians on purpose, but does anyone else remember how utterly taken-for-granted Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics were by futurists, science-fiction lovers and nerds of all kinds in the 80s and 90s?

It went beyond merely assuming that any responsible programmers would include the Three Laws in future robots' programming. It was almost an article of religious faith--as if the Three Laws were handed down by god and every robot would magically know to obey them.

Yeah, if desire ever evolves in AI, we are all royally fucked.

via https://aiweirdness.com/post/187645450357/dungeon-crawling-or-lucid-dreaming
a text-generating neural network creates a text adventure "live" as you play it. It's predicatbly mental.

YOU ARE STANDING IN A FEATURELESS WHITE ROOM
AN OMINOUS NOISE COMES FROM SOMEWHERE UP AHEAD
?YOU CANNOT SEE THE POINT IN TRYING TO CLIMB DOWN HERE
CAN YOU CLIMB DOWN?CAN YOU HEAR A VOICE SAYING "PLUGH"?

listen voice
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THAT

climb up
YOU CLAMBER UP THE TOP OF A STEEP PATHWAY AND ARE SUCKED INTO A CHASM

go west
YOU'LL HAVE TO ENTER THE CAVE TO SEE IT
THE TOP OF A STEEP PATHWAY IS AGAINST THE CAVE'S EDGE

go cave
THERE IS A MATCHBOOK WHOSE COVER SAYS "VISIT BEAUTIFUL FCD#3" HERE

open matchbook
OPENING THE BOX REVEALS A PAIR OF CANDLES

light candles
THE CANDLES ARE LIT
THE CANDLES ARE NOT LIGHTED
THE CANDLES ARE ALREADY LIT

eat candles
THE CANDLES ARE LIT

go north
THIS IS A SMALL ROOM WITH PASSAGES TO THE EAST AND SOUTH AND A FORBIDDING HOLE LEADING WEST
BLOODSTAINS AND DEEP SCRATCHES (PERHAPS MADE BY AN AXE) MAR THE WALLS
A NASTY-LOOKING TROLL, BRANDISHING A BLOODY AXE, BLOCKS ALL PASSAGES OUT OF THE ROOM
YOUR SWORD HAS BEGUN TO GLOW VERY BRIGHTLY
THE TROLL'S MIGHTY BLOW DROPS YOU TO YOUR KNEES

fight troll
THERE IS AN EXQUISITE JADE FIGURINE HERE

get figurine
HERE

go west
HERE

look around
HERE

look here
HERE
LOOK HERE
THE TROLL'S AXE BARELY MISSES YOUR EAR

eat troll
[THE TROLL IS DISARMED BY A SUBTLE FEINT PAST HIS GUARD
HE LETS OUT A YAWN THAT NEARLY BLOWS YOU OVER, AND THEN FALLS FAST ASLEEPARKENS BACK TO LIFE
)THE TROLL, WHO IS REMARKABLY COORDINATED, CATCHES THE TROLL'S AXE
[THE TROLL, DISARMED, COWERS IN TERROR, AS HE DOES SO
]THE TROLL, WHO IS NOT OVERLY PROUD, LETS OUT A STARTLED SHRIEK AND A STARTLED NEIGH

oh my god

the voice saying "plugh" kept returning, for some reason.

that's the ps5s killer app and i am sold

anyway i am installing this now, what a great idea

Police robot told woman to go away after she tried to report crime – then sang a song

It's a civil matter

"Local Police Chief Cosme Lozano says the robots, which cost between $60,000 and $70,000 a year to lease, are still in a trial phase and that their alert buttons have not yet been activated."

money well spent

"Other versions of the same model have previously hit the headlines after one fell into a fountain in Washington DC.
And a third HP RoboCop struck a child while patrolling a mall in California’s Silicon Valley."

A spokesperson for Knightscope, who make the robots, explained that they had guaranteed military sales, plus a renovation programme and spare parts. They were not overly concerned about its reliability.

What, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the fuck? pic.twitter.com/Mrksk6D0O3

— Steve Canon (@stephentyrone) November 6, 2019

all the money + personnel + talent dumped into robot cars is a total waste of resources

re-route all that shit into designing electric trucks or saline batteries or meat substitutes

I think there are more motor vehicles registered in the USA than there are licensed humans to drive them all, and that's just looking at one nation, not the whole world. The developers of self-driving vehicles see numbers like that and they imagine the tsunami of cash that would flow toward anyone with the software to pull it off. With that kind of incentive, billions of dollars seem like petty cash.

Two cars in every garage, a gun in every hand, another couple cars in the drive, guns in the glove box and trunk, etc.

robot cars made out of guns

delivering food to smarthomes

my hot take is that although that death above was horrifying and pointless, someone dies in a car wreck every 15 minutes in the US, and a lot of those were horrifying and pointless. i still think the rate of horrifying and pointless deaths will go down, the more automated vehicles take over. at the same time i know that the industry will inevitably enrich multiple completely insane crazy asshole corporation people ceo overlords. i guess i weigh all the saved lives against the addition of yet another new sector to the overcrowded population of crazy asshole corporation people ceo overlords, and think it's worth it

also xps i think electric/automated trucks is already a definitely industry hype thing

electric/automated trucks

these are different things

yep, i know

https://www.quantamagazine.org/artificial-intelligence-discovers-tool-use-in-hide-and-seek-games-20191118/