Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

There's a trend on Chinese social media where they imitate AI videos and it's beautiful pic.twitter.com/wdzaOBn0wd

— Orikron 🇵🇹 (@orikron) August 15, 2024

Found another pic.twitter.com/0CKY9miCyU

— RiceBro 🇹🇼 (@Ricefarmingguy) August 15, 2024

lol

Those are amazing

lmao they are so spot on

https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1etko9h/family_poisoned_after_using_aigenerated_mushroom/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

AI mushroom identification book puts family in the hospital

Yes, in a way, learning to craft the correct prompt is the new transferrable skill

phew pic.twitter.com/8VtvfPnhCX

— Zach Weinersmith (@ZachWeiner) August 13, 2024

...as long as you can create a quirky atmosphere, your job is safe

We’re never going there. Creativity is made, not generated.
You can read more at https://t.co/9Fgh460KVu ✨ #procreate #noaiart pic.twitter.com/AnLVPgWzl3

— Procreate (@Procreate) August 18, 2024

I recognize their CEO is describing a hypothetical feature that generates an image from a natural language prompt but the idea of engineers trying to write an image editor without interpolation is amusing.

...But it’s also utterly arbitrary. The arbitrariness is what makes it bad. It’s also what makes the vast majority of art generated by AI bad.

A lot of life (maybe all of it) really is pointless and arbitrary. But humans (I will venture to say) developed art to suggest the ways in which it might not be. Art — like love, like religion — is a human invention. Its deepest purpose is to subdue death and contain the chaos, waywardness and brutal indifference of the world around us. (If you’re wondering whether beauty has a role, of course it does. That’s what beauty is — a container of chaos, alloyed to a love of life.)

It’s true that some very important 20th century artists (Marcel Duchamp, for instance) deliberately embraced chance and randomness in ways that could be said to anticipate the arbitrariness of AI. But in Duchamp’s case, that’s because he had just seen the world fall apart. As an artist, he was drawn to the idea that life had meaning and purpose. But as a human — as a witness to reality — he felt compelled to acknowledge the almost overwhelming evidence that it didn’t.

AI-generated art isn’t disturbed or even mildly ruffled by this dynamic. It isn’t exercised by the idea that life might or might not have meaning, because it isn’t human. Therefore it can’t care. The algorithms create an illusion of meaning (“Oh, wow, it’s almost as if it knows what I want!”). But its deeper premise is randomness, pointlessness, vacancy. Nothing fundamentally matters to an algorithm.

Arsham’s sculpture of Chan has a special, 3D-printed, gorgeously fabricated look. If you’re into technique (how did he do that?) and finish, it’s super impressive. But it’s also arbitrary, just like the feature on Meta that allows Zuckerberg to imagine himself as “a streetwear designer in LA.”

And so the question is: Is this what most sculpture, or indeed most art, will look like in the future? Given the endless possibilities of AI, is this where we’re all headed?

It’s an amazing thought, on the one hand: You just have to imagine something and AI will (more or less) give it to you.

But if absolutely anything is possible, how amazing, or funny, or even just briefly cool will AI-generated views of the world continue to seem? What will happen when the large language models begin to feed on their own output? Will the results get more interesting, because they’re weirder, or less, because they’re even less human?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/art/2024/08/20/priscilla-chan-statue-mark-zuckerberg-daniel-arsham/
(gift link: https://wapo.st/4dLu7V8)

click on the link to get a bonus ronaldo statue image

jfc

VERA was the “world’s only veterinary engagement and relationship agent.” If your pet fell ill you could chat with VERA, and she would tell you if a vet trip was necessary.

“Let’s consider your standard diarrhea exercise,” said the CEO. His voice was serene, gentle, trustworthy. And yet below that outer shell of self-possession, I detected a suppressed, slow-burning anger. He seemed aggrieved by what he called pet parents, a fundamentally irrational demographic that was incapable of much besides crowding the vet offices.

A woman in the audience asked if VERA followed up to make sure her diagnosis had been right.

The CEO leaned an elbow on the podium. “I’ll tell you a story,” he said.

A woman wrote to VERA about her elderly dog, who was having diarrhea.

“Your dog is at the end of his life,” said VERA. “I recommend euthanasia.”

The woman was beside herself. She told VERA she wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Her dog was her only companion.

VERA knew the woman’s location. She sent a list of nearby clinics that could get the job done. Still, the woman was unconvinced. Euthanasia was so expensive. She’d never be able to afford it. VERA sent another list, this time of nearby shelters. “If you relinquish your dog to a shelter, they will euthanize him at no cost,” she said.

The woman did not respond. But some days later she sent VERA a long and effusive message. She had taken VERA’s advice and euthanized her dog. She wanted to thank VERA for the support during the most difficult moment of her life.

The CEO regarded us with satisfaction for his chatbot’s work: that, through a series of escalating tactics, it had convinced a woman to end her dog’s life, though she hadn’t wanted to at all. “The point of this story is that the woman forgot she was talking to a bot,” he said. “The experience was so human.”

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/

It's quite something the way someone on the Megalopolis marketing team clearly used ChatGPT to "research" disparaging contemporary quotes about The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Dracula to show how you shouldn't listen to critics, quotes which turned out to be fabricated and result in the trailer being pulled. "We screwed up".

lol “we screwed up” is a pretty euphemistic way of putting it when you were deliberately trying to deceive folks… it’s not like you just forgot to press a button or something

Oh I doubt it was deliberate

I mean, there were some people who didn't like these films so probably that half-remembered fact led to someone cluelessly using ChatGPT to "find" the quotes.

the thing Zach quoted reminded me of an article I read about AI maybe a decade ago, essentially saying that humans and AI could never really mesh because it's fundamentally such a different type of intelligence. like humans can identify with mammals, dogs for instance have very humanlike emotions sometimes, but spiders and lizards do not, hence why people are fine squashing the bugs in their house but wouldn't kill a squirrel that got inside. anyway broader point is that this was all destined to get really weird as AI starts to mimic human thought processes, though obviously it can't reproduce them. it does unnerve me a little when I toy around with ChatGPT, which usually adopts a cheerful tone, but sometimes will just start scolding you (obviously because you're trying to make it do something it's not supposed to do), you feel like it's actually mad at you, but the extent that it 'remembers' is hard to figure out - sometimes it relents after a few questions and gives you what you want anyway. it's really strange.

New AI lawsuit filed today:

A group of voice actors sued Eleven Labs, accusing the text-to-speech service of training its AI voice models using the actors' audiobook recordings. pic.twitter.com/LLki2INTDt

— Rob Freund (@RobertFreundLaw) August 30, 2024

I suspect likeness/publicity right lawsuits of that sort will have more legs than stuff solely based on copyright.

pic.twitter.com/7obVuvMi3v

— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) September 2, 2024

Yesterday, a Chinese company released an alarmingly advanced text-to-video AI:

Minimax.

It's like a Hollywood studio in your pocket.

10 mind-bending examples (plus how to access it for free): pic.twitter.com/m6fJrNCLQd

— The AI Solopreneur (@aisolopreneur) September 2, 2024

Lol

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-09-03/altman-infrastructure-plan-aims-to-spend-tens-of-billions-in-us

i'm old enough to remember when sam altman wanted to spend a few trillion dollars on AI

now it's just 'tens of billions'

well this looks fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uP7DHdc9Tk

One for the Literary Clusterfucks thread, too.

the deep fakin's gettin deep fakier

https://loopyavatar.github.io

this is all such a scam

I live in an anti-AI world, but I really don't think anyone buys that NaNoWriMo nonsense

didn't watch the video or read any posts, just stopping by to say this is all complete bullshit and a scam

oh yeah I didn't watch any videos either, just heard about it* elsewhere

*it = the claim that opposing the use of genAI in creative writing is classist and ableist

*it = the claim that opposing the use of genAI in creative writing is classist and ableist

― rob

probably not... it just ticks me off when people blatantly use social justice language to defend their poor behavior.

absolutely. the claim is also insulting to innumerable poor, working class, and/or disabled writers who do not use genAI to write and whose work has been exploited to build genAI

I mean that’s just silly. Some situations are designed to test someone’s ability at something. Those are necessarily going to be “ableist” on some level. It’s also ableist to not let people pay someone else to write a paper for them.

more intriguing is the fact that the org is now sponsored by several genAI software companies.

i mean nanowrimo has always seemed absurd and stupid to me, at least, but the idea of a non-profit basically going “hey this AI stuff is great and if you disagree you are racist and ableist” while they’re being sponsored by AI companies is…uh…. pretty rich

not too impressive

https://www.techradar.com/pro/generative-ai-triples-the-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-data-centers

I uninstalled copilot a while ago. I don't use chatgpt or image/music generation for lols or otherwise any more. (In other words I don't even own a AI!)

I sat in on a corporate focus group to evaluate a prototype for a Gen-AI work assistant from our ERP provider (starts with an S and ends with a P and somewhere in the middle there’s an A).

The last question was something like “How would you describe this tool in one sentence to a coworker?” and my answer was something like “Spyware that tries - and fails - to know something significant about your job.”

sounds about right for that company

soraclep

starpoop

Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung sounds both more ridiculous and mundane tbh

I got rid of my GPT “premium” subscription fwiw. Just wasn’t all that useful and the 5-10% of the time that it was unreliable meant the other 90-95% of the time was just a false sense of security.

Gross. LEAVE OLD PHOTOS ALONE

Man, I was so excited about the publication of “LIFE: Hollywood” by Taschen, because I consider the LIFE photo archives to be a priceless historical resource. So it’s a bummer to see how many of the photos in these books have been enhanced or even partially fabricated using AI.

— Sarah McGonagall (@gothspiderbitch) September 12, 2024

wtf

Given the flood of photorealistic AI-generated images washing over social media networks like X and Facebook these days, we're seemingly entering a new age of media skepticism: the era of what I'm calling "deep doubt." While questioning the authenticity of digital content stretches back decades—and analog media long before that—easy access to tools that generate convincing fake content has led to a new wave of liars using AI-generated scenes to deny real documentary evidence. Along the way, people's existing skepticism toward online content from strangers may be reaching new heights.

Deep doubt is skepticism of real media that stems from the existence of generative AI. This manifests as broad public skepticism toward the veracity of media artifacts, which in turn leads to a notable consequence: People can now more credibly claim that real events did not happen and suggest that documentary evidence was fabricated using AI tools.

The concept behind "deep doubt" isn't new, but its real-world impact is becoming increasingly apparent. Since the term "deepfake" first surfaced in 2017, we've seen a rapid evolution in AI-generated media capabilities. This has led to recent examples of deep doubt in action, such as conspiracy theorists claiming that President Joe Biden has been replaced by an AI-powered hologram and former President Donald Trump's baseless accusation in August that Vice President Kamala Harris used AI to fake crowd sizes at her rallies. And on Friday, Trump cried "AI" again at a photo of him with E. Jean Carroll, a writer who successfully sued him for sexual assault, that contradicts his claim of never having met her.

Legal scholars Danielle K. Citron and Robert Chesney foresaw this trend years ago, coining the term "liar's dividend" in 2019 to describe the consequence of deep doubt: deepfakes being weaponized by liars to discredit authentic evidence. But whereas deep doubt was once a hypothetical academic concept, it is now our reality.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/due-to-ai-fakes-the-deep-doubt-era-is-here/

my elderly father, who uses pictures of plants he finds on facebook in his business newsletter, has already learned to spot ai generated photos

and its not like plants have obvious defects like with peoples fingers the pictures just have that uncanny high contrast burnished AI sheen, think he also looks to see if the facebook accounts seem legit or not

that's cool. my father believed all the worst shit he could ever find, as long as it confirmed his opinion. i'm not like him, but there are a lot of hims out there

i should ask him how he got hip to it maybe he included a fake in a newsletter and someone told him about it, its a little different in a professional context

I like the idea of genuine content mimicking the uncanniness of fake content:

Some Chinese dudes imitating AI videos lol this is next level pic.twitter.com/LqB3O327Kr

— GioM (@theGioM) August 15, 2024

Paul F Tompkins and Brett Morris were both talking about the ABBA holographic experience they went to see in London recently, sounds fucking nuts.