Attribution: Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash
Featuring the Fabulous Dadbots: Mark M., Dave S., Mark O., Dennis C., Paul C., and Geoff Carter
Fellow pundits,
You cannot call me any kind of expert on Artificial Intelligence (AI). But is that going to stop me from writing about it? Hell no!
I just listened to an episode of The Daily podcast from the NYT, entitled “AI’s Original Sin”. Allow me to regurgitate.
As you probably know, the engines behind the AI chatbots and other AI applications have an insatiable hunger for internet text in the English language. This led the three major players— OpenAI, Google, and Meta— to violate their own corporate standards and to take in enormous volumes of copyrighted data.
Lawsuits are brewing. The Times itself is bringing such a suit. AI engines have sucked in huge volumes of Times articles and are using them to train their AI engines. I’m no copyright lawyer, but this appears to go far beyond the limited “fair use” exception that allows copyrighted material to be used.
The industry giants warn: if we’re forced to license all this material, it’s going to drive up the cost and make AI uneconomical. It’s not clear to me that that is all that persuasive of an argument. If it would delay the takeover of civilization by our robot overlords by a few decades, is that such a bad thing?
AI is one of those technological advances that I can’t be bothered to care much about. And, although the economic and cultural changes wrought by AI may be very disruptive, it won’t affect me all that much.
To some extent, this apathy is a natural consequence of my own aging process. Jesus Christ, our generation has been forced to adapt, again and again, to a dizzying and relentless pace of new technology. At some point, I just want to get off the train. Did a retired blacksmith in the 1890s care which brand of horseless carriage was going to dominate? Probably not.
However, let’s carve out an exception for a fully adaptive sexbot. Something like that just might work! I have signed up for beta testing.
And I will definitely take that Alzheimer’s pill, if they ever perfect it.
Have any of you fellow elders experienced a growing apathy over technological and cultural change? Of course you have! None of you geezers could recite a Taylor Swift lyric if your life depended on it.
-Mark M.
- Swift? Correct. I got natta.
- Tech in general: Growing apathetic? (or disgusted or worn out or frustrated)? A: I’m up and down. I quit calling others for help…just google and figure it out. Not sure how long I’ll keep waging the good fight.
- Copyright issues: Yeah, I knew the Times had one going… I bet Neil Young (who just recently re–allowed his music on Spotify) is humming the Dylan lyric: How does it feel? (he and a million other music artists who have lost a lot of do re mi with the dawn of the internet and digitizing music. Who moved my cheese? (see also Kodak…and of course that hard of hearing blacksmith—who gets too much space btw. A number of blacksmiths were pedophiles.
- AI: With fake news, internet trolls, robo calls, etc.… I like to think society has a jaundiced eye. Don’t just question authority, question AOC, question Bernie, question Mother T., question your wife, kids…. with this voice duplication shit it may not be them leaving me with some sort of emergency—despite the perfectly matching tone, the emotion in the voices… OMG, my daughter is in pain!. I had this paranoid idea in that respect. My family would use some sort of code phrase, say, Afghanistan Bananastand to authenticate an emergency correspondence. (some of you will remember it from the crime-com movie: Hot Rock. Same formula as A Fish Called Wanda, btw. Loved both.
- AI: In the healthcare field, I’ve read how much better bots can be at analyzing complex data, even with looking at various images. A lot of imaging out there in the medical field—several dozens of things like an MRI—all taking complex “images”—these used to x-rays or ultrasound movies but are now ginormous data files. Nvidia stumbled into this and other massive file needs after making a chip to keep challenging the kids doing on-line gaming. Fortnite anyone? I’ve been futzing with internet providers lately, (appreciate your condolences) and they badger one with download and upload speeds that you’ll never need… With the caveat” unless you are moving huge file sizes….or drumroll…doing heavy duty GAMING.
- Last Prediction: There’ll be confusion/conflation of terms. Exactly what is AI vs machine learning vs the simple google prompts that help further our searches. Also, there is siloed AI—the lack thereof MM once explained to us was the limitation with IBM’s Edison at NML’s financial investing needs (e.g.: MRIs looking solely at meniscus tears… or: find best sexbots in Phuket…etc… vs: Generative AI (tackles anything)… e.g.: What should I do today?
-D
(😎… I made up that blacksmith pedophile line).
A paper I have a digital subscription to has joined 7 other (second tier) newspapers in another copyright lawsuit against the AI giants:
“The St. Paul Pioneer Press and seven other newspapers sued Microsoft and OpenAI on Tuesday, claiming the technology giants illegally harvested millions of copyrighted articles to create their cutting-edge “generative” artificial intelligence products including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.” –The St. Paul Pioneer Press
Anything that slows down this AI juggernaut is good in my book. The AI race has so many parallels to the nuclear arms race. “We gotta get there before those dirty Chinese Communists. We’ll worry about the dangers later.” Get where exactly? Just looks like more powerful algorithms to control the masses to me. More mind control technology. I remember when the promise of AI included cool stuff like creating conscious machines. Cool SciFi stuff, in the vein of Space Odyssey HAL computers. Now it just seems like the only objective is more efficient profit extraction and war-making. BORING.
MarkO
Yeah, more efficient marketing (how can it get any smarter?…already I feel like I’ve got a laser pointer on my back 24/7… Wonder what Noam Chomsky, (marketing the root of most evils), thinks about AI. Aside, while talking (about this) with tech savvy son and DIL in SF, she picked up her phone, didn’t turn it on but just said something random…and then said to us: Watch, I’ll start getting targeted ads for (whatever she just said). I said: No way… it’s not “listening to us all the time, is it? They replied “Way”.
Trust you’ve seen an episode or two of Black Mirror? If not, a good tech creepy series…all different one hour episodes. The Star Trek one—creepier than usual Jesse Plemons at the helm, is a good one, another with killer dogbots policing dystopia, another with an eye gadget that plays back one’s day… including one’s trysts.
–Dave S.
And, speaking of BORING. AI has gotten sucked into the culture wars.
Since AI engines process mass amounts of data from the ‘net, the results generated from the chatbots have tended to be less than diverse. Why? Cuz the internet itself ain’t very diverse. So, for example, the bots, when asked for pictures of CEOs, would show only white men.
Google tried to take that on by retraining its “Gemini” product to NOT be so cisgendered suburban. But the engineers apparently got carried away, so the bot is now generating DEI-adjacent images for every question, including a black Founding Father.
Funny, yes, and good for laffs on Fox News, but really just a tiresome example of culture warriors taking their corners in a never ending cage match.
–Mark M
You know, this AI hive of knowledge reminds me of Star Trek: Next Generation’s villains The Borg—a collective hive of intelligence and communication bent on consuming everything in its path. Life imitates art. My brother-in-law Michael who is an illustrator has pointed out that AI can manufacture illustrations, but some are strangely alien—ahuman, if you will. Hands with seven fingers for example, or strangely assymetric faces (no three-breasted women—that’s been done). My point is that there’s a human sensibility that hasn’t, probably can’t, but hopefully won’t, be solved by AI. Imagine novels, films, art, songs, and even poetry manufactured by AI. How can AI imagine the terror of mortality or the anguish of unrequited love except through recycled and communal emotions which will undoubtedly lead to the least common denominator: Love is good. Death bad. No. Death good. Love bad. Does not compute.
This is no sci-fi show. We’re three quarters of the way there right now.
G
I listened to a podcast on AI recently that referenced an amateur AI detective’s investigation of a popular graphics generating platform. They found a phenomenon that they speculate is a general feature of the current state of AI technology, that the outputs tend to homogenize over time. They requested illustrations of elephants on day 1 and were presented a wide array of elephants of varying size, gender, color, age, etc… They repeated the same request on successive days and gradually the elephant illustrations began to look more and more alike until after a relatively short period of time, all the elephants looked almost identical. I’m not a computer scientist but I suspect that this is a result of AI engines “flooding the zone” of the internet with images of their own making, per their own algorithms, and creating a data pool of their own making from which they hoover up for each succeeding user request.
If this glitch of AI technology is not somehow rectified, I suspect that every query for founding father illustrations will eventually result in an androgenous Vin-Diesel-in-a-wig type creature for our cultural consumption.
MarkO
Yah Mark, you’ve covered it. The AI companies are using synthetic data which is generated by… AI. So, small errors get reinforced and regenerated in a hall of funhouse mirrors! The biological equivalent is inbreeding, right? But it does turn out some mean banjo players.
–Mark M.
Creepy story—with chatgpt examples– in NY Times “Morning” today bout trying out AI companions… Apparently you can choose from platonic to “racey”. You can also choose what they look like. Takes that Joaquin Phoenix Alexa infatuation movie (only saw the ads for it), to another level. Also, since no one has said it yet—trust you’ve heard the term for the runaway errors: hallucinations. I’d call it a bad trip, man… like at a concert where some dude gets up on stage and warns of the bad acid out there…..
–Dave S.
I read that NYT story too. The delicious part for me is that the author, with his wife’s permission (I love that he felt compelled to add that disclaimer), created a “racy” companion bot that immediately began hustling him with romance/blackmail scams. His own creation! He had to terminate the bot, HAL-style, pronto. Gotta love it.
–Mark O.