Synthesizing the Businessmen-Smile (plus a ton of links)
I published this article and links on my Substack here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and here (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Thanks for your ongoing support.
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Image: Businessman Smile / Stable Diffusion
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A politician has given a speech in congress written by an AI (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), which might be the first instance of synthetic content being used in politics.
When U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss decided to deliver a speech on a bill that would create a U.S.-Israel artificial intelligence center, he opted to let the AI do the talking. The brief two-paragragh speech read by the Massachusetts Democrat on the floor of the U.S. House on Wednesday was generated by the online AI chatbot ChatGPT. His staff said they believe it's the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress. (…)The text generated from Auchincloss's prompt includes sentences like: "We must collaborate with international partners like the Israeli government to ensure that the United States maintains a leadership role in AI research and development and responsibly explores the many possibilities evolving technologies provide."
Seemingly unrelated, this (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) viral tweet is making the rounds and its showing the (seemingly) future of job recruitment through synthetic application generation.
I think both are related.
Ryan Broderick yesterday wrote a compelling piece (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) about how these things automatize social process in job application. It is a good argument, but I disagree respectfully.
In both instances, the political speech and the job , AI writing political speech and job applications, the only thing that gets automatized is the political leveling of the field. Let me explain.
When you write a job application, or a political speech, you stick to formulas, which are algorithms. There is quite literally no difference if you pay an application consult to help you with your bland and formulaic job application, or paying OpenAI a buck for ChatGPT to do that job.
This stuff is bland, neutral and it doesn't surprise or risks offending anyone (its your voter/employer, so you maybe shouldn't risk offend them). Job applications and political talk is soothing and smooth nothingtalk, political PR speak for a cause.
Texts like these have zero edge, no texture and no personality, and that’s on purpose. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, because you want to meet the target of your communication on a leveled field, where both parties know exactly what the other one expects, and then those expectations are met.
Like a featureless business suit, texts like these offer marginalized, minimal creativity, and AI is perfect for this sort of thing: Job applications, PR text, copywriting and so forth. All of these require formulaic, noncreative text generation. In this kind of writing, there is actually a demand for minimized creativity.
If you are actually creative as a writer of political speeches, you may offend your voter base and loose. If you are actually creative for PR text or as a copywriter, you do not maximize the market outcome. In jobs like these, creativity is stiffled, it’s caged creativity brought down to a minimum.
Sure, you might say, but it’s a big problem of our times that political speech has no character, no style, no personality. And you’d be right, but [insert your fav polit-clown here] still has a pen, right? She might use it. If you have to get creative with a job app, you can paint it too.
Bland, empty political talk has been around since the cambrian explosion, and bullshit jobs not only deserve bullshit text, they love it like that. This is also why i really hesitate to feel sorry for the people who will loose jobs in those sectors (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). It’s industrial, technical, mechanized work in a business suit, and who really cares about that.
Highly intellectual excurse in this classic George Carlin bit on businessmen (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), surely no bland empty talk in this one, i promise.
What AI is automatizing here is George Carlins "big bullshit businessmen smile", and i actually think, business rhetorics and political speech is more authentic this way, if you know what i mean.
When AI is able to generate an actually funny synthetic George Carlin (which rhymes and writes 7 dirty words you can't say on Twitter), then i'll worry. Until then, it's just stochastic parrots producing bullshit for bullshit jobs.
However, we need to talk about UBI in an AI world, pronto.
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Links
High frequency brain wave patterns in the motor cortex can predict an upcoming movement (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - "we're seeing that there is spatially organized patterning that carries information." Mark my words: Consciousness is a moiré pattern (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) emerging from overlapping brain wave patterns.
David Chalmers Talk about AI-Consciousness (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) at NeurIPS22 is online now.
All in the mind: Decoding brain waves to identify the music we are hearing (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - For implanted BCI, we are nearing realtime speech synthesis. Paralyzed people soon will be able to speak again, fluently.
This biohybrid robot walks using lab-grown mouse muscles (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Scientists unravel secret of swing in jazz (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing.
CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) / A Writer Used AI To Plagiarize Me. Now What? (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - I guess this will be a year of GenerativeAI-lawsuits.
Image Stacks and iPhone Racks - Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - A search engine for image macros. (Memes are not merely “funny images with text”, but i think i lost that battle a while ago).
Nick Cave on ChatGPT (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - This song sucks.
Simulations all the way down: Recursive VR-Room (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Natural Language Playlist (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - AI generated Spotify-playlists. Here's "crazy mixtape with the most eclectic sound possible (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)" and "80s music for a sunny spring day (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)". They are okayish, but they are no match for GOOD MUSIC (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
Anti-Stable Diffusion Lawsuit Deep Dive: It’s A Neutron Bomb (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) / Don't Let Disney Monopolize A.I.-Generated Art (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Jon Stokes on the Stable Diffusion-lawsuits. I disagree with a lot here. Emad himself declared Stable Diffusion to be art history compressed into 4GB, and 'cut n paste' is mentioned nowhere in the complaint. It constantly states SD as a new form of collage tool, which is essentially what it is, except the collage bits have been atomized into postmodern grey goo, which you can morph into new forms by prompting. As i said in my piece on the lawsuits (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “The only thing that matters here is if the companies involved used unlicensed artworks in the creation of a commercial tool, and if the Fair Use defense applies to a machine that can mimic artistic style. They did, and we'll see.”
12 Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Kevin Kelly on aliens. Our species having nothing to offer for advanced interstellar travelling civilizations has a stanislawlemian feel.
Exactly how many senses do we really have? (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Scenario lands $6M for its AI platform that generates game art assets (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Only 2D-game assets (yet), but that’s another job from the industrialized creative complex that’s eaten by AI.
AI is the #3 in the global risk report: Weapons of Mass Disruption: Eurasia Group's #3 Top Risk of 2023 (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - While I do not buy into the flood (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), because human attention is the bottleneck for content, synthetic or otherwise, i do think that making the job of manipulators easier is not a good thing. Then again, i don't really care if a flood of disinformation is produced by an army of IRA-trolls or AI, and their impact is negligible (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
Google Calls In Larry Page and Sergey Brin to Tackle ChatGPT and A.I. Chatbots (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Google arguably has the most used text interface in the world. If they flip the switch and add some LaMDA to that interface, ChatGPT may look like dust. Back then, Apple introduced the iPhone into a already booming market within their Mac-ecosystem, which was a perfect fit for the looming social media revolution. Nokia just had phones, and the mobile web was just starting to take shape. Then again, Microsoft wants to put a gazillion bucks into OpenAI and they have Office. It’s on (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
These stickers are making the round (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and they are perfect.
StyleGAN-T: Unlocking the Power of GANs for Fast Large-Scale Text-to-Image Synthesis (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - "Every frame in the following video is generated in 0,1 seconds at a resolution of 512x512." We're approaching real-time image synthesis. Now hook this up to a BCI and enable some digital lucid dreaming (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
Wonders of Streetview (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) - Random weird places, here’s a ship of Pandas (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) / Underwater with Seals (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) / Scotts hut in antarctica (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) / Jojo Museum in California (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Cyberpunk Building Generator Created With RailClone (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Beatles Children's Book (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) by Fabian.eth and Midjourney
Family Guy x Family Matters x Midjourney (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
An invisibility cloak for computer vision: “This stylish pullover (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) is a great way to stay warm this winter, whether in the office or on-the-go. It features a stay-dry microfleece lining, a modern fit, and adversarial patterns the evade most common object detectors. In this demonstration, the YOLOv2 detector is evaded using a pattern trained on the COCO dataset with a carefully constructed objective.“
Aaron Hertzmann has a long, very good blog post about AI-art and its ramifications from ethics to aesthetics: When machines change art (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
New report on the use of AI for “automated influence operations” (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), in which the authors suggest to ‘nuke the internet’ with ‘radioactive data (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)’, to contaminate the training data to make it detectable. I don’t buy into the flood (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), and, funny enough, two days before this report was published, researchers in a new paper (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior“, which is compatible with previous literature on the impact of bots, and human sharing behaviour. Potential production volume in desinformation says nothing about its impact.
Director Keith Schofield created hundreds of AI-cinema stills for the parallel universe movie ‘Galaxy of Fear’ by David Cronenberg (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and got himself into a minor outrage cycle on Twitter (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) which is just what the world is today. Some people are upset because AI-art seems unethical, and some are upset because that movie doesn’t exist. How dare he. Here’s a good thread (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) about how this new artform enables a new way of seeing, and how to approach these strange new worlds with an open mind. And Schofield also did a Sequel: Galaxy of Flemish (1987) (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
And speaking of AI-cinema: The NYT has an op-ed by Frank Pavich (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), the director of “Jodorowsky’s Dune”. I’ve written about AI-cinema extensively here: If Jodorowsky directed TRON (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), AI Cinema gonna be wild (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), A selection of fine AI Cinema-stills 1 (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), 2 (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), 3 (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
Ryan Broderick reflects on ten years of This is fine (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and Yu Jie made a flaming Fine Sweater (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and published the knitting pattern on Ravelry. Here it is, in all it’s burning metaphorical glory, though i think she should’ve added a ‘This is fine’-speechbubble.
AI-powered "robot" lawyer will be first of its kind to represent defendant in court (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), in which Do-Not-Pay will give headphones to a lawyer and an AI telling him what to say. / In a new development (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), the effort has been cancelled because it's most likely illegal.
Here’s a paper presenting a technique to enhance voice audio from video input (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), and basically it can read lips from very low quality and shaky vids. Now you cantotally eavesdrop on anyone you can record on video from miles away, which given the camera abilities shown in Googles Pixel 7 is totally possible, today! Remember the paper in which they reconstructed sound recordings from videotaping a bag of potato chips (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) and analyzed the vibrations of the plastic surface? It’s like that but on AI-steroids.
Social Media Use Is Linked to Brain Changes in Teens, Research Finds (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “We can’t make causal claims that social media is changing the brain,” [says] one of the authors of the study. / But I can: Social Media changes the brain. If i'm at my most pessimistic, i'd read that study as a confirmation of my take that socmed established a hormone based attention economy (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), turning developing brains into dopamine/oxytocin-junkies craving for more. Social Feedback triggers oxytocin shots, and the gamification of socmed provides dopamin. Ofcourse such a media environment has an effect on developing neural circuits.
A new paper (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) on social contagion and the spread of mental health issues via Social Media, mostly among kids. The Guardian has a write up (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). The topic made rounds last spring with first reports on Tourette-like symptoms spreading via TikTok (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), a social contagion initiated by influencers with mental health-issues.
Plant Machete by David Bowen (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves. Using custom software, these signals are mapped in real-time to the movements of the joints of the industrial robot holding a machete.”
German audio version of the fantasy classic in 30 parts: J.R.R. Tolkien: Der Herr der Ringe (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
Iran Is Using Facial Recognition to Enforce Modesty Laws (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Why do you need morality police when you can have face recognition?
Scribepod 1 (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): Some guy has wrote scripts turning Machine Learning-papers into a podcast dialogue for synthetic voices via ChatGPT.
The Creative Underclass is Still Raging (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): Freddie DeBoer describes how the ‘creative underclass’ is a main factor in online outrage.
AZDNet summarized David “The Hard Problem of Consciousness” Chalmers keynote talk at NeurIPS 2022 (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) in which he predicts that ‘AI could have 20% of sentience in 10 years and the NYT has a piece on the “pursuit of artificial awareness (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)“. Machine Learning Street Talk interviewed Chalmers at that conference (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), too. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, and because consciousness can’t be defined (Öffnet in neuem Fenster), I’m worried: A machine doesn’t have to gain consciousness or sentience for any deployment of such a machine to be unethical. It just has to gain a machine form of consciousness. We have no clue how that would look like, how that would manifest and how we would recognize it. Just as with hypothetical alien life that goes unrecognized and then contaminated, any AI-consciousness might be too alien for us to detect, simply because we don’t “think” like machines, and machine awareness would be too weird and different from ours. I won’t go full Lemoine on this, but we have no clue what the situation of extremely complex statistical networks look like in 10 years, or 100, and we should be prepared for these questions.
This British Zoologist Wants to Reinvent Color (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): “The world’s best colors (...) come not from pigments or dyes, but from materials arranged into crystalline nanostructures that scatter light into 'structural colors'.”
Gizmo has an exzerpt from the book “Robot Ethics” by Mark Coeckelbergh: How Would a Self-Driving Car Handle the Trolley Problem? (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) Ofcourse, there is only one solution to the Trolley Problem (Öffnet in neuem Fenster).
Russia Reportedly Legalizes Piracy of Games, Movies, and More (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Piracy always was tolerated in russia and this is just a propaganda campaign.
Cybercriminals Starting to Use ChatGPT (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Ah come on, no way /irony off.
Dendrocentric AI Could Run on Watts, Not Megawatts (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)
Beware a world where artists are replaced by robots. It's starting now (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Molly Crabapple (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) joins the ranks of the AI-art-luddites.
Why writing by hand is still the best way to retain information (Öffnet in neuem Fenster): I’m not very concerned about ChatGPT for education, because the solution is very simple: Make students write by hand. Sure they can still generate an essay and then copy it, but it would be an obstacle. Also, writing by hand is superior for educational purposes, which is a reason why i’m maybe the only person on this planet who’s in favor of banning all digital screens in the classroom.
Carl Miller - Are You Outraged Yet? (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) Review of Max Fishers book ‘The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World’.
Will We Ever Run Out of Sudoku Puzzles? (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) Nope. “There are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible solvable Sudoku grids that yield a unique result (that’s 6 sextillion, 670 quintillion, 903 quadrillion, 752 trillion, 21 billion, 72 million, 936 thousand, 960 in case you were wondering). That's way more than the number of stars in the universe.”
