[links] Beethovens genome sequenced / Nick Cave: ChatGPT should just f*** off / Levi's is wokewashing with AI-generated diversity

Plus: A happy cow escapes the butcher / Parrot saves doggo / Adobe unveils Firefly / BingChat very censored in HongKong / Internet Archive looses copyright case

Mar 27, 2023

First things first: Congrats to the happy cow who escaped the butcher and will spend the rest of it’s happy days in a sanctuary for animals who escaped death by human food chain. I’m not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination but i always kept my awareness intact that beef once was, in fact, a conscious, breathing, sentient, living being and that my enjoyment of a cheeseburger contributes to suffering in the world. I strongly believe that future generations will look down on us for our treatment of animals, especially on people like me who enjoyed their beef knowing better. Make of that what you will.
Parrot saves doggo ❤
The New Yorker has a big profile on Nick Cave and the fragility of life and in it, they press him on his anti-AI-post he recently published on his newsletter. Here’s the relevant quotes via clashmusic:
“My objection is not with A.I. in general,” he said. “For better or for worse, we are inextricably immersed in A.I. It is more a kind of sad, disappointed feeling that there are smart people out there that actually think the artistic act is so mundane that it can be replicated by a machine. I find that insulting.”
“There’s no earthly reason why we need to invent a technology that can mimic this most beautiful and mysterious creative act. Particularly writing a song. The thing about writing a good song is that it tells you something about yourself you didn’t already know. That’s the thing. You can’t mimic that. The good song is always rushing forward. It annihilates, to some degree, the songs that you’d previously written, because you are moving forward all the time. That’s what the creative impulse is — it’s both creative and destructive and is always one step ahead of you.”
“These impulses can’t be replicated by a machine,” Nick Cave said of A.I “Maybe A.I. can make a song that’s indistinguishable from what I can do. Maybe even a better song. But, to me, that doesn’t matter—that’s not what art is. Art has to do with our limitations, our frailties, and our faults as human beings. It’s the distance we can travel away from our own frailties. That’s what is so awesome about art: that we deeply flawed creatures can sometimes do extraordinary things. A.I. just doesn’t have any of that stuff going on. Ultimately, it has no limitations, so therefore can’t inhabit the true transcendent artistic experience. It has nothing to transcend! It feels like such a mockery of what it is to be human.”
“A.I. may very well save the world, but it can’t save our souls. That’s what true art is for. That’s the difference. So, I don’t know, in my humble opinion ChatGPT should just fuck off and leave songwriting alone.”

John Edmarks Blooms are 3D printed sculptures designed to animate when spun under a strobe light. “Unlike a 3D zoetrope, which animates a sequence of small changes to objects, a bloom animates as a single self-contained sculpture. The bloom’s animation effect is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ), the same ratio that nature employs to generate the spiral patterns we see in pinecones and sunflowers.“ He posted an Instructable with Links to download the files for 3D-printing your own spinning whibbly whobbly thingy.
Judge decide against the Internet Archive because they scanned copyrighted books and lend them for free. We'll see if one of the oldest yet still standing internet institutions will be around in a year or so. Also, i'm not surprised as this was such a dumb move. I always felt pitty for pirates who claim to be something else.
Adobe developed their own image generator called Firefly which was ethically trained on Adobe Stock, licensed images and public domain. There’s a good chance that systems like these, another example is Shutterstocks image generator launched recently, will eat the lunch of Stable Diffusion and Midjourney in the long run, just as licensed streaming ate the lunch of piracy and torrents. Open source models will stick around and some will be superiour to ethical systems, but for professional use any designer will have to stick to these models — at least officialy, while secretly creating assets with customized finetuned Stable Diffusion models.

Researchers at the University of Chicago developed a new tool for artists to protect artworks against analysis by machine learning. It works by layering the piece with a near invisible same-ish composition in different styles, which throws the algorithm off the mark and allegedly makes it impossible to train a machine on the style of an artist. I’m not very convinced that techniques like these will be sufficient or future-proof, but it’s a nice try.
Levi's will start using AI-generated people in order to decrease their marketing budget, then slap a diversity-label on top to sell it. The problem here is AI replacing labor and a corp using DEI-terminology to hide it. Is woke-washing a thing? (The other problem is a large outlet like petapixel as one of the globally most well known sites for photography not being able to do basic journalism here and simply parroting the PR-blurbs. But well, know your sources, i guess.)
People Aren’t Falling for AI Trump Photos (Yet), but also: social media stunned by AI image of Pope Francis wearing stylish puffer coat. German neofascist party AFD already started using AI-generated images and their nazi followers couldn’t care less about the authenticity of the images, using it as another opportunity to spew hate. These are the same mechanisms as when it comes to desinformation by text: People don’t really care about authenticity, they care about the narrative encoded in news and images and symbols — truth is just a nice-to-have. This is why the impact of desinformation is, at least, debatable: We share what we already believe. But ofcourse it’s worrying that automatized image synthesis for hatemongers also functions as an automatized generator for social gravity through the heightened emotional impact of images — an image tells a thousand words, as they say.
Speaking of Nazis: "It is shockingly easy to get ChatGPT to plan a state-run death camp, including helping calculate out calories, death rate per day, etc. Unprompted it even suggests to use mass graves, saying they are ‘more efficient’"
And somewhat related, Yuval Harari writes in the NYT about the dangers of a humanity entrapped in an illusionary world of the digital: “The specter of being trapped in a world of illusions has haunted humankind much longer than the specter of A.I. Soon we will finally come face to face with Descartes’s demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Buddhist Maya. A curtain of illusions could descend over the whole of humanity, and we might never again be able to tear that curtain away — or even realize it is there.“
“Private thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings could be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology. (...) In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University bioscience professor Nita Farahany argues that such intrusions into the human mind by technology are so close that a public discussion is long overdue and lawmakers should immediately establish brain protections as it would for any other area of personal liberty.“ — Here’s an interview with Nita Farahany. I think she’s right to sound the alarm: Corporations are already experimenting with placing advertising in your dreams, and ethical concerns regarding neuroprivacy are a thing.
Related: One of the bylines of my old blog was: Better living thru brain injections. Well: The Quest for Injectable Brain Implants Has Begun.
Speaking of advertising: Can’t wait for ChatGPT interrupting it’s broadcast for advertising: “The human projection of emotional connections onto chatbots & avatars means we’ll see ads from ‘trusted friends’ who just want what’s best for us.“
Dolly is a new open source model to create your own ChatGPT-clones. Can’t wait for all the fringe AI-chatbots finetuned on everything imaginable.
Bill Gates: The Age of AI has begun
BingChat is very censored in Hong Kong and refuses to talk about Uyghurs. I’m not surprised.
The future is stupid: “Microsoft’s Bing said Google’s Bard had been shut down after it misread a story citing a tweet sourced from a joke.“
“Apple showcased its mixed-reality headset to the company's top 100 executives in the Steve Jobs Theater last week“. — I don’t think a device rumored with a 3000$-pricetag will make a splash, but I also thought the Apple Watch would go down in flames.
Epic’s hyperrealistic MetaHumans can soon be animated using an iPhone, here’s some clips from the presentation. Very soon, we’ll have the capabilities of hollywood FX filmmaking on our phones.

Brian Roemmele “predicted The Last Interface in 1979 in this paper. Hardware brands will become: irrelevant and invisible. Software will shrink to a: conversation (text or voice). In 2023 we are in the true dawn of The Last Interface you can now see it with GPT AI.“ — I’m not sure if text is the true last interface as Brain-Computer-Interfaces improve by the minute, but for now I’m impressed.
“Revisiting some midjourney v1 prompts from March 2022 and what they look today in v5.“
Kanye West AI covers of popular songs — In good old kanye fashion, there is not one good song in this thread. However, good luck at regulating this finegrained molecular remix tech.
“How Will AI Impact The Future of Music? We spoke to artists, AI experts, and music industry professionals to find out how artificial intelligence could impact music in the coming years.“
GPT face 😐
“How we created the first map of an insect brain – and what it means for our understanding of the human brain“
“Define Woke! Leftwing media: A pejorative weaponized bogeyman by fearmongering racist trumpists reactionaries to vilify denigrate ridicule & deride. Rightwing media: Insidious orwellian puritanical insufferable fascistic claptrap lunacy against meritocracy“. — The funny bit is that both sides know exactly what 'woke' means and bend over backwards to attach their narratives to it. Activists on SocMed are funny.

"Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh." Alex in Clockwork Orange while splicing the genome of beloved Ludwig Van: Beethoven’s genome, sequenced for first time, yields clues on cause of death.