Spiral Town
Good Links 2023/09/12: Sculpting Sunlight / Margret Atwood feels murdered by AI / City Dreamer / Algorithmic Hauntology / Cars track everything / Molecular Signatures of a Broken Heart and much more
Iconographic Encyclopædia of Science, Literature, and Art: "An enhanced digital edition of J. G. Heck’s collection of illustrations from 1851 including more than 13,000 illustrations from 500 engraved steel plates and more than 1.6 million words of descriptions with new interactivity."
Ryan D. Anderson: 'We Wanna Do the Fun Stuff'
Sculpting Sunlight: "I recorded footage of the sunlight phenomena at the Media Lab and used computer vision to extract characteristics in the lighting pattern across time. I then re-spatialized the data to produce a sculpture that compresses its time/space into one moment/object."
‘ABBA Voyage’ Tour Makes $2 Million a Week With an Avatar Band: I don't expect many bands to pull this off. Abba were a phenomenon long before AI, and this sort of gimmick is not suitable for all genres of music. At least I can't imagine a holographic singer/songwriter pouring his synthetic heart and soul into intimate songs. But for popculture legends, this surely works. It remains to be seen if this becomes more than the fad it currently is.
Related: Virtual Influencer Noonoouri Lands Record Deal: Is She The Future Of Music?: As they saying goes — All headlines posing a question can be answered with NO.
Taste Bud: Your cooking companion. Invent recipes based on what's in your kitchen!: It does not give you poisonous chlorine gas, but it does give you fish-chocolate-cheese-balls, which might be just as deadly.
CityDreamer "learns to generate unbounded 3D cities from Google Earth imagery and OpenStreetMap".
Dave Karpf reviews Blood in the Machine, the new book by Brian Merchant about the Luddite movement: We should all be Luddites now. AI is the most pressing frontier of newschool tech labor conflicts, and while i do have some minor reservations with the AI-Art-luddities — most of which fight to keep jobs in industrialized mainstream illustration which are decidedly not art —, they have my solidarity and any work that goes into datasets making multibillion dollar AI-companies possible should be compensated.
AI-generated child porn makes it harder for the police to discern real from fake and help actual victims. Now, every single US-state’s attorney general is calling for action. The unforeseen and very ugly consequences of interpolatable latent spaces, in which you can't just interpolate between Van Gogh and Picasso in the style of Shakespeare, but also between imaginary people and real victims of sexual assault.
UN calls for age limits for AI tools in schools: I'm very much opposed to any digital tech in classrooms, at the very least for lower grades, so this is a nobrainer for me.
Melanie Mitchell about why just because LLMs can solve problems it doesn't mean they can reason: This is related to my AI is not creative-piece in which i argue that just because AI can interpolate novel outputs it doesn't mean it uses creativity to do so.
ChatGPT consumes half a liter of water per conversation: "Microsoft disclosed that its global water consumption spiked 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to nearly 1.7 billion gallons, or more than 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools), a sharp increase compared to previous years that outside researchers tie to its AI research. (...) In a paper due to be published later this year, Ren's team estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what's in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions."
I signed this Open Letter of Artists Using Generative AI Demand Seat at Table from US Congress, published at Creative Commons. I have some quibbles with this and find it a bit shallow, but i also think that interpolative latent spaces are a too important cultural innovation to be merely called "theft" and their use for creative expression is legit. I'm also not sure how relevant Creative Commons are for Generative AI as they just provide a tool to grant permissions already regulated under copyright, as laid down in their own piece about AI here, and i find their take on Fair Use pretty weak, not taking into account accusations of data laundering.
However, as an old time vet of the socmed revolution, they still have my sympathy, even when i always sidelined them giving my stuff away under a Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License, which should tell you about my general stance on all things copyright when it comes to non-corporate entities. But Generative AI are decidedly not products of non-corporate entities.
Related: Potential Supreme Court clash looms over copyright issues in generative AI training data on VentureBeat is a good overview of the current state of the AI-copyright debate. Dr. Alex Hanna, director of research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), calls the, uhm, 'discovery' by AI corporations that, you know, training products on unlicensed and copyrighted material might pose a huge problem, the "Oh Shit!"-moment of generative AI. As long as i'm writing about AI on this newsletter, i'm also writing about the copyright situation, and that experts in the field are surprised by this is baffling to me, to say the least. I get that a lot of people in AI come from a research background, but even then it should be a nobrainer for people with more than two braincells that 'Fair Use covers research use' does not extend to 'Fair Use covers commercial exploitation'. I mean come on!
Related: Margret Atwood in The Atlantic feeld Murdered by her Replica and compares the AI-copyright situation to the scifi-horror-classic The Stepford Wifes: "In that 1975 horror film, the human wives of Stepford, Connecticut, are having their identities copied and transferred to robotic replicas of themselves, minus any contrariness that their husbands find irritating. The robot wives then murder the real wives and replace them. Better sex and better housekeeping for the husbands, death for the uniqueness, creativity, and indeed the humanity of the wives. The companies developing generative AI seem to have something like that in mind for me, at least in my capacity as an author. (The sex and the housekeeping can be done by other functionaries, I assume.) Apparently, 33 of my books have been used as training material for their wordsmithing computer programs. Once fully trained, the bot may be given a command—“Write a Margaret Atwood novel”—and the thing will glurp forth 50,000 words, like soft ice cream spiraling out of its dispenser, that will be indistinguishable from something I might grind out. (But minus the typos.) I myself can then be dispensed with—murdered by my replica, as it were—because, to quote a vulgar saying of my youth, who needs the cow when the milk’s free?"
Related: The paper AI Art and its Impact on Artists explores the many problems posed by image synthesis and how this tech harms the market value of human artists. They take a lot of effort to explain the many differences of generative AI to the creative process of humans, and explain why the technology is exploitative in nature.
Related: Actually, That AI Drake and The Weeknd Song Is NOT Eligible for a Grammy which is good for the Grammys because nobody listens to crap like Drake or The Weeknd anyways, synthetic or not. Meanwhile, Ghostwriter Returns With an A.I. Travis Scott Song and, in good old Ghostwriter-fashion, the track sounds like shit. Adding insult to injury, the AI-voice-mangler wrote "The future of music is here. Artists now have the ability to let their voice work for them without lifting a finger."
A statement like this is all you need about how much fucks this guy gives about art. At least, when Grimesz embraced mimetic AI-tech when she allowed people to use her deepfaked voice-likeness in tracks, she also took control and curated the output. Maybe the future of music is an untalented guy farting out bad tracks with deepfaked raps, but at least Grimesz gets paid for this in that future of music. The real question here is: Who will build the first Spotify for artistic styles after this Napster-phase of generative AI?
However, it's not all bad in AI: IRS, with AI help, targets wealthy cutting corners on taxes. This is not rocket science.
In The Future As Imagined, Eryk Salvaggio adapts Mark Fishers philosphy to talk about the concept of Algorithmic Hauntology, the uncanny valley of AI-systems trained on the part predicting the future. He links to a paper about Critical Image Synthesis there, "the prompting of imagery that variously interrogates and makes visible the structural biases and cultural imperatives encoded within their originating architectures." I haven't read that paper yet, but it sure sounds interesting for anyone actually interested in AI-art.
People compare capitalism and corporations to AI, and for a good reason it seems: "Researchers compared executives' answers on earnings calls to answers written by AI. The more executives acted like robots, the less the stock price changed."
Andreessen Horowitz Funds ‘Uncensored’ AI That Will Tell You How to Kill Yourself because ofcourse they do. Given that we already have one AI-assisted suicide by open source AI models, this is an outstanding display of moral judgement from the acceleration crowd.
Experiments in biased AI: With OpinionGPT - A very biased GPT model you can let the statistical models of various averaged biases debate each other: "What happens if you tune a model only on texts written by politically left-leaning persons? Or only on texts written by right-leaning persons? Only on texts by men, or only on texts by women? Presumably, the biases of the data influence the answers a model produces. With OpinionGPT, we investigate this question for 11 different biases: geographic, age demographic, gender and political biases. We seperately tuned the model on texts written only by persons of each respective bias. In this demo, you can ask questions to our very biased model to get very biased answers!"
People work better with non-humanlike robots which have no eyes.
Researchers are working on AI-enabled interpreters for whale song: Can We Talk to Whales?
Everybody is complaining about Time Magazines 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023, so i guess it's a good list.
Cars track everything: Mozilla put out a horrifying report on data collection in cars. They even track your sexual encounters, which is great news for these guys: People Are Having Sex in San Francisco's Self-Driving Taxis. There's a ballardian scifi-shortstory in this about voyeurs fucking in robot cars enjoying the thrill of being watched by the allseeing algorithmic observers.
The AI shortfilms by Iskarioto:
Capitol of Conformity: "Welcome to the future! Where the pursuit of unending joy comes with hidden costs. This retro futuristic metropolis has many hidden wonders you won't want to miss out on!"
A new paper looks at the reasons why scrolling mindless through random information in feeds makes you more bored: The paradox of boredom intolerance: Why vigorously pursuing excitement makes people more bored. While this sounds innovent enough, here's another paper which should give you a pause in this context: "inducing boredom increases sadistic behavior".
I have a long time concept i call "the psychopathology of the swarm", and the connection of mindless scrolling —> boredom —> sadism seems to be one of the puzzle pieces: by seeking out excitement online to fight boredom by mindless scrolling, we involuntarily increase boredom and in consequence our sadist tendencies. This surely don't change behavior on an individual level for you and me, but if you introduce these mechanisms on a societal level, say, by making stuff like social media ubiquitous, you will skew the behavior of the population in a certain direction. The result is a timeline from "You" being the person of the year 2006, and ten years later the same magazine headlining How Trolls Are Ruining The Internet.
The free speech clown is at it again: Twitter appears to throttle New York Times: While i do think that section 230 is relevant here which protects service providers and platforms from liabilities reserved for publishers, i am no lawyer and 230 is heavily debated in the US. But i also think that Musk is actively and broadly curating the content you can see on X which goes beyond moderation, and with censorial measures like this one or the shadowbanning of Substack-links, he may legally position his TwiX as a publisher, not as a platform, seemingly unaware of the consequences. Good luck with that, free speech clown.
The fight over what’s real (and what’s not) on dissociative identity disorder TikTok: The Verge reports on symptoms of what once was called multiple personality disorder supposedly transmitted via emotional contagion on TikTok, and nobody knows how much of those selfreported mental health issues are real. A few months ago i wrote about the case of the so called Tiktok-Ticks and their surprising connection to leftwing identity politics, and this seems the same to me: Kids with mild tendencies for mental health issues find safe spaces in socmed communities and meme themselves into ever more engraving symptoms.
The Neely Social Media Index consists of a set of "large scale public longitudinal, nationally representative panels of user experiences", and as of yet they reported "findings for social media experiences that users perceive as bad for the world, experiences that negatively affect users personally, which platforms people use to learn useful and important information,(...) where people experience the most meaningful connections with others online" and The Political Attitudes of Social Media Users. Interesting throughout, albeit focussed on the US, and despite popular opinion of online experts, the most used online service stays... e-mail. I'm not sure how representative "1,965 U.S. adults" really is, but it is what it is.
2023 likely to be hottest year on record: The hottest ten years on record as of yet are, in order of average temperature, 2016, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2015, 2022, 2018, 2021, 2014, 2010. With 2023 pushing out 2010 from that list, then, all ten hottest years on record are to be found in the last ten years.
And if that's not enough sequential heat records caused by climate change for you, rest asured that Earth had hottest three-month period on record, with unprecedented sea surface temperatures.
Congrats people to these outstanding statistical achievements, with a special shoutout to our conservative fellow human beings. What a marvelous job we all did at fucking up the planet, 1a tip top quality work here for once.
What Are Dreams For?: New research on twitching during sleep points at the possibility that we dream to learn our bodies and figure out what happened to them during the day and sort out movements and sensations.
Molecular Signatures of a Broken Heart: "The transcriptional profiles in the brains of prairie voles changed after a long breakup, revealing a molecular shift that might help them cope with the loss of a partner. ... Pair-bonded voles showed stable upregulation of several genes involved in many different brain processes, such as the formation of synapses and signaling pathways relevant for learning. The team found that this upregulation trend was reversed in animals separated for four weeks."
Interesting research showing that sequential memory is a unique human trait, revealing "that bonobos, our closest relatives, cannot effectively remember the order of visual stimuli as humans can." Speculating from this: The human ability to represent sequential orders in our minds and then play with those patterns are essential in creating new patterns. If animals can't remember sequential information, they are unable to come of with different or higher orders in their minds, which might be the reason why their intelligence stays limited. When human cultural evolution went off so hard and fast as it did when we invented systems to inherit culture from previous generations by inventing writing systems, we kickstarted an exponetial improvement to exactly this unique human ability to memorize sequential information.
Universal Music: All Recognize Dance & Lullabies, But Not Love Songs: "Over 5,000 individuals from 49 countries, including isolated communities, participated in the study, listening to music samples in 31 different languages. Nearly all participants could identify dance music and lullabies, but only 12 out of 28 language groups could identify love songs. The varied recognition of love songs could be due to their wide emotional range and the influence of linguistic and cultural cues." // While this is interesting, i think it's bad experiment design to mix music that activates emotions (love songs) and physical activity (dance, lullaby). As this was more about language groups universally recognizing music styles, this may be secondary to the goal of the study, but still.
One of the more interesting recent memes in monster movie making is the micro genre of Kaiju-Cleanup-stories in which we see what happens after the giant monster destroying the world is defeated. Last year, we saw What to do with the dead Kaiju?, a movie about the cleanup of titular giant monster corpse which is about to explode, threatening the city - again! And in the soon to be released anime Kaiju No.8 we are following the adventures of one of those Kaiju corpse cleaners.
I'm very confident that the Kaiju cleanup squads are heavily inspired by Marvels 70s comic series about Damage Control, a company which "specializes in repairing the property damage caused by conflicts between superheroes and supervillains". I love those mundane aspects of giant monsters and superheroes and hope that Marvel will do a Damage Control movie in the future, after already appearing in Spiderman-flicks and some of their series. I'd really love to see the adventures of a normal guy working as a cleaner who also has to deal with superhero fuckups in his dayjob.
In the last Roundup, i linked to a walkthrough video of the game Stray, in which you play a cat walking around Kowloon Walled City. Now they'll adapt that game for the big screen.
The NYT reviews Talking Heads' remastered ‘Stop Making Sense’: "The 40th-anniversary restoration of a great concert film is a funk spectacle."
Lane Brown in Vulture on Rotten Tomatoes and how "the most overrated metric in movies is erratic, reductive, and easily hacked". She points out that RT has detoriated the influence of actual movie critics and while she's right, i want to point at the outstanding work of german movie critic Wolfgang M. Schmidt Jr. and his YT-channel Die Filmanalyse, in which he always wears a well taylored suit and dissects popular movies in context of the ideology they are embedded in. It's available in english too and it's truly one of the finest, best, most recognizable movie criticism in recent years. His dissection of Wes Anderson and the Barbie phenomenon, and his explanations of the brillance of Oppenheimer or Mission Impossible 7 are of a such analytical depth you simply find nowhere else in film critique these days. That's how good this guy is. I somewhat trust Rotten Tomatoes and i am guilty as charged -- but even more so, i trust Wolle Junior. He's the best. (The guy also has a new book out featuring some of his best reviews, available in german only though.)
Geoffrey O’Brien for Criterion writing on Roger Corman’s Poe Cycle: “The House Is the Monster”. I’m just getting back into the classic gothic horrors of Hammer Studios and Roger Cormans Poe-Cycle is on my list for a rewatch. I haven't read O’Briens piece on The Incredible Shrinking Man yet, which i just found, but TISM is my favorite scifi-movie of all time so this is a must read for me.
George Romero's Twilight of the Dead Hires Session 9 Director: A final film in George A. Romeros Zombie-saga will be shot by Brad Anderson (Session 9) who will direct Twilight of the Dead based on a script treatment co-written by Romero. As every horrorhead i know Romeros Dead-films in and out and i have no less then four different cuts of Dawn on my harddrive. Needless to say: I'm very much looking forward to this.
Hayaho Myazakis supposedly last movie: The Boy and the Heron has a trailer: Mahito, a young 12-year-old boy, struggles to settle in a new town after his mother's death. However, when a talking heron informs Mahito that his mother is still alive, he enters an abandoned tower in search of her, which takes him to another world.
In Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' Grindhouse, Eli Roth shot one of the interwoven fake trailers, and now he made a real movie from it: Thanksgiving is about a Black Friday riot which ends in tragedy and a mysterious Thanksgiving-inspired killer who terrorizes Plymouth, Massachusetts – the birthplace of the infamous holiday. Here's Eli Roths original fake trailer, and this, after Hobo with a Shotgun and Machete, marks the third movie which came out of these. It doesn't really look good, but it's interesting as an obscure artifact coming out of the tarantinoverse.
More trailers worth watching: Creature, The Bikeriders, The Royal Hotel, Creepy Crawly.
DJ Phonetic is a beatbox machine made from public speeches producing "beats with the kicks, snares, and hi-hats that are hidden within human speech" and mapping "specific phonemes (e.g. the /b/ in "ball", /k/ in "kite", /t/ in "tap") to specific drums (kick, snare, hihat.)" Then, they aligned some drum patterns to those public speeches.
Today in frankensteinian news: Scientists grow whole model of human embryo, without sperm or egg.
Today in bloodsuckingdracula news: Archeologists found a 400-Year-Old Corpse, Locked to Its Grave. It's a 'Vampire Child' buried with their foot padlocked "so they wouldn't rise from the grave". The site is an old graveyard where they buried the poor, criminals and people forbidden to be laid to rest in holy ground and it's not the first 'vampire'-corpse they found there.
How criminal networks in Sweden use false Spotify streams to launder money
Bamboo about to flower and die for first time in 120 years: "A species of bamboo found all over Japan – Phyllostachys nigra var. henonis – is about to flower for the first time in 120 years, and then die. The flowering event, expected in 2028, could have wide ramifications for the country’s ecology and economy. (...) It’s one of the most common varieties of bamboo in Japan, which has around 1700km2 of bamboo forests. All bamboo is 'monocarpic': it flowers once, then dies. Some bamboo species live for a couple of years before their flowering, but many live for decades. Phyllostachys nigra var. henonis has an unusually long flowering interval of 120 years: the last major flowering of henonis was in 1908."