Infinite Kiss
GOODLINKS 2023-12-05: Sculpting Consciousness / AI-Warfare in Israel / Invisibles in the Neo-City / Record Emissions 2023 / Organoid Intelligence Biobots / Ultrasound BCI / GTA 6 and much more.
KISS Forever!
After playing their last gig on December 2nd in Madison Square Garden, glam rockers KISS introduced their new shiny digital avatars which will go on and have giant CGI-tongues wiggling around on stage forever. KISS will be the second band with a perpetual, constant presence after ABBA, from whom they got the tech.
From the BBC: Kiss to become 'immortal' thanks to Abba's avatar technology.
The avatars were designed by George Lucas's visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and financed by Swedish conglomerate Pophouse Entertainment, which is co-owned by Abba's Björn Ulvaeus. The companies previously collaborated on the Abba Voyage show, which recreates a 1970s-era Abba concert in a custom-built London arena. That show makes an estimated £2m per week.
However, Kiss's avatars seem unlikely to be as grounded in reality as Abba's digital replicas. The characters that appeared in New York were 8ft tall, breathing fire and shooting electricity from their fingers, while floating above the audience.
I'd like to know if the new CGI-KISS will also play in ABBAs custom arena, because if so, then Björn Ulvaeus has a real money machine at hand here. He and his company can digitize any big shot popstar, license the stage tech to other arenas and distribute the artists as digital files, akin to digital movie files for theaters.
Besides debates about the creepiness of infinite and always-same stars performing on stage -- remember Elvis in Blade Runner 2049 -- and how this might make artistic progress in pop grind to a halt, it is pretty fascinating to watch this new CGI-avatar-based industry for live events unfold in the real world.
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Art & Design
In Sculpting Consciousness: Art as a Materialization of Research, Ari Melenciano created a "yearlong self-designed art residency" to develop "obscure forms of ontology and epistemology for new branches of thought" in a practice she calls Computational Anthropology.
If i understand this right, she created this residency and a research lab as a sort of piece of art in itself, an experimental setup to go intentionally crazy with art theory and philosophy in context of AI and psychology analysis: "What happens when one simultaneously considers and seeks to explore the possibilities at the nexus of the collective conscious and unconscious? What if the tools used were mythopoesis (the making of myths), AI, and cultural metacognition? Similar to the opportunities that exist because of neuroplasticity to create new neural pathways, how might this practice design new pathways for artistic synthesis? And finally, when engaging with such mythopoetic (thus inherently, psychoanalytic) tactics, what might be revealed about the self (and thus, society)?"
Some fascinating work there.
Updates on my post about the artpiece by Center for Political Beauty featuring a deepfaked chancellor of germany announcing a ban of nazi-party AFD: After their video getting censored on bogus coypright claims by the government, the artists are suing the government. And: In a new video featuring the deepfake voice of party leader Alice Weidel, they're claiming that their fake company Flyerservice Hahn printed and sent out letters to all party members in which they were asked to upload evidence of their own antidemocratic and unconstitutional nazi views at AfD-Verbot.de.
AI and Tech
‘The Gospel’: how Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza and ‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza: In former operations up to 2021, the IDF were able to produce 50 targets per year based on intelligence which only included major targets with influence in terror orgs like Hamas. With AI, they can identify 100 targets in a day, ranging from influential leaders to nobodies within the orgs. The input data of the system includes everything from on the ground intelligence to drone footage. This way, their rocket systems can bomb individual houses of suspected terrorists all day long, civilian victims and collateral damage be damned. Other states will watch this and adapt and I guess its futile to ask for a ban on AI-systems in war operations at this point.
New papers on AI-bias: Trained AI models exhibit learned disability bias and AI image generator Stable Diffusion perpetuates racial and gendered stereotypes.
"How (not) to get hit by a self-driving car 🚗⚠️💥 A street-based game that challenges visitors to avoid being detected by an AI-powered camera." If you're in Tokyo, you can play it at the Invisibles in the Neo City-exhibit. Here's another bit.
Visual Anagrams: Generating Multi-View Optical Illusions with Diffusion Models: "We present a simple, zero-shot method to generate multi-view optical illusions. These are images that look like one thing, but change appearance or identity when transformed".
AI and the Rise of Mediocrity: "The problem for AI is that creative work is not predictable. It is not about statistical likelihood or simply mashing up the familiar—it is about leaps in logic and counterintuitive juxtapositions. It is about the unique experience of the individual, and seeking to do what has never been done before. It is about the least predictable next word or pixel. So the danger is not that AI programs will write the next great novel or create the next great painting, successfully replacing human inventiveness: they never will. The greater danger is that they won’t need to create great writing or art."
One more study finds that humans can't differentiate between human and synthetic text: AI- and human-generated online content are considered similarly credible: "Participants in our study rated AI-generated and human-generated content as similarly credible, regardless of the user interface (...) participants rated AI-generated content as having higher clarity and appeal, although there were no significant differences in terms of perceived message authority and trustworthiness". Regulators are calling for labelling and watermarks for synthetic output, but this only goes so far that i can cut'n'paste any text output, edit and post it on any platform. I'm not sure if there's a big cognitive difference in perception of posted synthetic or human bullshit on the web, but i guess there isn't. So the bottleneck of the supposedly coming AI-flood still is human attention and credibility is still earned by trust and the old saying that "it must be true i read it on the internet" is still relevant.
Generative AI images are making us numb to the awesome of reality: "Humans are wired to appreciate novelty. We want to be surprised. The scarcity of beauty is what makes it so compelling, and AI has shattered the concept of scarcity into perfect little shards. This is a problem, according to science. Awe is one of the fundamental feelings that makes us humans." Accelerationists, in their dumb shortsightedness -- i think it's hilarious that many of them think that they are "rational", because they are actually everything but --, dream of a world of abundance. But humans don't thrive on abundance, they thrive on a balance of availability and scarcity. We need stuff to be available to survive, and we need scarcity to be creative and solve problems. The outcome of that balance is progress. Like all utopian views, accelerationist utopia would be damaging human psychology and hence society, so thank god for journalists writing about their most influential memetic centers.
While the copyright case against AI art generators just got stronger with more artists and evidence, one of the defendants, Runway ML, now partners with Getty Images on new AI video models. Smart move to legitimize your business in face of copyright lawsuits, Runway. Meanwhile: Getty lawsuit against Stability AI to go to trial in the UK.
This DeepMind AI Rapidly Learns New Skills Just by Watching Humans: DeepMind achieves social learning by "cultural transmition" and imitation in AI agents. In other words: AI can meme now.
What to Do When the Ghost in the Machine Is You is a short interview with Adafruit-founder Limor Fried. Adafruit is one of the largest providers for open source hardware and DIY-tech for makers in the US and her code for drivers are regulary becoming a standard, with the consequence that ChatGPT and Githubs Copilot are writing code in her style.
Multifaceted: the linguistic echo chambers of LLMs: Going down the rabbit hole of the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of the phrase "a complex and multifaceted phenomenon". "Multifaceted" until recently was an obscure term with disproportionate usage on Quora, until ChatGPT was trained on Quora output and now the phrase get's reposted by Quora-Spambots, making "a complex and multifaceted phenomenon", well, a complex and multifaceted phenomenon. It's complex and multifaceted all the way down.
Mike Masnick from the longtime copyleft blog Techdirt in If Creators Suing AI Companies Over Copyright Win, It Will Further Entrench Big Tech argues for a hands-off approach to AI-companies scrapping the web for copyrighted images for training data, because it's fair use. Read him, he's the best when it comes to copyleft thinking, and i think he's wrong.
Scraping for AI simply is not fair use because a) companies use a research setting for scraping (which may be fair use) and then build a commercial product on top, which b), as study after study confirms is biting a larger and larger chunk out of the creative market, which absolutely is an argument against fair use. AI companies using artists images is not fair use and they deserve a paycheck for working on products by multibillion dollar companies. His argument that this paycheck may be too low to make a living and could be limited to a one-time-payment, does not mean that scraping for AI is fair use.
Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages. I'm very sure libertarian e/acc crpyto bros will care.
Social Media and Webculture
When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media: A new study found that most users would pay for others to not use socmed apps, so they're free to not use them too. The study identifies a "'social media trap' for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media."
Jonathain Haidt writes about tackling the collective action problem of social media that is the consequence of that trap, and published "an ongoing and evolving open-source Google document that contains the citations and summaries of current and proposed social media reforms, both at the policy and platform levels, with comments and criticisms from leading experts in each content area."
Google Registry launches new .meme top level domain. knowyour.meme is already there, ofcourse.
Salad Fingers wasn’t just strange, it was art. Here’s how it's still influencing the ‘weird part of YouTube’ 2 decades on. There still is a weird part of Youtube? Thank god i'm out of the loop when it comes to webculture these days. However, there's a paper on Salad Fingers now: Salad Fingers: Pre-YouTube digital uncanny and the ‘weird’ future of animation.
Climate
Katarina Zimmer in How Positive Climate Tipping Points Could Save The Planet writes about how technological solutions to parts of climate change-solutions can reach tipping points from which on they are rapidly adapted. Her case is the 80% eCar adaption in Norway, and in germany, we might see another with large supermarkets lowering the prices for plant meat alternatives to be cheaper than beef. The constantly dropping prices for solar energy, ofcourse, are another point here. I'm still not convinced, and i think a major tipping point for the economy to recognize the shit we're in will be the collapse of the insurance industry. We'll see.
The battle against Climate Change is fought on the street and in court: German govt loses key climate court case: "A Berlin court ordered the government to adopt an "immediate action program" after failing to meet its own climate goals in the transport and building sectors. The case brought by the Deutsche Umwelthilfe and BUND environmentalist groups had accused the government of not doing enough to get back on track after missing emissions targets for transport and building in 2021 and 2022."
Cop28 president Al Jaber embarassed himself by claiming that "there is 'no science' behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels", which is just part of the OPEC agenda to keep their businesses alive and they use COP28 as a promotional stage, which is both a farce and good: At least the world can see, transparently, how hard they suck how many fucks they give about the survival of humanity.
He later claimed he was misrepresented and he meant that the phase-out of oil must be "orderly, fair, just and responsible". Okay. Lets take his word for it:
The oil producing states and companies are trying to write Direct Air Capture (DAC) and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) into the final declaration, because with enough DAC and CCS, they think they can burn fossil fuels in years to come, and profit from that. Let's "orderly, fair, just and responsible" bill them for the technology necessary for getting the carbon out of the air then. That would be orderly, absolutely fair, very just and super responsible: Make them pay. Because, for instance:
'End of century' extreme heat and drought conditions in Europe could occur much earlier than previously thought: "the probability that single and compound end-of-the-century extreme heat stress and drought events will occur repeatedly year after year is greater than one in 10 by 2050–2074". The stuff climate scientists predicted for 2100 is coming in earlier and earlier, while OPEC play poker at COP28. Don't look up, Jaber.
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels to hit record high: "The world is on track to have burned more coal, oil and gas in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to a report by the Global Carbon Project, pumping 1.1% more planet-heating carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a time when emissions must plummet to stop extreme weather from growing more violent." In the context of this, the Blah at COP28 is just cynic.
Record number of fossil fuel lobbyists get access to Cop28 climate talks. Because ofcourse a record number of lobbyists gets access to Cop28 climate talks. What did you expect?
Meanwhile: Horn of Africa floods displace more than two million: "The heavy rainfall, linked to the El Niño weather pattern, has struck just as the region is emerging from the worst drought in 40 years that drove millions into hunger."
India’s unstoppable need for air conditioners, driving up inequality (which also means access to cool air now) and energy consumption.
Italy bans cultivated meat products: They pretend this is to protect "health, culture and tradition", but ofcourse is is plain old protectionism in the face of new technology coming for meat consumption.
All of this only can mean one thing: More than 1,000 climate scientists urge public to become activists. In a decade from now, there will be no other topic anyways.
Psychology and the Mind
I'm arguing for some years now that screens and digital tools are bad for education, and that kids should write by hand on paper and read printed books. My argument is that the spatial neuropsychological experience of haptics engrains knowledge in your memory by using more diverse set of neural processes, making it much more easy to retrieve.
Now, researchers in Paper Notebooks vs. Mobile Devices: Brain Activation Differences During Memory Retrieval find that "duration of writing down schedules was significantly shorter for the Note group than the Tablet and Phone groups, and accuracy was much higher for the Note group in easier (i.e., more straightforward) questions" and "activations in (brain) regions were significantly higher for the Note group (...) The significant superiority in both accuracy and activations for the Note group suggested that the use of a paper notebook promoted the acquisition of rich encoding information and/or spatial information of real papers and that this information could be utilized as effective retrieval clues, leading to higher activations in these specific regions."
Anthrobots: Tiny Biobots From Human Cells Heal Neurons: The future is biobots powered by Organoid intelligence regrowing your brain: "Tiny biological robots that they call Anthrobots from human tracheal cells that can move across a surface and have been found to encourage the growth of neurons across a region of damage in a lab dish".
Tinnitus is associated with undetected auditory nerve loss: If i'd meet my younger self, i'd have two tipps: The other would be "Wear ear protection in that fucking loud techno club because you'll get annoying Tinnitus from that".
Music Preferences Mirror Moral Values. Play your favorite song and i'll tell you about your moral-psychological configuration: "Musical elements like pitch and timbre emerged as crucial predictors for values of Care and Fairness, while sentiments and emotions expressed in lyrics were more effective in predicting traits of Loyalty, Authority, and Purity."
Ultrasound enables less-invasive brain-machine interfaces. This is interesting not only for the obvious applications in BCI for paralyzed people, but because Apple recently patented Airpods to read brain signals. In combination with Apples AR-headset you can see where this tech may be going in the consumer market.
Entertainment
The trailer for GTA 6 has landed and in 2025, we're going back to Vice City:
The Fallout Trailer for the upcoming series by Westworld creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy:
And the first Godzilla x Kong Trailer:
Misc
Listen to the Center of the Milky Way Translated Into Sound: "a collaboration between a NASA sonification project and composer Sophie Kastner has turned astronomical data collected by telescopes into music that can be played by a small ensemble."
Goodnite Shane MacGowan, and thanks for all the drinks. Here's a two hour documentary on the guy with the most beautiful teeth on earth (in german).
I think Alice Weidel's voice wasn't fake. Those are true statements, I thought that was the point.
especially excited for upcoming Fallout since i've been playing the games for a long time (the new one every weekend). also, i kind of hope the other thing you would tell you back in time is not to invest in Bitcoin:)