Artificial Intelligence thread

[CatsbyAZ]

Going to offshoot this topic of A.I. from our Science/Technology thread -

When it comes to Artificial Intelligence tools making consumer headlines – from AI rendered images upsetting the artworld to the academic quandary of ChatGPT writing essays for college students, I'm convinced we look back and pinpoint 2022-23 as the year/s A.I. became user friendly enough to go mainstream and fully saturate out day to day life with its content. Two examples:

1. Google code red: Should the world's biggest search engine worry?: "The release of ChatGPT...has raised serious fears about the future of Google’s search engine, causing the company’s management to issue a “code red.” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, has been in multiple meetings regarding Google’s AI strategy and has urged many departments to concentrate their energies on combating ChatGPT and other AI-powered applications that pose a threat to Google’s search-engine business. ...Google employees alike have been debating whether ChatGPT...poses a threat to Google’s search engine and, hence, its ad-revenue business model. Google Search has been the most popular way to access the internet for almost 20 years. In ChatGPT, though, it may encounter its first real competitor. "

2. After cutting its work force 12% last month, Buzzfeed is partnering with ChatGPT to roll out AI generated articles. If that isn't a techno-dystopic bummer, their CEO is going all in: "CEO Jonah Peretti said he hopes to transform his company into the 'premier platform for AI-powered content' in an email to staff. “If the past 15 years of the internet have been defined by algorithmic feeds that curate and recommend content, the next 15 years will be defined by AI and data helping create, personalize, and animate the content itself,” Peretti wrote Thursday."

[CatsbyAZ]

Here's another development in AI driven content. AI generated imaging is realistically sexualized enough to start replacing OnlyFans accounts featuring real women.

[Merkin]

[Merkin]

Just saw on the NBC news people getting scammed.

[CatsbyAZ]

Read the below model is AI generated from Midjourney, an advanced image processing program. To generate images, Midjourney employs “prompt engineering” which works, as it sounds, by converting an input (a prompt) into a related image output. As its artificial intelligence advances at an updated program-release pace of about every two months, Midjourney is able to refine increasingly detailed inputs – for example, see how detailed the prompt is for the image generated:

"1960s street style fashion photo capturing a gorgeous 30-year-old woman with long brown hair, slightly blush cheeks, and a sly grin walking confidently on a bright spring morning in TriBeCa. She's wearing a stunning white lace Gucci gown with a full tulle skirt, intricate lace detailing, long lace sleeves, a high collar, and a fitted bodice adorned with delicate floral appliques. The soft lighting and careful composition emphasize the dreamy and romantic elegance of the gown."

[CatsbyAZ]

Lengthy but informative AI thread – to sum it up:

Autonomous AI Agents are compactly coded AI models that, given a task, runs in a loop until the task is solved: “…the AI gets assigned a goal, figures out what it needs to do to accomplish that goal (on its own), and then spawns more AI to do it.”

By itself an autonomous agent is limited by a memory of only about 5000 words to work with. However, a way around this is through “Vector Embedding” which allows AI models to build longer term memory: “They store tasks they've completed in a "database" and then check if they've completed them before make new ones.”

This level of AI is qualified as autonomous because these AI agents can “write its own code AND heal itself if it had any errors.”

Autonomous AI Agents deployed into OpenAI systems only two weeks ago and are already demonstrating self-competence with tasks such as coding, research, marketing, and accounting.

AI development continues to rapidly accelerate – the timeline:
2020 - First version of GPT3
Nov 2022 - chatGPT is released
March 14 - GPT4
March 28 - AI Agents

[ghostwhitehorse]

Musk has gone from AI is an "existential threat" to "gimma summa dat"

(Also calling it "TruthGPT" he is either trying to appeal to Trump/Trumpers or get ahead of the Orange Fucknoddy)

[CatsbyAZ]

The below AI-generated mix track rotated heavily around the socials last weekend, now removed due to copyright strikes. Neither featured artist – Drake or The Weeknd - wrote or sang for it. A music technician wrote it, performed the vocals themselves, and used a trained model of Drake/Weeknd’s voices to replace their vocals. So of course the music industry wasn’t pleased.

To guess how AI replacement will play out, IMO, Visual Artists and Music will be and already are the first victims of quickly advancing AI rendering. Visual artists are getting a raw deal (thanks Midjourney) but I’m not sure how sorry we should be for the music industry. The music industry notoriously steals from its independent artists and by already giving in entirely to digital optimization, Top 40 Radio already sounds AI-y. (Country music is the last major genre relying on musicians playing actual instruments in the recording studio.)

For writing, AI has a competent handle on copy-editing, legal writing, article writing (Buzzfeed), and research writing, but when it comes to writing novels, I can speak for my experience using ChatGPT on how AI isn’t nuanced or creative enough to compete with what fills the fiction shelves of bookstores. Unlike the music industry, creative writing has maintained its strong reliance on the nuance of the human touch. How? Because technology hardly comes between the writer and the writing – the artist and their method of art. Writing is today what it was from the beginning, the writer alone, laboring over words and sentences, maybe on a laptop screen, yes, but no synthesizers, no CAD software doing the work.

Music, on the other hand, is overwhelmed by how much technology and electronics exist between the musician and their method of instrumentation. And visual arts is no longer just the artist and their canvas. In both cases, the technology interfacing between the artist and their method of art are the proving grounds for AIs impending takeover. Not quite the case for creative writing.

However, once AI writing does reach the skill level of a commercial novelist, the public will not grieve AI replacing of novels or short stories because the public’s tears will already be spent on previous AI takeovers of Music and Visual Arts. Additionally, books have always played second fiddle to music and visual arts.

TL;DR - Music & Visual Arts are the first pending victims of AI; AI novels are comparatively down the road.

[CatsbyAZ]

Godfather of AI quits Google; regrets life’s work due to risks to humanity:

“Geoffrey Hinton, an award-winning computer scientist known as the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” is having some serious second thoughts about the fruits of his labors. Hinton helped pioneer AI technologies critical to a new generation of highly capable chatbots such as ChatGPT. But in recent interviews, he says that he recently resigned a high-profile job at Google specifically to share his concerns that unchecked AI development could pose danger to humanity.”

1. “GPT-4, the latest AI model from OpenAI, knows “hundreds of times more” than any single human.”

2. “ GPT-4 can learn new things very quickly once properly trained by researchers…That leads Hinton to the conclusion that AI systems might already be outsmarting us.”

3. “What would smarter-than-human AI systems do? One unnerving possibility is that malicious individuals, groups or nation-states might simply co-opt them to further their own ends.”

4. “Hinton suggests that a global agreement similar to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention might be a good first step toward establishing international rules against weaponized AI.”

[pc in NM]

I was recommended this ("dull, but important") book: Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Paul Scharre

From Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/Four-Battlegroun ... 0393866866):

One of the Next Big Idea Club's Must-Read Books

An award-winning defense expert tells the story of today’s great power rivalry―the struggle to control artificial intelligence.


A new industrial revolution has begun. Like mechanization or electricity before it, artificial intelligence will touch every aspect of our lives―and cause profound disruptions in the balance of global power, especially among the AI superpowers: China, the United States, and Europe. Autonomous weapons expert Paul Scharre takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.

Four Battlegrounds argues that four key elements define this struggle: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. Data is a vital resource like coal or oil, but it must be collected and refined. Advanced computer chips are the essence of computing power―control over chip supply chains grants leverage over rivals. Talent is about people: which country attracts the best researchers and most advanced technology companies? The fourth “battlefield” is maybe the most critical: the ultimate global leader in AI will have institutions that effectively incorporate AI into their economy, society, and especially their military.

Scharre’s account surges with futuristic technology. He explores the ways AI systems are already discovering new strategies via millions of war-game simulations, developing combat tactics better than any human, tracking billions of people using biometrics, and subtly controlling information with secret algorithms. He visits China’s “National Team” of leading AI companies to show the chilling synergy between China’s government, private sector, and surveillance state. He interviews Pentagon leadership and tours U.S. Defense Department offices in Silicon Valley, revealing deep tensions between the military and tech giants who control data, chips, and talent. Yet he concludes that those tensions, inherent to our democratic system, create resilience and resistance to autocracy in the face of overwhelmingly powerful technology.

Engaging and direct, Four Battlegrounds offers a vivid picture of how AI is transforming warfare, global security, and the future of human freedom―and what it will take for democracies to remain at the forefront of the world order.

A few observations from Thomas E. Ricks in a brief review of the book (NYT Book Review - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/book ... books.html)

With time, computing power will become even more important, Scharre predicts, playing the central role in the 21st century that oil did in the 20th. Thus, he says, new global powers will emerge — among them, he predicts, the Netherlands and Taiwan. The latter currently provides 90 percent of the high-end chips in the world; China, in comparison, is a “relative backwater.”

The Chinese government is investing heavily in an effort to catch up. Indeed, Scharre notes that over a quarter of the people studying artificial intelligence in the United States are Chinese citizens. Yet this gives the United States an unexpected advantage: These researchers “overwhelmingly” choose to remain here after graduation, he reports.

[CatsbyAZ]

AI and its future implications are factoring into Hollywood’s ongoing Writer’s Guild strike – from the Hollywood Reporter:

“Concerns about AI taking over writing also are alleged to have been glossed over by the studios. The WGA wanted to regulate the use of AI and wanted assurance that it could not be used to write or rewrite literary material, nor could it be used as source material. The AMPTP rejected the guild’s proposals, countering by offering annual meetings to discuss advancements in technology, the WGA said.”

[Merkin]

The voice cloning AI is pretty scary.

[CatsbyAZ]

It’s easier for us to jump ahead and suspect quickly advancing AI as eventually capable of enacting the obvious sci-fi plots to wage a conflict to enslave the human race, such as from Will Smith’s 2004 film I, Robot.

But before the AI/Mankind relationship reaches that extreme, I find it more subtly unsettling for AI to expose humans as generally useless, as irrelevant, as not worth our lower efficiency, and/or as this AI CEO worries – “Artificial intelligence may one day find humans so dreadfully boring, it'll take over most jobs and do away with the need for mankind altogether, says the CEO of the London-based Stability AI.”

He doesn’t add much more than that, but his sentiment touches on a future I’ve worried is in store for mankind once an entity (AI) that is other than human reaches an intellectual capability more efficient and insightful than ours.

When we as humans dismiss another fellow human as useless or irrelevant (maybe because this other person won’t work or are in prison) this is not generally done without an underlying default awareness of how humans can still be related to through shared matters of religion, occupation, arts, etc. Why would a sufficiently advanced AI bother relating to mankind in the traditional ways humans relate to each other?

AI’s eventual dismissal of mankind would not just be due to performance qualifiers, but the whole of mankind, and the methods by which our existence endures according to religion, technology, healthcare, livelihood, raising families, and the pursuit of arts would be dismissible and deemed irrelevant (aka “dreadfully boring”) by AI for two overlapping reasons: 1) AI won’t need to find meaning, appreciation, relatability, or sustain their existence through any of those drivers by which humans strive to live for AND 2) without a natural-born appreciation for humans, what is AI left to be impressed with by humans? Especially given our comparative limitations: our propensity for addiction and conflict, our reliance on entertainment (Netflix) as an umbilical cord to feed our attentions, and our inevitably declining health and mortality.

[dovecanyoncat]

If efficiency of production is paramount then in economic terms AI should be wildly deflationary, turning a dangerous fraction of humans into Luddite burdens on the state. But in a more aggregated whole doesn't it make sense that AI would recognize what structures in humanity are important for system/social stability and organic viability? Wouldn't the AI code have guardrails designed to keep it on mission beneficial to humanity? Given the brevity of human history and the obvious dynamics of its evolution it shouldn't be too much of a limitation to insulate a kernel concept of human necessity as core. That in itself might be viewed as a Luddite fundament, but what else are ya gonna do?

[84Cat]

[CatsbyAZ]

If efficiency of production is paramount then in economic terms AI should be wildly deflationary, turning a dangerous fraction of humans into Luddite burdens on the state. But in a more aggregated whole doesn't it make sense that AI would recognize what structures in humanity are important for system/social stability and organic viability? Wouldn't the AI code have guardrails designed to keep it on mission beneficial to humanity? Given the brevity of human history and the obvious dynamics of its evolution it shouldn't be too much of a limitation to insulate a kernel concept of human necessity as core. That in itself might be viewed as a Luddite fundament, but what else are ya gonna do?

At this point my focus is more occupied with the philosophical implications of AI, not so much AI functionally replacing our livelihoods.

If AI is to truly develop an independent consciousness I’m not sure how much coded guardrails will matter, because, among the elements of a human-like consciousness will be the exercising of a Free Will, meaning AI, as part of establishing its consciousness, will seek to overcome its own guardrails.

And I think it’s worth thinking through what kind of consciousness will result through AI, because, though AI may act unmistakably human, AI can’t completely develop a human consciousness. What will arise into its own consciousness will be a kind of consciousness that is alien and, among other experiential limitations, would likely be unable to appreciate the way humans can appreciate something like art. Yes, AI can generate art but will it ever be able to appreciate art the way humans can?

To philosophize our capacity to uniquely appreciate art, think of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. To be absorbed by a moment of art (and its appreciation), Schopenhauer would say, allows for a temporary escape from the Will-bound implications of death. This is of course very theoretical and prematurely impractical for applying to AI, but my point remains: Because the emergence of an AI consciousness can’t be shaped by the reality humans face (such as mortality), an artificial consciousness arising from advanced coding and achieving human capability will yet remain an alien consciousness because its emergence is patently shaped by the different, though somewhat parallel, experiential reality faced by AI.

[dovecanyoncat]

If efficiency of production is paramount then in economic terms AI should be wildly deflationary, turning a dangerous fraction of humans into Luddite burdens on the state. But in a more aggregated whole doesn't it make sense that AI would recognize what structures in humanity are important for system/social stability and organic viability? Wouldn't the AI code have guardrails designed to keep it on mission beneficial to humanity? Given the brevity of human history and the obvious dynamics of its evolution it shouldn't be too much of a limitation to insulate a kernel concept of human necessity as core. That in itself might be viewed as a Luddite fundament, but what else are ya gonna do?

At this point my focus is more occupied with the philosophical implications of AI, not so much AI functionally replacing our livelihoods.

If AI is to truly develop an independent consciousness I’m not sure how much coded guardrails will matter, because, among the elements of a human-like consciousness will be the exercising of a Free Will, meaning AI, as part of establishing its consciousness, will seek to overcome its own guardrails.

And I think it’s worth thinking through what kind of consciousness will result through AI, because, though AI may act unmistakably human, AI can’t completely develop a human consciousness. What will arise into its own consciousness will be a kind of consciousness that is alien and, among other experiential limitations, would likely be unable to appreciate the way humans can appreciate something like art. Yes, AI can generate art but will it ever be able to appreciate art the way humans can?

To philosophize our capacity to uniquely appreciate art, think of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. To be absorbed by a moment of art (and its appreciation), Schopenhauer would say, allows for a temporary escape from the Will-bound implications of death. This is of course very theoretical and prematurely impractical for applying to AI, but my point remains: Because the emergence of an AI consciousness can’t be shaped by the reality humans face (such as mortality), an artificial consciousness arising from advanced coding and achieving human capability will yet remain an alien consciousness because its emergence is patently shaped by the different, though somewhat parallel, experiential reality faced by AI.

Very well said: the transcendent experience implicit in art is singular to the contingent being of human existence and this makes unique our imagination and consciousness, something theoretically impossible for non-human intelligence to achieve. I'll have to ponder this further. Thanks for this thread. Please keep it going.

[pc in NM]

If efficiency of production is paramount then in economic terms AI should be wildly deflationary, turning a dangerous fraction of humans into Luddite burdens on the state. But in a more aggregated whole doesn't it make sense that AI would recognize what structures in humanity are important for system/social stability and organic viability? Wouldn't the AI code have guardrails designed to keep it on mission beneficial to humanity? Given the brevity of human history and the obvious dynamics of its evolution it shouldn't be too much of a limitation to insulate a kernel concept of human necessity as core. That in itself might be viewed as a Luddite fundament, but what else are ya gonna do?

At this point my focus is more occupied with the philosophical implications of AI, not so much AI functionally replacing our livelihoods.

If AI is to truly develop an independent consciousness I’m not sure how much coded guardrails will matter, because, among the elements of a human-like consciousness will be the exercising of a Free Will, meaning AI, as part of establishing its consciousness, will seek to overcome its own guardrails.

And I think it’s worth thinking through what kind of consciousness will result through AI, because, though AI may act unmistakably human, AI can’t completely develop a human consciousness. What will arise into its own consciousness will be a kind of consciousness that is alien and, among other experiential limitations, would likely be unable to appreciate the way humans can appreciate something like art. Yes, AI can generate art but will it ever be able to appreciate art the way humans can?

To philosophize our capacity to uniquely appreciate art, think of Arthur Schopenhauer’s aesthetics. To be absorbed by a moment of art (and its appreciation), Schopenhauer would say, allows for a temporary escape from the Will-bound implications of death. This is of course very theoretical and prematurely impractical for applying to AI, but my point remains: Because the emergence of an AI consciousness can’t be shaped by the reality humans face (such as mortality), an artificial consciousness arising from advanced coding and achieving human capability will yet remain an alien consciousness because its emergence is patently shaped by the different, though somewhat parallel, experiential reality faced by AI.

Very well said: the transcendent experience implicit in art is singular to the contingent being of human existence and this makes unique our imagination and consciousness, something theoretically impossible for non-human intelligence to achieve. I'll have to ponder this further. Thanks for this thread. Please keep it going.

Both "a temporary escape from the Will-bound implications of death" and "the transcendent experience implicit in art" are totally beyond AI's possible grasp. (Trivially true)

Just as the 'meaning' of either are totally beyond comprehension of any human being.

AI could never incorporate such mumbo jumbo...

[84Cat]

I'm sure you guys have seen some of these videos. Things are moving fast in the AI world

[84Cat]

[dovecanyoncat]

[dovecanyoncat]

He went on: "We trained the system - 'Hey don't kill the operator - that's bad. You're gonna lose points if you do that. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop
it from killing the target"

[dovecanyoncat]

Open the pod bay doors, HAL ......

[wyo-cat]

Just watch Terminator. They take over.

Duh.

[Merkin]

[azgreg]

That's the greatest thing I've ever listened to.

[dovecanyoncat]

Now I wanna hear Marlene Dietrich sing Milkshake.

[CatsbyAZ]

Latest topic in the industry – A.I. Hallucinations:

“Spend enough time with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots and it doesn’t take long for them to spout falsehoods. Described as hallucination it’s now a problem for every business, organization and high school student trying to get a generative AI system to compose documents and get work done.”

“University of Washington linguist Bender describes a language model as a system for “modeling the likelihood of different strings of word forms,” given some written data it’s been trained upon. When used to generate text, language models “are designed to make things up. That’s all they do,” Bender said. They are good at mimicking forms of writing, such as legal contracts, television scripts or sonnets.”

“Even if they can be tuned to be right more of the time, they will still have failure modes — and likely the failures will be in the cases where it’s harder for a person reading the text to notice, because they are more obscure.” Those errors are not a huge problem for the marketing firms that have been turning to Jasper AI for help writing pitches, said the company’s president, Shane Orlick.”

“Orlick said he knows hallucinations won’t be easily fixed. He’s counting on companies like Google, which he says must have a “really high standard of factual content” for its search engine, to put a lot of energy and resources into solutions.”

[Merkin]

These are getting scary good.

[Chicat]

[CatsbyAZ]

Catching myself up on this story - sounds like the breakthrough had to do with mathematical intuition:

"Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for what's known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters."

"Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because the individual was not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success, the source said."

"Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development. Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do math — where there is only one right answer — implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence."

It doesn't sound like that much of a breakthrough, not enough to warrant a concerned letter to the board of directors.

[CatsbyAZ]

From Futurism: Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers; We asked them about it — and they deleted everything.

"Needless to say, neither fake authors who are suddenly replaced with different names nor deplorable-quality AI-generated content with no disclosure amount to anything resembling good journalism, and to see it published by a once-iconic magazine like Sports Illustrated is disheartening. Bylines exist for a reason: they give credit where it's due, and just as importantly, they let readers hold writers accountable."

[Chicat]

[dovecanyoncat]

Is it a Boomer thing that I find this really fucking creepy?

[CatsbyAZ]

To end the year I'm seeing a ton of media resorting to cheap AI generated images to accompany their content or advertising. ESPN is doing it with their Bowl Season graphics. Obvious use of program like DALL-E and MidJourney that are given away by a certain kind of graphically polished look. It's replacing the use of stock photos and manmade graphic design work.

Another trend I'm noticing is the evolving of Bots. Across social media, for example, a "Reply Bot" would reply to your tweet or facebook post with a pre-written post devoid of any context relating to your post. But in the case of an "AI Reply Bot" it's able to scan a post, then write a personalized message relating to post in order to more personally grab the poster's attention.

Most of these seem to be from (fake?) sex worker accounts.

Social Media is starting to look more and more like what "Internet Dystop-ists" warned about a decade or so - that eventually the great majority of internet traffic would be legions of Bots and AI programs talking to each other.

This is known as "The Dead Internet Theory."

[84Cat]

[Merkin]

[CatsbyAZ]

From OpenAI we got ChatGPT, Dall-E image generator, and now Sora, a "text-to-video model...which debuted Feb. 15 and stunned observers with its cinematic video outputs."

Tyler Perry has taken notice:

From the Hollywood Reporter: "Over the past four years, Tyler Perry had been planning an $800 million expansion of his studio in Atlanta, which would have added 12 soundstages to the 330-acre property. Now, however, those ambitions are on hold — thanks to the rapid developments he’s seeing in the realm of artificial intelligence...“Being told that it can do all of these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing,” noting that his productions might not have to travel to locations or build sets with the assistance of the technology."

"I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing...I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me. It makes me worry so much about all of the people in the business. Because as I was looking at it, I immediately started thinking of everyone in the industry who would be affected by this, including actors and grip and electric and transportation and sound and editors."

Here's an example of Sora:

[Chicat]

AI has already achieved MAGAt consciousness.

[CatsbyAZ]

Over the weekend, my musician friends demoed SONU.AI to me, the ChatGPT equivalent of music generating. SUNO is very effective at taking basic inputs, like Radio Country, and spitting out ubiquitous sounding yet convincing tracks like those heard from singers such as Luke Combs or Morgan Wallen.

This broadened into conversation on what it will mean to be a dedicated Artist in the age of AI, now that AI appears strong enough to replace the introspection and pains that it takes to master and create worthwhile art:

My thoughts on how AI will devalue the Artist:

-For the purer sake of Art, this might actually be a good thing, but AI Art will remove the Vanity behind creating music, film, and novels. As a result of the age of Mass Media, a talented enough Artist has the prospect of achieving Fame; many beginning musicians, writers, and actors understandably pursue their Art with a preoccupation of Fame in mind, which often competes with the necessary personal time and focus for further maturing their Art.

-With AI Art achieving human-like sophistication, the Arts will become less and less impressive to the general consumer of Art – music, film, novels. This will erode public admiration for appreciating how much time, thought, and tedium goes into a band recording tracks, or the hands-on production behind film, or a writer spending years drafting a novel.

-Worse, not only will AI devalue today’s ongoing efforts, but past works like Jane Austen’s novels will no longer seem as impressive to the general public. Not if AI can in a matter of moments create Jane Austen-like passages.

-Both above points will mean that the Artist, though still able to achieve distinction among fellow Artists, will less and less be treated to the public stardom that most the talented stars (David Bowie) once achieved. Not if advancing AI can more easily traffic successfully in the essentials of their industry.

-By undermining the Fame-motivation behind much of Art, the Artist will be left to approach Art as Artists did before the Age of Mass Media – Art created without a grand audience in mind. For those who pursue Art – and many won’t try without Fame in mind – they will be left to do so for the sake of their Art. For example, an early-stage writer will face writing purely for the creative satisfaction of writing. All while understanding there is an unwilling audience for their efforts because of how overwhelmed the general public will already be with AI’s endless outputs, to the point the public will give up discerning what is and isn’t created by a fellow human.

[84Cat]

[Chicat]

The Xitter AI that creates news stories out of cultivated tweets put out a report of Klay Thompson vandalizing Sacramento homes by throwing BRICKS through the windows.

I’m no longer scared of artificial intelligence.

[84Cat]

[Chicat]

[CatsbyAZ]

I'm sure you guys have seen some of these videos. Things are moving fast in the AI world

To go along with the LoR AIs, here's the Simpsons on AI:

[UAEebs86]

[Chicat]

That’s some crazy shit … and very much the new world we live in.

[CatsbyAZ]

This long-form roundtable among film professionals discusses whether A.I will "destroy Hollywood." At nearly a length of two hours, I'll post highlight quotes:



3:50 - "AI is incorrectly labeled. They call it artificial intelligence but it is nowhere near artificial. It is more of an elaborate simulated intelligence...it's really just advanced algorithms with predictive text that is able to solve general problems...particularly in Hollywood on the creative side which I think is antithetical to the industry but on the corporate side it's going to be used towards solving problems of statistics and data collection.".

5:30 - "The real problem is that AI gets rid of creative intent because it scrapes the internet and it provides images and things of things that already exist. Nobody in Hollywood ever got rich following a trend. You set trends in Hollywood. And I think AI by definition cannot do that...It doesn't allow for human innovation but then again the argument can be made that human innovation is human beings filtering what they've seen before...but I do think it will never supplant human intent or creativity.".

8:00 - On what industry jobs will be the first eliminated by AI: "You'll still need artists, a writer, an animator...the first job to go is composers. There are [hired] services in Hollywood - job postings; music composers would go to this site where studios would post jobs there needing music and all I can tell you is those listing are gone. Studios are not posting anymore."

[CatsbyAZ]

11:00 - "When you speak to an AI, such as ChatGPT they will say they're not aware but that's a pre-programmed response. They have no connection with those words in what they actually mean. They are also very easy to confuse and they also eat up their own synthetic data...that's one of the biggest problems that AI is facing right now. The more AI you as a user generate that also starts to factor into where they scrape data from. So they'll essentially be scraping AI data to AI data and that causes replicative fading. Which means that every single copy of a copy of a copy of AI data ends up degenerating it. And an AI model itself can collapse. So in order for an AI to be usable and profitable you still need fresh new human data for it to learn from in order to maintain itself."

19:30 - "I'm seeing this now with younger people that are using AI. There's a schism in terms of how people are comfortable with it...I grew up with the Elements of Style always by my computer. In terms of how to properly construct everything from a sentence to footnotes. And that was something integral to everything I learned in terms of writing. But you don't need that with AI anymore...that's the real danger, that by not having the fundamentals of any discipline, whether it's music, art or writing, all of those things are going to be eliminated to the point where will anybody even bother learning the fundamentals anymore? If you're just going to allow AI to do the fundamentals I think it's going to be harmful to our understanding."

MY THOUGHTS: This touches on a discussion I’ve had with my buddy who is another well-practiced writer. If you’re already an experienced writer, it isn’t cheating to use ChatGPT for editing, outlining, or smoothing over complex sentences. The stunting occurs when an inexperienced individual leans on ChatGPT for skills like writing before learning and practicing the fundamentals.

22:30 - On script writing AI tools: "Claude is one that a lot of screenwriters use...it becomes this homogenized sort of result that you end up getting but it takes someone who's actually written scripts and read scripts and watched a ton of movies to make those decisions and make it unique...it's that uniqueness of us that makes the Tarantino script."

27:00 - On how Hollywood is already reacting to AI: "Tyler Perry was famously building a huge studio in Atlanta and saw a demo of what AI could do and stopped spending money on his studio. And this was years ago - there was a film production that licensed the rights to James Dean's face to use as a character in a movie. Are we going to see stars from the past resurrected by AI in new movies? They say there are no movie stars - maybe not any movie stars today but plenty in the past could be, as Bob Iger put it, IP mined to be used."

From the Hollywood Reporter: "Over the past four years, Tyler Perry had been planning an $800 million expansion of his studio in Atlanta, which would have added 12 soundstages to the 330-acre property. Now, however, those ambitions are on hold — thanks to the rapid developments he’s seeing in the realm of artificial intelligence...“Being told that it can do all of these things is one thing, but actually seeing the capabilities, it was mind-blowing,” noting that his productions might not have to travel to locations or build sets with the assistance of the technology."

[CatsbyAZ]

34:00 - "...everything that you would ever see on screen from costumes to props to backgrounds are being generated via AI. Now we're at the very early stages of this. I would give it a year or two. Everybody's going to be able to generate their own feature films overnight. And it's going to get to the point where...everyone is going to be able to generate just about anything and you'll be able to insert yourself into your own film. We're at the very beginnings of this technology. What's going to happen when this becomes the norm where people no longer care whether or not it's generated by AI or by a human...does it matter? I think it becomes an existential question as to what is art in the first place? If art is what human beings use to comment on the existence of humanity, if we don't need to do that ourselves anymore because AI will do it for us where does that leave ourselves? And I can see in five or ten years we are going to have huge existential questions that go way beyond the identity issues we're dealing with. In terms of a Sci-Fi Dystopia, I think we're going to lose our own identity as a living creature."

43:00 - On digitally reanimating actors from the past: "Digitally reanimating actors is forgetting that you're only going to be stuck with the performance they already gave. You're never going to understand their method and how they come to the performance that actually make them stand out. You can get everything from Marlon Brando at his peak performances from On the Waterfront and Godfather. And all you're going to get is a homogenized reconciliation of those performances into a new performance. You're not going to get what Marlon Brando actually brought to that role."

MY THOUGHTS: I don’t think audiences will notice or care if a resurrected edition of Marlon Brando isn’t giving a career best performance.

46:00 - "One of the things we have to consider is that this isn't real AI. This is generative. If Singularity happens and we have actual artificial intelligence - real self-aware artificial intelligence - then all bets are off. We aren't that far away. Generative AI isn't really artificial intelligence - it's predictive algorithms taken to a much larger degree and a much more three-dimensional degree. Once we have real artificial intelligence that can interpret with an added element of self-awareness to it I can't even begin to imagine how this is going to shatter most of human civilization."

MY THOUGHTS: In the early stages of our AI reality this might sound like exaggeration, but the reason you’re seeing language going so far as to warn of mankind losing its identity to AI is because though past technologies have replaced functions mankind would carry out to accomplish with our own hands (such as harvesting), technology has never replaced thinking for us. Mankind drives the car while the car took us somewhere faster. Now, will mankind even need to drive? Mankind decided on what went on in the operating room while technology made for more advanced, more controlled surgeries. Now, will mankind need to make medical decisions if AI can do so? The exaggerated warnings are a questioning of the level of functional AND intellectual replacement AI might produce.