Poltergeist Attacks on tripping Cars
Goodlinks 2023/09/28: The Wild Things Font / Project Gutenbergs AI-Audiobooks / Salad Fingers / TikTok OSINT / Hatespeech reduces Empathy / New York City is sinking / Tron for sale and more.
In my ranking of all Black Mirror episodes, which i embarrassingly still haven't updated with the sixth season yet, i've featured the artworks of Butcher Billy from Brazil. Back then, i rediscovered his popping comic artstyle which i loved to feature on my old blog, so here's some of his more recent stuff: The Holy Bible, George Orwell: Animal Farm, George Orwell: 1984, Post-Punk/New Wave Halloween Special, Atari Pop Art, More Atari, Tarantino-Verse, Tales From The Smiths, Planet Mercury Comics, H. G. Wells Collection Box Set.
Cool webcomic about the (very) early days of blogging, aptly titled Eternal September.
Josh Korwin tracked down the font from the cover of Maurice Sendaks Where The Wild Things Are.
Researcher finds way to get audio from still images and silent videos. This is pretty incredible: Researchers can extract words spoken off camera from the vibrations in the springs which hold lenses in camera stabilizing mechanisms, and these vibrations are subtly visible in the stabilized images and video.
The same guys then used a similar technique to exploit image stabilization in robot cars, shooting audio waves at the vehicle which then started to hallucinate objects, and they dubbed their technique Poltergeist attacks. I’m instant fanboy.
This reminds me of the now famous paper in which they extracted audio from the vibrations of a bag of potatoe chips.
Meta AI Chat Bot Characters: Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, Tom Brady. Frankly, i find these developments to be quite boring. AI-products gonna improve and will be built into every interface you can think of. Getty is doing image synthesis now — who would've thought —, Google puts Bard into everything, ChatGPT can do visual input and speech, Spotify is autotranslating podcasts, Websites gonna summarize themselves and you soon can prompt a multimodal assistant from everywhere like HyperClippies for everything, in all products, yada yada.
It's just iteration and product variation for monetization now, but the basic principles are left unchanged: These products are based on interpolatable datapoints in vast latent spaces, a new form of accessing and synthesizing from a huge library, and new developments on the paradigm level seem slow at the moment. Now is the time of product development and marketing, and i'm not that type of guy.
So yeah, sure, chat with a mimetic AI-model of Paris Hilton, I'm sure you'll get some deep insights from that. AI-Snoop could be funny though, if you can jailbreak the synth and talk some dope if you know what i mean.
Productvariationally related: Coca Cola made a soda with AI and it tastes not so good. I don't think interpolative Coke is much different from non-interpolative Coke. I mean, is there anything more synthetic than soda drinks? Does anyone actually think there's cherry involved in cherry coke? Come on.
Productdevelopmentationally related: Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Altman reportedly collaborating on mysterious AI device. You don't need to click this, it's all in the headline, nobody knows anything, just that OpenAI is eyeing consumer hardware now. Everybody's speculating on a phone, but i'd throw my hat in the ring for an Alexa-like device, given ChatGPTs recent speech integration.
OpenAI offices seen overflowing with paperclips by Dall-E 3.
Anil Kapoor Wins Battle Against AI. The battle for personality rights for public persona is an emerging legal problem in context of AI and deepfakes and this is one of the first legal decisions in court upholding the personality rights to his likeness of an actor. In April, Metaphysic CEO filed for copyright of his own AI likeness, with no decision yet.
The problem with this decision is this: "I can straight away, if that happens, send a court order and injunction and they have to pull it down." This is in conflict with freedom of speech and expression, as i have the right to produce e.g. satire and use his image for this, and I'm sure that decisions like these will be used to censor legitimate speech like satire.
Anil Kapoor adresses this problem: "My intention is not to interfere with anyone’s freedom of expression or to penalize anyone. My intent was to seek protection of my personality rights and prevent any misuse for commercial gains, particularly in the current scenario with rapid changes in technology and tools like artificial intelligence."
Project Gutenberg produced thousands of audiobooks voiced by AI: "The oldest digital library in the world, Project Gutenberg, has transformed thousands of ebooks into The Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook Collection using AI — bypassing the longer (and more expensive) process of hiring a human reader to do the job. It’s exactly the kind of AI application that actors, who are currently on strike in the US for the first time in four decades, fear may endanger their careers."
Good example of how scalable AI-technology can create conflict of labor issues with interests of the public. The works in Project Gutenberg are in the public domain. PG provides a valuable service to the public, and offering those works as audiobooks adds even more value to that, especially for the visually impaired and the blind. I welcome this, and most likely, turning those works into audiobooks would have never happened, if that public service had to hire professional voice actors. You can blame neoliberalism for that, but only so far. We're talking about thousands of books here, not just a few dozen or so.
In this case at least, it's not so much that AI took workload from voice actors, because that workload would've never existed on this scale in the first place. In this case it seems to me that AI adds value to a public service by making human labor scalable which was not scalable before: Reading for audiobooks. I think i'm siding with the AI-bros on this one.
Copy Far "AI" is "a license close to copyleft, but far from the so-called 'Artificial Intelligences'." // I'm very sure this has no legal standing, but as someone who gave away his stuff under a Do What The Fuck You Want-License in the past, i like this stuff.
AI-generated naked child images shock Spanish town of Almendralejo. All you need to know is that there are dozens of undress apps freely available. Vice first identified the phenomenon back in 2019 in Deepnude: The Horrifying App Undressing Women, and since then the tech only got better and cheaper. Dudes use all kinds of excuses that tech like this exists, but let's make this clear: These apps exist for the one and only one reason — to 'undress' women without consent.
And this is the outcome: "at least 11 local boys have been identified as having involvement in either the creation of the images or their circulation via the WhatsApp and Telegram apps. Investigators are also looking into the claim that an attempt was made to extort one of the girls by using a fake image of her."
I guarantee you that is a tiny tip of the tip of a giant iceberg. What would you do if you were twelve years old today, full of hormones, with apps like these floating around freely and your crush from school has all kinds of photos on the instas and nobody's watching? How much did your parents know of your sleazy activities when you were a teen?
I half-jokingly adapted Rule 34 for the AI-age recently: If you're a woman on the internet, there will be porn of you. This is the sad, stupid, simple truth about deepfake tech.
Why generative AI is 'alchemy,' not science: "(AI is) largely a matter of assuming magical properties about the amount of intelligence that is implicit in the structure of the internet — and then building computation and structuring it such that you can distill that web of knowledge that we’ve all been building for decades now, and then seeing what comes out."
Top Economist: AI-Driven Cataclysm Could Rock the Job Market: Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT, studied technological progress and it's benefits for society at large and despite what techno optimists are saying, technology does not automatically improve lives of the people: "In their book 'Power and Progress', Acemoglu and Johnson showcase a series of major inventions over the course of the past 1,000 years that, contrary to what we've been told, did nothing to improve, and sometimes even worsened, the lives of most people. And in the periods when big technological breakthroughs did lead to widespread good — the examples that today's AI optimists cite — it was only because ruling elites were forced to share the gains of innovation widely, rather than keeping the profits and power for themselves. It was the fight over technology, not just technology on its own, that wound up benefiting society."
A Neural Network for the Trolley Problem by
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In Epic Forgetting, Rob Horning skillfully (!) takes apart the idea that generative AI is democratizing art, writing about data totalitarianism quoting Kant that aesthetic ideas "arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words", which means that the meaning of art can't be prompted with words: "there is often an assumption that AI is edging toward being alive because of its apparent language competency. Or that it its somehow participating in the zeitgeist because it has absorbed so much human expression. But the essential point here is that geist is precisely what escapes datafication. Generative models can only ever simulate it; they can only ever substitute something fixed and reified for it. Rather than bring ideas to life, generative models kill them dead."
Thus, it is no wonder that this happens: AI data training companies like Scale AI are hiring poets to improve datasets on creative writing, so models can churn out text that closely resembles literary art: "The companies say contractors will write short stories on a given topic to feed them into AI models. They will also use these workers to provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text." I'm sure that ghostwritten shortstories about topics chosen not by a soul, but a corporate function will hugely improve the creative potential of AI.
Call for Writing: Models for Making Distance: The Algorithmic Resistance Research Group is making a zine about "art that confounds, confuses and misuses algorithmic systems for the pleasure of human observers or actors" and they are looking for contributors.
The World’s Oldest Active Torrent Turns 20 Years Old: "Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their 'Fanimatrix' release is the oldest active torrent that's still widely shared today."
A Taylor Swift fan-account on TikTok is using open source intelligence tech to doxx random people. If we're talking surveillance capitalism, democratized open source tech once exclusive to intelligence agencies which make this (and other) shit possible belong to that equation, not to speak of the ubiquitous outrage and gossip driven peer surveilance on social networks. If this is the cool post-privacy brave new world that techno-utopists were talking about in the mid 2000s, it can suck my ass.
And speaking of surveillance capitalism: How the “Surveillance AI Pipeline” Literally Objectifies Human Beings: "The vast majority of computer vision research leads to technology that surveils human beings, a new preprint study that analyzed more than 20,000 computer vision papers and 11,000 patents spanning three decades has found. Crucially, the study found that computer vision papers often refer to human beings as 'objects', a convention that both obfuscates how common surveillance of humans is in the field, and objectifies humans by definition."
147 Jewish Leaders are Calling out Antisemitism on X. I'm very sure this will fly with a guy like Musk who spreads antisemitic propaganda himself and then reacts like a whiny prick when being called out. Musk also just dismantled Twitters election integrity team ahead of key votes around world, which is just great.
So, with all of those great news about TwiX, here's a Neuroimaging study which reveals that hate speech dulls brain's empathy responses, which largely confirms what every expert ever said on the topic: "An experimental neuroimaging study in Poland found that exposure to hate speech diminishes the brain’s response to stories about other people suffering. The effect was present irrespective of the group membership of the person suffering in the story – whether they were Polish, like the participants, or Arab. The study was published in Scientific Reports."
Social Media's Influence: Why More Young Women Eye Cosmetic Surgery: "women who regularly engage with social media were excessively self-judgemental and more likely to consider cosmetic surgery. The study of 238 young Australian women (aged 18-29) also identified that 16% of women had already received cosmetic surgery and that more than half (54%) would consider having it in the future. Only 31% said that they would not undertake surgical cosmetic procedures."
How Social Media Does (And Does Not) Impact Teen Brain Development is part of a NYT-Magazine issue on Being 13: "Experts who are studying teens and social media are observing that girls are being hit harder by the current crisis in teen mental health; they say that female hormones may factor in, but the connection to social media use has not been proven scientifically. 'Hormones are modifying this process', Dr. Jensen said. 'But in ways we don’t fully understand.'"
I think i can help with those hormones, actually. Women and girls have higher oxytocin levels, which regulates social connection and is responsible for not only bonding, but also exclusion. If i were a psychologist researching the impact of social media on mental health, i'd have looked very closely at the manipulative effects of socmed-engagement on oxytocin levels, because it might explain all kinds of phenomena from outrage economics to radicalized forms of wokism, which, in turn, ramp up the pressure from stress for girls.
This is just a hypothesis from a former professional blogger reading extensively about this stuff for years and i might be completely wrong here, but maybe i'm not. I've written about the role of oxytocin on social media here (in german).
Meet the Shadowy Network Vilifying Climate Protestors Around the World: A network of rightwing think tanks is shaping the conversation about climate change and drafting legislation which is criminalizing protest. If you want to know where terminology like "climate terrorism" comes from, read this. It's the usual names all over the place, from the Kochs to Exxon and Shell to Rupert Murdoch.
New York City is sinking. All coastal cities are turning into Miami, eventually.
Carbon removal: why ambitious 'no nonsense' plans are vital to limit global heating to 2℃: Researchers are proposing a reform to the pricing of carbon credits (which are not working).
Antarctic sea ice shrinks to lowest annual maximum level on record, data shows: "Each September Antarctica’s sea ice reaches its maximum extent. The average between 1981 and 2010 was 18.71m sq km. But the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said preliminary analysis suggested the sea ice reached a maximum of 16.96m sq km on 10 September and had fallen away since then. The 2023 maximum was 1.75m sq km below the long term average and about 1m sq km below the previous record low maximum set in 1986."
How many animals get slaughtered every day? 6.8 million mamals, 213.8 million birds and a whole bunch of fish, so i can get a burger whenever i want. Our kids will hate us for this.
More dying stuff: Giant flowers are dying. I don't want giant flowers to die. Here’s an image before they go:
Swiss glaciers lose 10% of their volume in two years, the amount "is the same as that lost between 1960 and 1990."
‘We are just getting started’: the plastic-eating bacteria that could change the world: Researchers are "evolving the crap out of an enzyme" to get a working solution out of plastic eating bacteria, which are starting to be used at an industrial scale: "Since 2021, a French company named Carbios has been running an operation that uses a bacterial enzyme to process about 250kg of PET plastic waste every day, breaking it down into its precursor molecules, which can then be made directly into new plastic. It’s not quite composting it back into the earth itself, but Carbios has achieved the holy grail of plastic recycling, bringing it much closer to an infinitely recyclable material like glass or aluminium."
Mammals’ Time on Earth Is Half Over, Scientists Predict: "A new model suggests that in 250 million years, all land will collide into a supercontinent that boosts warming and pushes mammals to extinction." // I think we can make it in less than a thousand years, if we push really really not very hard.
For the first time, research reveals crows use statistical logic. For some time, the ravenmaster was my favorite account on the tweeties, in which the, well, ravenmaster from the Tower of London posted a lot of awesome images and videos of these wonderful animals, which release the weirdest metallic clicking sounds too. He deleted all his tweets it seems, but still: crows can do statistics. Who knew!
Fuck Freud: Suppressing fearful thoughts reduced their vividness and improved participants’ mental health and "results showed no significant rebound effect; suppressed negative thoughts did not return with increased intensity."
Brainless Jellyfish Demonstrate Learning Ability. Jellyfish are people too.
Heritage is auctioning off a lot of cool Tron stuff including concept art by Moebius and Syd Mead and some high-contrast black-and-white Kodalith transparencies, "which were individual frames blown up to twice their size so animators could illuminate the actors, sequences and world inside our own. (...) The film was shot on 70mm on a set with an entirely black backdrop, and its actors (Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan, David Warner, Barnard Hughes) dressed in white costumes. Then the footage was “dismantled,” as Lisberger once said, so that every frame could be animated by hand – just like every Walt Disney classic before it. Even more artists would fill in the blanks, shining light through the mattes to make them glow. Airbrush artists made that light appear to blur, rendering the unreal somehow more real.The process was painstakingly laborious: It took months to finish scenes that could be completed today in a single afternoon."
Martin Scorsese is on promo tour for his "Killers of the Flower Moon", so GQ has a huge profile of the man and an interesting video where he breaks down his most iconic films, saying: "Every other person is like Travis Bickle now." Right. Right.
Trailers worth watching: Fingernails, Argylle, Night of the Hunted, Obliterated, Sister Death, Blue Eye Samurai, True Detective: Night Country, L'Empire
I just found out about Elle Cordova and she instantly became my favorite thing for the next five minutes: Podcasters profoundly saying nothing and ChatGPT hangs out with Siri and Alexa in the server break room and Alexa, Siri and the other bots hanging out in the server break room again. She's also on YouTube and TikTok.
After Salad Fingers went silent for a few years, we saw a new episode last year and now here’s: Salad Fingers 13: Harvest. Creepy internet humor at it's finest.