Attribution: Photo by Luke Jones on Unsplash
Featuring the Fabulous Dadbots: Dave S., Mark M., Mark O., Dennis C., John K., Michael D., and Geoff Carter
Sundry sharing. My love/hate with ai took a step in the hate direction after getting taken for a ride. Once bitten twice shy…, fool me once… Both leap to mind. So first that episode, them more: some love, some hate.
Clicked on Neil Young’s (5) favorite songs. Delightful. Solid pics, taught me a few things and signature Neil takes—he’s way partial to non studio, mistakes, scratchy…in a word, raw. As opposed to polish. 20 some minutes long, so some depth from Neil as to why he loved these 5: You Really got me-Kinks, The Weight—The Band, Gimme Shelter—Stones, Lighter Shade of Pale—Procol Harum and Change is Gonna Come—Sam Cooke. My wow, learning moment: Gimme Shelter was so ubiquitous, I never inspected it. One of those great songs, bl, bl, blah. Numbed by over-exposure. But wow. Two words: Merry Clayton! Two more: Rape, Murder. She comes on late in the song, replacing, War, Children, with R & M in the refrain and the emotion (terror) in her voice, along with Keith and company’s impending doom melody hits hard.
Another one popped up—Oscar Robertson’s (5) best NBA players. Ho hum, I won’t say more
Then more 5 best were popping up-various sports, celebs…and Ok, I get it, I’m a target. The Neil voice was ai generated.The whole video a deep fake. I suspected something initially—cuz, tho it sounded like him and the content was signature Neil, his pace is not so disciplined. Was like a lecture from a humanities class at Middlebury: The Folk Rock Movement. Suno ai Music Generator, partnered with Warner to deliver it. Neil, as you may know has resisted all things tech, only reluctantly and recently allowed reinstatement to Spotify and others. He’s not making any coin off of this Suno ai—bit, but apparently made his bit signing something with Warner, earlier.
The others I glanced at—after inspecting, were all ai. This shit is coming at us fast. Is this really me?, right now? (Twilight Zone theme…). We’ll have to come up with some impenetrable top secret dad bot watermark-esque grammar device. Dennis: Get on that.
Plus: I recently did a pro bono bit of pool HVAC inspection/suggesting up nofth. A local community focused friend, has a deal cooking to re-open a 2000 era pool at small college to be run by a nearby Y. Pools are cost/ headache for the college—relegated to storage for 20 years. Even Ys see them as lost leaders, but, via “programming” they have a successful financial formula. And programming is not just water aerobics—includes all sorts of activities, many on dry land. I gave ai a description of the system, a few thoughts and after 3-4 follow up Q/A, I had a firm handle on HVAC/Pool Pumping, both design and cost. Back in my engineering days, I could’ve sold this “Concept and Budget Report” for $25k. Took me an hour with ai. Plenty of meat, well organized, well summarized.
Minus: A friend’s take: We just need to keep from numbing old brains and stunting the growth of new ones. To which I thought:
. (taking umbrage)…not numbing for me, just the opposite,. Recall the old days (for me), going upstairs to our Funk and Wagnall encyclopedia set and paging through a topic du jour. Hell, my sister and I used to drool over the better encyclopedias, (e..g.: Britannica—bigger, color pics…) at our high school and public library. ai is leaping beyond just the raw data, but at the end of the day it is merely doing the encylco page turn IMO—just months of it, in seconds. But it is not generating anything that I couldn’t find elsewhere. It’s grabbing an LLM which, theoretically, I have access too. So far, it has only blown me away with speed, not content. Now some of the content; expansion is titillating—but so was thumbing through the F & W. So, I’m on the other end of the spectrum, GPT is cross fertilizing, stimulating, not numbing. Bottom line it is vastly increasing both the depth and breadth of my learning
· Yet I get it re stunting younger minds. The NYT, (Conversation) touched on this recently…writing class at Duke was the example. If ai eliminates all your mistakes—one is not learning from them. Someone is suggesting lowering the bar—thus pressure, incentive to cheat—as a way to decrease ai usage. We’ll see.
Interested in sage bots chin scratchings.
Dave.
In So Dave, was the Neil encounter a video, or only his voice? ….Yes, that preternaturally steady speaking pace (Midddlebury seminar)is a dead giveaway. At least for now. They’ll soon find a way to randomize pauses and disfluencies (um, er, uh). I’m thinking this was voice only. AI NY on video would have looked way too robotic.
That ai-generated proposal is impressive. My oldest daughter works as an advocate and manager in the non-profit sector. She tells us repeatedly how she uses AI on a daily basis to write summaries, presentations, etc. She says that AI has eliminated the role of the junior level assistant. It’s a huge time and money saver.
My only problem with that is: Where are the senior level people going to come from in the future? You do more than grunt work as a junior. You absorb the mission of the organization and learn from watching the senior people. You pick up on the nuances of client management. I guess that’s all out the window. But I guess that ultimately this is a weak argument. Humans are infinitely adaptable. They will figure it out somehow.
I do love Gimme Shelter. After an interminable haunting intro, building and building, with one corkscrew of a guitar phrase they get down to business. At age 11 (in 1969), I was Bobby Wagner’s Sentinel (newspaper) route helper. He had a transistor radio in his eagon, playin’ the hits. Band of Gold, Ball of Confusion, The Question (by the Moody Blues), Hair, that Stone Ponies song. Crackling Rosie by Neil Diamond. And of course, Gimme Shelter. (Preceding list was generated w/o the use of AI!).
Only voice. They had a static image of him…maybe even had him speaking a bit before the lecture to set the hook, (can’t recall for sure and it’s not popping up now…).
MM
It is funny, a mystery, a miracle, etc. …how capitalism always adapts. Whether its spices, furs, beads (who the f ever wanted beads btw?), horses, bikes for transport (I just watched an ai history of Schwinn video), cars, bikes again—this time for rec, services (therapy, legal, medicine, now bloggers, substackers, even f’en influencers)…the market mechanics always morph to an equilibrium. It may percolate for a bit but never boils over.
And the market purchase rate—something, ahem, I can’t recall being tracked, but golly, it must be 1000s x higher volume, given this internet thing, ebay, FB Marketplace, Craig and Angie, A and A (‘zon and ‘baba)…etc. … I wonder what that does to GDP? Banks and VISA must love it. Society is spending w/a bump stock.
Excuse this dusty observation. New to me.🤓.
-d.
That’s The Invisible Hand at work, as posited by Adam Smith in the 1700s.
But despite the miracle of the free market, it’s being challenged (bigly) by the Chinese command economy. For example . They have a bunch of e-vehicle manufacturers who are in the red, apparently, but presenting a huge challenge to American and European e-veh manufacturers. Chinese govt subsidies keep these co’s afloat.
-MM
I watched that NY video before Dave posted on it. It never occurred to me that it might be AI generated. I guess I need to approach anything on the internet with increased wariness. I mean I have approached anything produced with political connotations with extreme skepticism. Anything related to the news cycle or “national security” for sure. But now they are using one of my beloved cultural icons, NY, as a channel for their fuckery. That’s a step too far! Torches, pitchforks and hammers to the data centers.
I should have suspected it was AI generated because it was seriously boring and the NY I know is never boring. His explanations of the worthiness of his five song picks were repetitive and unoriginal. I tuned out before his Gimme Shelter spiel out of boredom and my disbelief that Gimme Shelter would be on his list (it doesn’t reflect what he claimed were his criteria at all, in my opinion).
MarkO
Hey bots,
Twilight Zone territory is right. This Neil Young “lecture” (so unlike the Neil Young we’ve seen) so aptly named by Mark, begs the question of why. Why was this thrown out there? For the edification of Generation Z? I highly doubt it. To see how effective products like this might be in fooling your average bear? More likely. Had I not my antennae raised by DS and MM’s warnings, I might have taken the interview at face value. The premise reminds me of a Philip K. Dick novel Through a Scanner Darkly where undercover cops take on aliases that are holographic projections and finally culminates to a point where identity is so random and fluid, it becomes meaningless.
Granted, as DS said, AI can be an incredibly useful tool, but Mark’s concerns are well—concerning. If AI takes over some of the fundamental and foundational tasks of the workplace, how will middle and high-level management be trained? Those learned skills might go by the wayside, the same as memorizing phone numbers (even their own) or reading an analog clock, or performing simple math functions have become anachronisms to today’s kids. I met some teachers who don’t even bother teaching the multiplication table anymore which to me is a huge mistake. Not only should everyone have that knowledge, but kids should have to memorize something that big—or long—at sometime in their lives. I had to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution when I was in the eighth grade.
Maybe that wouldn’t be a bad assignment for everyone these days.
G
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