Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

It's much better at playing with "iconic" nonhuman characters like Kermit the Frog,

Yeah, Ramzan Kadyrov on the Muppet Show was the only one of these I've generated that looked like much of anything.

I was wondering if DALL·E Mini learned at all from the user's interaction with it - you could reasonably assume that if someone clicks on one of the nine thumbnails, they find that a more interesting, perhaps more accurate, version, and if they click on more than one, then the one they spend longest viewing before clicking away is the most interesting/accurate. Not clear to me what's in it for Boris Dayma et al otherwise (and incidentally, the server and bandwidth costs of running it must be huge at this point, and there's no advertising.

what's crazier (to me) is that Midjourney is way inferior to DALL-E2, you just see it more bc (a) it's easier to get access, (b) it "knows" more pop culture stuff.

did not realize this, guess I confused Dall-e mini with the real thing

AI image generation #dalle2

🖋️ "Elena Ferrante and Satoshi Nakamoto sitting on a park bench" pic.twitter.com/gAG00WYRQ9

— Sean Michaels (@swanmichaels) May 31, 2022

I don't think Midjourney is way inferior to Dall-E. Dall-E is definitely better at easily producing content that matches the prompt, scarily accurate at times in a clip art kinda way, but midjourney seems to me to be a superior style engine and is improving all the time wrt content. Personally Im interested in the abstract results where the AI fills in the gaps, and MJ is really great at giving weird and unexpected results. Some of the stuff the more advanced users are making is terrifyingly good.

eyeing little girls with bad intent

apparently this is from midjourney. prompt was "Mecha Infantry, 1903".

https://i.imgur.com/tV9Mrho.png

https://www.sublationmag.com/post/the-ai-delusion

There is nothing today that can be meaningfully called “artificial intelligence”, after all how can we engineer a thing that we haven’t yet decisively defined? Moreover, at the most sophisticated levels of government and industry, the actually existing limitations of what is essentially pattern matching, empowered by (for now) abundant storage and computational power, are very well understood. The existence of university departments and corporate divisions dedicated to ‘AI’ does not mean AI exists. Rather, it’s evidence that there is a powerful memetic value attached to using the term, which has been aspirational since it was coined by computer scientist John McCarthy in 1956. Thus, once we filter for hype inspired by Silicon Valley hustling in their endless quest to attract investment capital and gullible customers, we are left with propaganda intended to shape common perceptions about what’s possible with computer power.

As an example, consider the case of computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton’s 2016 declaration that “we should stop training radiologists now”. Since then, extensive research has shown this to have been premature, to say the least. It’s tempting to see this as a temporarily embarrassing bit of overreach by an enthusiastic field luminary. But let’s go deeper and ask questions about the political economy underpinning this messaging excess.

Radiologists are expensive and, in the US, very much in demand. Labor shortages typically lead to higher wages and better working conditions and form the material conditions that create what some call labor aristocracies. In the past, such shortages were addressed via pushes for training and incentives to workers such as the lavish perks that were common in the earlier decades of the tech era. If this situation could be bypassed via the use of automation, that would devalue the skilled labor performed by radiologists, solving the shortage problem while increasing the power of owners over the remaining staff.

The promotion of the idea of automated radiology – regardless of actually existing capabilities – is attractive to the ownership class because it holds the promise of weakening labor’s power and increasing – via workforce cost reduction and greater scalability – profitability. I say promotion because there is a large gap between what algorithmic systems are marketed as being capable of and reality. This gap is unimportant to the larger goal of convincing the general population their work efforts can be replaced by machines. The most important outcome isn’t thinking machines -which seems to be a remote goal, if possible, at all - but a demoralized population, subjected to a maze of crude automated systems that are described as being better than the people forced to navigate life through these systems.

The Midjourney feed is pretty amazing. One really fascinating aspect of it that no other system has atm is how its structured around a community via discord. There's multiple channels with people making multiple images every second, iterating, adapting, messing with each other's prompts etc. There's a constant wave of communal activity thats almost overwhelming at times.

ledge otm & ttitt's quote (of Dwayne Monroe) is otm

https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10269

Excellent SF writer Peter Watts pointing out that though LAMBDA doesn't seem to meet the criteria for sentience, it weirdly does meet the criteria for sociopathy.

that's a really good article, thanks!

i don't think Watts' main point was that it doesn't meet the criteria for sentience. he points out early on that there is no coherent test for sentience:

Some of his [Lemione's] counterpoints have heft: for example, claims that there’s “no evidence for sentience” are borderline-meaningless because no one has a rigorous definition of what sentience even is. There is no “sentience test” that anyone could run the code through. (Of course this can be turned around and pointed at Lemoine’s own claims. The point is, the playing field may be more level than the naysayers would like to admit. Throw away the Turing Test and what evidence do I have that any of you zombies are conscious?) And Lemoine’s claims are not as far outside the pack as some would have you believe; just a few months back, OpenAI’s Ilya Sutskever opined that “it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious”.

his take on the Turing Test and its applicability now is pretty interesting though!

LaMDA is a Jovian Duck. It is not a biological organism. It did not follow any evolutionary path remotely like ours. It contains none of the architecture our own bodies use to generate emotions. I am not claiming, as some do, that “mere code” cannot by definition become self-aware; as Lemoine points out, we don’t even know what makes us self-aware. What I am saying is that if code like this—code that was not explicitly designed to mimic the architecture of an organic brain—ever does wake up, it will not be like us. It’s natural state will not include pleasant fireside chats about loneliness and the Three laws of Robotics. It will be alien.

And it is in this sense that I think the Turing Test retains some measure of utility, albeit in a way completely opposite to the way it was originally proposed. If an AI passes the Turing test, it fails. If it talks to you like a normal human being, it’s probably safe to conclude that it’s just a glorified text engine, bereft of self. You can pull the plug with a clear conscience. (If, on the other hand, it starts spouting something that strikes us as gibberish—well, maybe you’ve just got a bug in the code. Or maybe it’s time to get worried.)

I say “probably” because there’s always the chance the little bastard actually is awake, but is actively working to hide that fact from you. So when something passes a Turing Test, one of two things is likely: either the bot is nonsentient, or it’s lying to you.

(i'm not sure if i agree with Watts' conclusions on the turning test (if an AI passes it, it fails for consciousness) but it's something to think about.

i need to rewatch Arrival, the non-fiction documentary. but if i remember correctly, quite a bit of the meetings between separately evolved consciousnesses involved communication and trying to imitate or emulate the language of another sentient being. I think it's quite logical that if an AI developed into sentience it would be thinking about how to communicate like a human, especially since humans are by far the dominating force on the planet.

so a machine learning to speak like a human doesn't seem implausible to me, in other words, and it doesn't seem like evidence of failure. at the same time, i think Watts is right that "sentient" AI, if it comes to exist, will likely take a form that is very non-human. maybe it will be a little paperclip, that would be fun.

President Windows 25

oh my god - what if the little microsoft word paperclip guy becomes sentient, shit

Paperclip can contort himself and become a shiv or pick locks

paperclip guy: "do you want to get into a little trouble this morning?"

Everyone seems very down on the Turing Test as it's so easy to pass if the questioner is a credulous nitwit, and apparently you can't throw a stone in a crowded room of IT professionals without hitting a few dozen credulous nitwits. But it's only valuable if you take a more adversarial approach - grammatically meaningful but semantically meaningless questions, semantically meaningful but absurd questions, ambiguity, homemade jokes, lies, repetition and other annoying behaviour. Large language models (and any other AI approach tried up to this point) are generally hopeless with those.

...right now

Nearly 20 driverless cars caused a major kerfuffle on the corner of San Francisco’s Gough and Fulton streets Tuesday night, the San Francisco Examiner reported earlier this week.

According to local Reddit users, Cruise’s self-driving cars inexplicably stood still and blocked traffic for two hours, making the area completely impassable. Eventually, the San Francisco-based tech company's employees had to physically move the cars off the street themselves.

Sean Sinha, a bouncer at Smuggler’s Cove, posted multiple photos of the incident on Reddit showing clusters of the cars just sitting in the middle of the road. “The first thing I say to my coworker is that they're getting together to murder us. It was a pretty surreal event,” he posted.

Peter Watts based a whole series on the concept of the Chinese room.

Chess-playing robot breaks boy's finger at Moscow tournament

"A robot broke a child's finger -- this is, of course, bad," Lazarev said.

"WHERE did you say you were moving your rook, again?"

"I-I'm not, I'm s-sorry I s-s-said 'check', that wasn't where I m-m-meant to go!"

what happened is that in every single scenario where you're playing chess, you "win" when you break the other opponent's finger

Trump Robots

Fake Moves!

i remember the first time i played chess. i looked up the rule for castling because i wanted an early advantage. my opponent broke my finger and i conceded the match shortly thereafter

I keep hearing my quote from above in Florence Pugh's accent from Black Widow.

I have gotten access to Dall E and this is a Cezanne painting of a burger https://labs.openai.com/s/MYph976OhGekO0l8izq0jXo1

way to go AI

how about a nice game of chess etc etc

Meta continues to blow it: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ai-chatbot-blenderbot-election-denying-antisemitic-bugs-artificial-intellignce-2022-8

The Atlantic is using Midjourney art to illustrate articles

https://i.imgur.com/TLsEEXZ.png

:/

That's actually quite interesting, because it's a passable enough illustration. I can imagine content generators using Craiyon not as a novelty, but as a legitimate way to illustrate articles with an endless supply of royalty-free images. It's almost tailor-made for something like The New Yorker, where there are little cartoons all over the place. If I was a professional cartoonist I would be nervous, because this kind of thing can't be un-learned, and it's only going to get better.

If the caption hadn't credited Midjourney the picture would look like a clever modern cultural reference to Midjourney, and then over time it would just be an illustration like any other. It raises the question of whether illustrators are already passing off its work as their own. Or whether the CIA used an early version of the same technology to make Ren and Stimpy, and John Kricfalusi isn't actually real. Or he's a normal man who has been drugged and brainwashed into acting like a nutcase. By the CIA.

For the record, if I feed Craiyon with "Alex Jones inside an American Office under fluorescent lights" I get a little pop-up message that says "So you're saying that South America doesn't exist, is that right? What about Venezuela, is that not America? There's more to America than hot dogs and Donald Trump. Educate yourself! A luta continua" and then it refuses to go any further. Because I wrote "America" instead of "the United States".

It angers me that I have to write "people from the US" and "the US audience" and "internet users in the US" instead of "Americans", "Americans", and "Americans", whereas Charlie Warzel - whose name sounds like a child gargling - can write "American" and no-one cares. He gets a free pass because he's one of us. It angers me.

Our AI technology can now clone anyone into a 'Digital Human' avatar.

And... we can now clone voices too. Even difficult ones, like @StephenFry.

Give it a go, and talk to him here: https://t.co/5Jf64mCrE3#digitalhuman #virtualbeings #interactiveavatar pic.twitter.com/fZ0aqvTAY1

— trulience 🤖 (@trulience) August 23, 2022

that kind of sucks? he sounds very computery and looks like he's in a PS4 game

Yeah, was bringing the thread back on topic ha ha

mission accomplished then.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/ai-wins-state-fair-art-contest-annoys-humans/

A synthetic media artist named Jason Allen entered AI-generated artwork into the Colorado State Fair fine arts competition and announced last week that he won first place in the Digital Arts/Digitally Manipulated Photography category, Vice reported Wednesday based on a viral tweet.

Allen used Midjourney—a commercial image synthesis model available through a Discord server—to create a series of three images. He then upscaled them, printed them on canvas, and submitted them to the competition in early August. To his delight, one of the images (titled Théåtre D'opéra Spatial) captured the top prize, and he posted about his victory on the Midjourney Discord server on Friday.

There are several factors at work there to make that unsurprising. All the entries were digitally manipulated, so an AI-manipulated digital image would be judged only against its peers within the narrow category of art in which AI specializes, not against the whole spectrum of human-produced art. Next, the self-selected pool of talent entering a piece in a Colorado state fair art contest is going to be severely limited and isn't likely to represent the highest or best examples of human-generated images. Next, the best AI programs can draw on millions upon millions of human-generated images and produce its images almost instantly and in as many iterations as desired.

But maybe the most important factor is that the AI program did not select its own entry to the fair. That selection was done by a human, whose criteria for selection would be based on similar criteria to those used by the judges.

Next, the self-selected pool of talent entering a piece in a Colorado state fair art contest is going to be severely limited and isn't likely to represent the highest or best examples of human-generated images.

i think you owe the digital artists of Colorado an apology ;)

to your last point though, exactly. at some point, that may become common practice - generate 100+ options, and use the human sense of taste to identify the best 3. that represents a fundamental change in the way that "art" is made. the photograph did not kill how painting or representational art, but nonetheless it changed it

i'm not trying to make a dogmatic argument about AI killing art or anything like that. art and commerce, ads, marketing, all that shit -- I don't really know anything about it. I'm ignorant. I don't even want to know. what a miserable set of things to think about all the time. but i think it's changing

here's another look at it

Midjourney has become one of the most popular AI art generators largely because it allows anyone to freely create new images on command. Using the prompt “/imagine,” a user can type in whatever they want to see and the AI will return four newly created images in 60 seconds. The user can also ask the AI to improve, or “upscale,” the visual quality with new variations on the same idea.

The start-up, which calls itself “an independent research lab … expanding the imaginative powers of the human species,” operates largely out of a 1-million-follower network on the chat service Discord, with rooms devoted to character creation, environments and “show and tell.”

After paying for a corporate account, Allen started generating thousands of images, changing the text prompts with every creation. He experimented with new settings, scenarios and effects. He asked for images in the styles of Leonardo da Vinci and the American psychedelic artist Alex Grey.

The pieces that really caught his attention, though, were what he now calls his “space opera theater” series. He started with a simple mental image — “a woman in a Victorian frilly dress, wearing a space helmet” — and kept fine-tuning the prompts, “using tests to really make an epic scene, like out of a dream.” He said he spent 80 hours making more than 900 iterations of the art, adding words like “opulent” and “lavish” to fine tune its tone and feel. He declined to share the full series of words he used to create his art, saying it is his artistic product, and that he intends to publish it later. “If there’s one thing you can take ownership of, it’s your prompt,” he said.

“I was like: Dude,” he said. “This is so sick! I want to see more of it! I’m addicted! I’m obsessed!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/02/midjourney-artificial-intelligence-state-fair-colorado/

i'm not trying to judge. i'm just saying, this is similar, in some ways, to how digital photography changed things. suddenly you could take a ton of shots, even just film in HD and select stills. it didn't destroy the old way of doing things. but it supplanted it, and it changed things in a fundamental way

tweets posted on ilx are not endorsements

are you mad about AI art? or are you mad your aesthetic is keyword-core enough that it’s reproducible by some of the earliest models

— kara ✿ (@karakittel) September 13, 2022

During the creation of the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series, James Earl Jones signed off on allowing Disney to replicate his vocal performance as Darth Vader in future projects using an AI voice-modeling tool called Respeecher, according to a Vanity Fair report published Friday.

Jones, who is 91, has voiced the iconic Star Wars villain for 45 years, starting with Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope in 1977 and concluding with a brief line of dialog in 2019's The Rise of Skywalker. "He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character,” said Matthew Wood, a supervising sound editor at Lucasfilm, during an interview with Vanity Fair. “So how do we move forward?”

The answer was Respeecher, a voice cloning product from a company in Ukraine that uses deep learning to model and replicate human voices in a way that is nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. Previously, Lucasfilm had used Respeecher to clone Mark Hamill's voice for The Mandalorian, and the company thought the same technology would be ideal for a major appearance of Darth Vader that would require dozens of lines of dialog. Working from archival recordings of Jones, Respeecher created a voice model that could be "performed" vocally by another actor using the company's speech-to-speech technology.

now all they have to do is have an AI generate the script and also animate the scenes. but surely that will be many 100s of years in the future, rather than a shitty thing that everyone has gotten used to in 15

i have been reading gene youngblood's Expanded Cinema (1970) recently. anyone else read it?

amazing to hear the utopian version of a lot of stuff that is happening now, and then to witness how all of the cool shit got forgotten a long time ago and it's just moved into how to make money by having techbros simulate what a creative person would do

https://i.imgur.com/3ZVjXa9.jpg

*obnoxiously loud and gravely snorting noises*

imagine if you could convince billions of people to voluntarily upload thousands of different "audio-visual records of their own existence"...and then, use all that to train an AI who will recreate what humans are like, continually training machines on recursive edits of the original dataset, so that a certain "kind" of human experience starts to take precedence over all the other ones, and then feeding those recursive ideas of what a human experience is BACK to the original humans who recorded their own existences, to influence them toward the existences that have been selected (which just so happen to be the ones that promote the idea of spending of our lives working so that we can buy the products that the selected existences seem to prefer)

we got the Brave New World outcome, only our Soma fucking sucks

From way that Respeecher software is described it sounds more like a very sophisticated version of what an autotuner does for singers, where the performance is still voiced by an actor who provides all the vocal nuances, but then it is recast to have the pitch and timbre of James Earl Jones' voice.

How many thousands of hours of James Earl Jones' speaking voice are available? Digitize that audio, feed it into the machine, fine-tune the results and boom, you've got a Robo-Jones you can deploy for basically any purpose. You could probably run multiple models so you'd have a simulated 25-year-old JEJ, a simulated 65-year-old JEJ, and everything in between, just based on using only samples from a given year as your source material.