Synthesizing the Businessmen-Smile (plus a ton of links)
I published this article and links on my Substack here (Opens in a new window) and here (Opens in a new window). 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 (Opens in a new window), 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 (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window). 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 (Opens in a new window), 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 (Opens in a new window) - "we're seeing that there is spatially organized patterning that carries information." Mark my words: Consciousness is a moiré pattern (Opens in a new window) emerging from overlapping brain wave patterns.
David Chalmers Talk about AI-Consciousness (Opens in a new window) at NeurIPS22 is online now.
All in the mind: Decoding brain waves to identify the music we are hearing (Opens in a new window)
A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis (Opens in a new window) - 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 (Opens in a new window)
Scientists unravel secret of swing in jazz (Opens in a new window) - It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing.
CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism (Opens in a new window) / A Writer Used AI To Plagiarize Me. Now What? (Opens in a new window) - I guess this will be a year of GenerativeAI-lawsuits.
Image Stacks and iPhone Racks - Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine (Opens in a new window) - 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 (Opens in a new window) - This song sucks.
Generative AI is bringing the biggest disruption to film making in 100 years (Opens in a new window)
Simulations all the way down: Recursive VR-Room (Opens in a new window)
Natural Language Playlist (Opens in a new window) - AI generated Spotify-playlists. Here's "crazy mixtape with the most eclectic sound possible (Opens in a new window)" and "80s music for a sunny spring day (Opens in a new window)". They are okayish, but they are no match for GOOD MUSIC (Opens in a new window).
Anti-Stable Diffusion Lawsuit Deep Dive: It’s A Neutron Bomb (Opens in a new window) / Don't Let Disney Monopolize A.I.-Generated Art (Opens in a new window) - 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 (Opens in a new window): “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 (Opens in a new window) - 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? (Opens in a new window)
Scenario lands $6M for its AI platform that generates game art assets (Opens in a new window) - 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 (Opens in a new window) - While I do not buy into the flood (Opens in a new window), 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 (Opens in a new window).
Google Calls In Larry Page and Sergey Brin to Tackle ChatGPT and A.I. Chatbots (Opens in a new window) - 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 (Opens in a new window).
These stickers are making the round (Opens in a new window) and they are perfect.
StyleGAN-T: Unlocking the Power of GANs for Fast Large-Scale Text-to-Image Synthesis (Opens in a new window) - "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 (Opens in a new window).
Wonders of Streetview (Opens in a new window) - Random weird places, here’s a ship of Pandas (Opens in a new window) / Underwater with Seals (Opens in a new window) / Scotts hut in antarctica (Opens in a new window) / Jojo Museum in California (Opens in a new window)
Cyberpunk Building Generator Created With RailClone (Opens in a new window)
Beatles Children's Book (Opens in a new window) by Fabian.eth and Midjourney
Family Guy x Family Matters x Midjourney (Opens in a new window)
An invisibility cloak for computer vision: “This stylish pullover (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window).
New report on the use of AI for “automated influence operations” (Opens in a new window), in which the authors suggest to ‘nuke the internet’ with ‘radioactive data (Opens in a new window)’, to contaminate the training data to make it detectable. I don’t buy into the flood (Opens in a new window), and, funny enough, two days before this report was published, researchers in a new paper (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window) and got himself into a minor outrage cycle on Twitter (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window) 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) (Opens in a new window).
And speaking of AI-cinema: The NYT has an op-ed by Frank Pavich (Opens in a new window), the director of “Jodorowsky’s Dune”. I’ve written about AI-cinema extensively here: If Jodorowsky directed TRON (Opens in a new window), AI Cinema gonna be wild (Opens in a new window), A selection of fine AI Cinema-stills 1 (Opens in a new window), 2 (Opens in a new window), 3 (Opens in a new window).
Ryan Broderick reflects on ten years of This is fine (Opens in a new window) and Yu Jie made a flaming Fine Sweater (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window), in which Do-Not-Pay will give headphones to a lawyer and an AI telling him what to say. / In a new development (Opens in a new window), 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 (Opens in a new window), 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 (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window): “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 (Opens in a new window), 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 (Opens in a new window) on social contagion and the spread of mental health issues via Social Media, mostly among kids. The Guardian has a write up (Opens in a new window). The topic made rounds last spring with first reports on Tourette-like symptoms spreading via TikTok (Opens in a new window), a social contagion initiated by influencers with mental health-issues.
Plant Machete by David Bowen (Opens in a new window): “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 (Opens in a new window).
Iran Is Using Facial Recognition to Enforce Modesty Laws (Opens in a new window). Why do you need morality police when you can have face recognition?
Scribepod 1 (Opens in a new window): Some guy has wrote scripts turning Machine Learning-papers into a podcast dialogue for synthetic voices via ChatGPT.
The Creative Underclass is Still Raging (Opens in a new window): 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 (Opens in a new window) 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 (Opens in a new window)“. Machine Learning Street Talk interviewed Chalmers at that conference (Opens in a new window), too. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, and because consciousness can’t be defined (Opens in a new window), 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 (Opens in a new window): “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? (Opens in a new window) Ofcourse, there is only one solution to the Trolley Problem (Opens in a new window).
Russia Reportedly Legalizes Piracy of Games, Movies, and More (Opens in a new window). Piracy always was tolerated in russia and this is just a propaganda campaign.
Cybercriminals Starting to Use ChatGPT (Opens in a new window). Ah come on, no way /irony off.
Dendrocentric AI Could Run on Watts, Not Megawatts (Opens in a new window)
Beware a world where artists are replaced by robots. It's starting now (Opens in a new window). Molly Crabapple (Opens in a new window) joins the ranks of the AI-art-luddites.
Why writing by hand is still the best way to retain information (Opens in a new window): 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? (Opens in a new window) 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? (Opens in a new window) 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.”
