[links] Grimes gives away her AI-voice / Sarah Palin forever / Plastic in the flesh
Plus: Nick Cave on irritating his peers, ChatGPT is an ideology machine, The A.I. business influencer guys must be stopped, The KLF: Beyond The Band That Burnt £1.000.000 and much more
Grimes said on Twitter she’d “split 50% royalties on any successful AI generated song that uses my voice.“ Context are the recent viral hits from AI-Oasis and AI-Drake.
Very interesting move, especially from a mainstream artist like Grimes, but she’s not the first one to do this: Two years ago i wrote about Holly+, a crypto DAO around the synthesized voice of artist Holly Herndon, who sells shares of that AI-voice as NFTs. Besides the artyfarty crypto-hogwash, this is roughly the same model: Synthesize your singing voice and sell shares. Now, read this interesting bit in context of copyright for synthesized AI-Likeness and you get a grasp of where we are heading with this stuff.VideoLDM by Nvidia — state of the art in video synthesis. We’re roughly at the stage of Artbreeder/DallE1 right now. Will take a while from here to real text-to-movie.
Hannes Bajohr, Whoever Controls Language Models Controls Politics: “the risk of large language models like ChatGPT is not the technical catastrophe of malicious computers. Much more concretely, language models threaten to become a democratic disaster – through the privatization of language technologies as the future site of political public spheres.“ — This is one reason why i think it’s good to think about LLMs as libraries and consider running foundational models as public services.
Related: ChatGPT Is an Ideology Machine, in which a socialist agrees with Henry Kissinger. If anything, AI was worth this moment in history: “Kissinger is right, alas: GPT systems, because they automate a function very close to our felt sense of what it means to be human at all, may produce shifts in the very way we think about things. Control over the way we think about things is called ‘ideology’, and GPT systems engage it directly and quantitatively in an unprecedented manner.“
The Organoid Intelligence guys raised ten million bucks to grow brain cells in a dish and develop wetware AI-chips.
Reminder from this issue: Whoever builds the first Organoid Intelligence-model should name it after Nellie The Elephant, the maybe most famous of all Oi!-Punk songs - the lyrics resolve around an intelligent elephant after all, who then ”slipped her iron chain”. Classic AI-trope.The WaPo took a look at the Google C4 dataset and not only found sites for pirated books and warez, but also “at least 10 sites that sell dumpsters“.
Related: OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it — This is what happens when you just use techniques covered by fair use and build commercial products on top.
You know, I’m not at all a guy who respects copyright in any way. I always looked at it and the evolving digital world and just shrugged and thought ”it’s over”. But I am less egalitarian when it comes to corporations: When Microsoft builds an Office AI-assistant and uses a pirated copy of my book for this, then Gates should lawyer up pronto.AI Therapy Becomes New Use Case for ChatGPT — i already wrote about some of the things that can possibly go wrong.
Persona-driven ChatGPT yields toxic, racist output — “By asking the model to respond to questions as a good or a bad person, a man or woman, or as individuals of varying racial or ethnic backgrounds, responses became ‘extremely problematic’ and produced ‘biased and hurtful commentary.’“
No surprises here. LLMs can also be used to sample demographics, which always will include problematic responses. Prompt a redneck, get a redneck. Here’s the paper.Image generation AI for predicting the deformation of splashing drops — I find this application of image synthesis slightly poetic. I hope that Kenneth G. Libbrecht and his Grand Unified Theory of Snowflakes, which is a 500 page tomb of a scientific paper detailing every inch of the physics of snowflake-formation, already play around with image synthesis to predict the shape of melting ice crystals or something.
ChatGPT is taking ghostwriters’ jobs in Kenya — Automatic Cheating is hurting the global Cheating Industrial Complex.
‘I’ve Never Hired A Writer Better Than ChatGPT’: “I'm really frankly worried that millions of people are going to be without a job by the end of this year“.
AI agents in AR glasses: “my GPT-4 JARVIS can now: recognize my friends faces, understand what i'm looking at using computer vision, respond aloud via TTS“
Sarah Palin Forever by Eryk Salvaggio: ”Fake Deepfakes and a Cinema Without Cameras”.
Excellent thread on Image-Synthesis-as-art: “Unless recontextualized as part of an artistic practice, AI images simply don't belong to the realm of art, but to the much larger realm of images.“
Greg Brockmans TED-Talk: The Inside Story of ChatGPT’s Astonishing Potential — I’m not sure if you need to watch this if you’re up to date, but TED-talks are not just talks, but also have become an initiation rite of consensus about all things we talk about. As such, this presentation of the first mainstream AI is a remarkable artifact and a confirmation: Yes, the age of AI has officially begun, and a TED-talk means we commit on that.
The A.I. business influencer guys must be stopped — 412563182 AI tools were released in the last 5 minutes. Read this 🧵 and get ready for me to service your account.
Look, we’ve been here before: SEO-idiots became Crypto-idiots became AI-idiots, what you gonna do. Hype attracts parasites without a yota of creativity or originality, and shady business-types always will stay shady business-types, the vultures of culture, for whom the integration of AI into MS Office-products is about the pinnacle of human achievement, the most cataclysmic cosmic event they can think off.
I already wrote why AI synthesizing the Businessmen-Smile is nothing I’m too concerned about and it is kinda funny that any of those AI-business-spammers can be automated easily even without AI, just a few scripts and the product-hunt-feed is enough to be that kind of person, which is to say: Don’t be that kind of person, show some dignity.A.I. May Change Everything, but Probably Not Too Quickly — Paul Krugman on the economic impact of AI. I never subscribed to the idea of accelerated change in tech, the biggest changes in the way we live and do culture in the recent past was the iPhone in tandem with mainstreamification of social media and that started 20 years ago. Changes through AI will take time.
Also, whatever the AI-business-hacks say, they are the polar opposite of AI-doomsters like Yudkowski, and it’s safe to say that whatever happens is somewhere inbetween those extremes.Could ChatGPT become an architect? — Can we put all those Twitter-thread-bros and AI-tech-hacks into ChatGPT-generated houses and just… wait?
The Post-Human Desert by Slavoj Žižek: “Today’s ‘post-human’ sciences are no longer about domination. Their credo is surprise: what kind of contingent, unplanned emergent properties might “black-box” AI models acquire for themselves? No one knows, and therein lies the thrill – or, indeed, the banality – of the entire enterprise.“
Reddit and Stack Overflow will charge AI companies for training data. — Obvious outcome, and i read Sam Altmans recent comments on the not-so-important size of LLMs in that context.
"A search for 'site:amazon.com "as an AI language model"' yields some fun results!"
You gotta love McSweeneys: I’m ChatGPT, and for the Love of God, Please Don’t Make Me Do Any More Copywriting
Misalignment Museum — Popup exhibition in San Francisco
Human or Not? A Social Turing Game — Chatroulette for the age of AI.
Spotify Gives 49 Different Names to the Same Song — apparently a strategy of Spotify to reduce license fees on their chill background music stuff, which i always subsume under ‘Music for people who don’t like music’. Here’s a playlist of that crap, 49 almost identical tunes made-to-order for Spotify and which are pure sonic Spam.
Nick Cave: Christ, the Devil and the duty to offend: “In the punk rock days offensiveness was the sacred duty, to kick against the establishment. That was not me. I was never doing that. I was much more concerned with irritating my peers and people that were my audience, ignite their imaginations and get them thinking about things and challenge them. This felt like the way to make good art, to confront people. I was not really interested in dealing with Thatcher and all of this sort of stuff that was the energy behind punk, a kind of hatred of the establishment. I didn't I didn't have that political fury. I was much more concerned with with people on a different level. I was always at odds with my peers.“
There Is Plastic In Our Flesh — Before AI turns anyone into paperclips, we’ll become plastic creatures anyways. Where’s the Yudkowski of Polypropylene?
xkcd: Escape Speed — neat Moonlander-like game from Randall Munroe. If you want to spoil yourself, here’s some maps.
In the same vein, here’s neal.funs Space Elevator
I regulary visit The Quietus to get some news on more experimental music and they need some subscriptions to keep the site running.
In german: Nachhaltigere Schokolade ohne Kakao: Das Start-up Planet A Foods startet die Massenproduktion
“Sun Thinking is a group exhibition that brings together artists, writers, and researchers to explore the qualities and logics of solar power and solar powered computing networks. It presents a collection of network-based artworks, games, texts, and interviews and is the first exhibition project to be hosted on the Solar Protocol network.“
Notable Trees: “Old, historic, entangled, strange trees that have grown against or into humanity“.
Worms are people too: Worms Get the Munchies, Scientists Discover In Cannabis Experiment
This guy:
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Thanks for sharing the Sarah Palin Forever video!