The two faces of AI | The Seattle Times by David Horsey
The lure of enormous profits combined with the fear of a competing company or rival country getting ahead in AI development will be an irresistible force that no ethics panel or government regulators will be able to stop.
horsey’s opinion in toto:
The two faces of AI | The Seattle Times
jack, before you get on to me about the wonders of AI let me repost your comment from last month:
Hey Pat, there is nothing inauthentic about AI. It is American as nachos, spaghetti red or cashew chicken.
And can it be any less authentic than the pablum we view on our streaming services.
greed & competition are also authentically American and always lurking in the shadows ready to foul every wonderous invention.
no skunks at this party last night
The Guardian
also last night 60 minutes reported another wonderous discovery coming our way sooner than we’re ready for
Google, IBM make strides toward quantum computers that may revolutionize problem solving – CBS News
“Money” was the sixth track from English progressive rock band Pink Floyd’s 1973 album “The Dark Side Of The Moon”. Written by bassist Roger Waters, it opened Side Two of the original vinyl LP, and is the only song on the album to enter the top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number 13. “Money” is particularly notable for its unusual 7/4 time signature, its distinctive bassline and the seven-beat ‘loop’ of money-related sound effects that opens the track: coins clinking, a cash register ringing, etc. The song is also notable for its dramatic change to 4/4 time for an extended guitar solo…..
something else worth watching yesterday
Former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney says that voters have become increasingly numb to politicians warning of looming dangers to democracy, so in her new book, “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” she lays out the case for the threats to the Constitution posed by Donald Trump should he regain the White House. Cheney talks with CBS News’ John Dickerson about how the leading GOP candidate’s own words reveal his plans for a second term, and why she believes blocking Trump and preventing a Republican House majority in the next election is “the cause of our time.”
Articles in The Atlantic’s entire issue today:
The Revenge Presidency
Trump Will Abandon NATO
Trump’s Loyalists, Lapdogs, and Cronies
How Trump Gets Away With It
Is the Press Ready for a Second Trump Term?
A Warning About a Second Trump Term
Four More Years of Unchecked Misogyny
No puppet. No puppet! YOURE the puppet!
Neener neener.
Made a Prime Rib dinner for my visiting cousin yesterday. She wanted recipes for my scalloped potatoes and horseradish, so I wrote them down:
Craig’s Slow Cooker Scalloped Potatoes
Craig’s Creamy Homemade Horseradish
also, cousin wanted me to write down my Prime Rib recipes:
Craig’s Prime Rib (various methods)
Word of the Day: inanity This word has appeared in 12 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
inanity \ i-ˈna-nə-tē \ noun
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/04/learning/word-of-the-day-inanity.html
https://deadline.com/2023/11/justine-bateman-sag-aftra-deal-ai-1235616848/
“Justine Bateman [an actress and director with a degree in computer science] Discusses Concerns With SAG-AFTRA Deal’s AI Protections, Warns Loopholes Could “Collapse The Structure” Of Hollywood”
“SAG-AFTRA’s 118-day strike came to an end last week, when the studios finally struck a deal with the guild. While the ratification vote started this week, the union has yet to release the full tentative MBA. Instead, they released a detailed summary of the contract, which includes extensive language about how the studios can and cannot use AI to replace actors or alter their performances.”
“Since then, Bateman has pointed out several concerns with the AI portion of the summary, including how the use of “synthetic performers” has the potential to replace living actors as well as how consent will (or won’t) be obtained to use digital replicas of real performers.”
“But the biggest issue is the ‘synthetic performers,’ which I just call human looking AI objects, because they’re not performers. Having that in there would be like if the Teamsters said that it’s okay to use self driving trucks instead of them. Or, it would be like the DGA not having the definition of a director or any of the other positions being human, that you could have a director that’s just a generative AI base. It would be like the WGA saying it’s okay if chatGPT authors full scripts. That’s what that is, and I’ve maintained from the very beginning, when I started talking to actors about what would happen, that’s the key to the front door.”
“You can do all these renovations in the house. You can get all these other gains in the contract. But if you don’t get that, if you don’t get control of what they can do without you based on 100 years of performances…you put in a prompt and you get out this Frankenstein amalgamation of performances. I said that if you don’t get that, you’ve given them the front key to the house, because it’s not just the actors. It’s the crew, it’s the drivers, it’s everybody. If you don’t have to shoot an actor, you don’t need a set. You don’t need a crew. You don’t need drivers.”
“Well, in order to keep the profession alive at all… that synthetic performer sh*t has to come out. I told you the equivalents in the other unions. The Screen Actors Guild represents human performers, and when you have a clause in the MBA that allows for something else to take those parts, I’m not sure. I mean, it’s supposed to be of service to the members that are in that union. Synthetic AI objects are not in the Screen Actors Guild. There’s also going to be big financial ramifications for the union itself when they use those objects. That’s an object. That’s not a person, not going to be paid, not paying dues to the union, you’re not going to have pension and health contributions, on behalf of that object. I know it says in there that they’d negotiate consideration, but it doesn’t even say financial consideration, unless they add that word. So how are you going to force the studios to pay you something?”
“They can go to Credo23.com and the ‘AI and film’ page, and it lists all the things that I believe will happen in the business. There are hyperlinks to all these video demos, and they could just look at that and decide for themselves.”
Pat
Telling me that folks will use AI in greedy and corrupt ways is like telling me it is going to get cold next month. No shit. The same thing happened with almost every invention man has discovered. It is kinda one of them human things. AI is a tool, much like my nail gun which has built McMansions and housing for the needy, AI will be what ever the user makes of it. But I should be interesting.
I personally think the whole AI phenom is over hyped, we are streaming too many 1950’s sci-fi movies and taking too much joy is scaring our silly selves. AI will change the work place, true. But then so did the computer. Whole categories of “Jobs of the future” became obsolete. My neighbor got back from Vietnam and got a job as an apprentice type setter, a good job with a good future. 15 years later he is sweeping floors. Nobody needs type setters. Mrs Jack was a graphic design artist who first started her career when cut and paste meant you got out the exacto and the paste pot. Need some exacto blades? I got a bunch of them because at some point a tool she used all the time and bought blades by the carton, got shoved to the back of the cabinet. In her lifetime she had to completely relearn her craft. In a short 10 years what would have taken a large staff of production people, she was doing at her desk on a PC. And her work place just kept changing. I’m certain if she was around today she would be playing with the current AI programs to see how she could best use them to turn out a better product.
Jack
If an actor can be replaced with AI then they probably weren’t much of an actor anyway. What that article tells me is they have been paid good money for rolling out a crappy product that can easily be done by a computer. In other words they are going to have to get off their ass and step up their game. The sad fact is as the streaming services and builders of McMansions have learned selling crap makes you more money than trying to turn out a quality product.
Jack
Speaking of selling crap. I did a house inspection yesterday for a niece who is tring to buy a house. The house a 3 bedroom ranch was crammed with figurines. Every wall in every room had multiple display cases. God knows how many thousands of dollars this woman has spent. Everything was dust free, just keeping a house you live in with that many dust collectors as clean as she did is beyond my imagination. I know I couldn’t do it.
Jack
The election of Damocles.
today’s meme… because I love cats…
https://venturebeat.com/ai/hollywoods-strike-battle-over-ai-and-3d-scanning-has-been-decades-in-the-making/
“The first week of the strike, a young actor (early 20s) told me she was a BG actor on a Marvel series and they sent her to “the truck” – where they scanned her face and body 3 times. Owned her image in perpetuity across the Universe for $100. Existential, is right.”
“Meanwhile, voice cloning AI apps like those offered by startup ElevenLabs and demoed by Meta are also raising the prospect that actors won’t even need to record voiceovers for animated performances, including those involving their digital doubles.”
“Now with the power of generative AI, those 3D scans that were once seen as extensions of a human actor’s performance on a set can be repurposed and theoretically used as the basis for new performances that don’t require the actor — nor their consent — going forward. You could even get an AI chatbot like ChatGPT to write a script and have a digital actor perform it. But because of the inherent complexity of these technologies, they are all generally, and improperly, conflated into one, grouped under the moniker du jour, “AI.”
The decimation of that business will impact supporting businesses. Few actors, fewer make-up people, fewer set designers, few costume people, catering for twelve vs two-hundred actors and crew members.
Hollywood is a very visible canary in the proverbial coal mine. We’ve all probably dealt with bots instead of customer service humans. More non-human intern will come. Amazon is working on robots to pick some orders. Fewer humans will be necessary across industries. And, Republicans want women to keep making babies. For what?
“That said, we are also working on what we call Autonomous Virtual Human technology. Here we create a fully digital human, either based on a real person or a synthetic identity, powered by generative AI components such as chatbots. The goal is to create a realistic virtual human the user can have a conversation or other interaction with. We believe that the primary application of this technology is outside of entertainment, in areas such as customer service, hospitality, healthcare, etc…”
“In July, VentureBeat reported that Synthesia actually hired real actors to create a database of 39,765 frames of dynamic human motion that its AI would train on. This AI will allow customers to create realistic videos from text, though the ideal use case is more for company training videos, promotions and commercials rather than full feature films.”
“…you can manipulate assets, and you can make crowd scenes, parade scenes, audiences, all without having to pay actors to do that…”
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/03/congress-ai-fellows-tech-companies-00129701
“Key Congress staffers in AI debate are funded by tech giants like Google and Microsoft”
“Big tech companies are funneling money through a science nonprofit to help pay the salaries of AI staffers in Congress…”
“The apparent conflict of tech-funded figures working inside the Capitol Hill offices at the forefront of AI policy worries some tech experts, who fear Congress could be distracted from rules that would protect the public from biased, discriminatory or inaccurate AI systems.”
“As Congress searches for staffers that can make sense of the fast-moving technology, new tech fellowships have sprouted across Washington.”
“Money from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia and IBM is partially funding the salaries of the AI fellows placed by AAAS in influential Senate offices this October…”
“Most people would be concerned if Bank of America, Chase, any of these large companies were funding staffers that worked on the Banking Committee,” said Stretton. “Having staffers work in offices producing legislation that — directly or indirectly — benefits the companies or industry funding those staffers is a conflict of interest.”
BiD
That is kinda the way the system works in DC. And don’t let the writer fool you the Wallstreet bankers have their folks writing legislation too.
When it comes to complex issues who else can explain it. If you turn the average congressman loose and make him write the rules we would really have a mess and on fast moving areas like Tech or finance the average government worker is 10 years out of date.
Jack
I would gladly give Elizabeth Warren a crack at it.
The computer graphics can produce an image that you would swear is a human. Febreeze, the air cleaner product, has at least two commercials with very good images, not perfect though. What I find interesting is the commercials are done in English and Spanish. Also, the computer image is mixed with shots of live humans. It took me a couple of watchings to ensure that the image was not human.
Notice I purposely did not use artificial Intelligence because this is neither. Computer graphics have been improving for decades, what they are doing now is incremental from Avatar. The awe expressed in the last year since the promotion of the words is still hot. This is so funny to many computer types, it is just what they have been working on for decades. Now that the media is wetting its collective drawers whenever someone whispers, “AI”, we have to put up with parched throat, dilated eyes, wet undies, as they make it sound like the programming is the end of humanity. Bull. There is no software and computer capable of anything human. There are systems built and programmed to perform some human task or tasks, but nothing at all approaching end of times monsters.
“AI” means many things, it’s already everywhere, already causing problems, especially the image generators, “yes” it’s only going to get worse, “no” government can’t move quickly enough to regulate it, too busy picking fistfights in hearings and expelling members
you’re training it every time you do anything on the internet 😱
All sensitive data needs to be firewalled yesterday
most effective way congress can regulate it immediately is to restrict data collection/retention
Yesterday I was trying to figure out why I felt “nothing” about the passing of Sandra Day O’Connor. Today I was reminded.
Bush V. Gore: One reason to refrain from lionizing Sandra Day O’Connor:
the EU does a much better job at regulating tech than the US, have successfully regulated the video-game industry, website data collection, social media targeted marketing…
Thanks EU ❤️ sorry about Brexit 😭
“Can you use it in a sentence? …inanity: a total lack of meaning, significance or substance “
Ivy,
Hannity is the embodiment and epitome of inanity.
Brilliant, Pat‼️
Hannity’s inanity fills every nook and crannity.
Because I’m lazy – Hannity’s inanity.
NEW THREAD