Synthesizing the Businessmen-Smile
In which a stochastic parrot positions itself behind the customer to service the account.
A politician has given a speech in congress written by an AI, which might be the first instance of synthetic content being used in politics.
When U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss decided to deliver a speech on a bill that would create a U.S.-Israel artificial intelligence center, he opted to let the AI do the talking. The brief two-paragragh speech read by the Massachusetts Democrat on the floor of the U.S. House on Wednesday was generated by the online AI chatbot ChatGPT. His staff said they believe it's the first time an AI-written speech was read in Congress. (…)
The text generated from Auchincloss's prompt includes sentences like: "We must collaborate with international partners like the Israeli government to ensure that the United States maintains a leadership role in AI research and development and responsibly explores the many possibilities evolving technologies provide."
Seemingly unrelated, this viral tweet is making the rounds and its showing the (seemingly) future of job recruitment through synthetic application generation.
I think both are related.
Ryan Broderick yesterday wrote a compelling piece about how these things automatize social process in job application. It is a good argument, but I disagree respectfully.
In both instances, the political speech and the job , AI writing political speech and job applications, the only thing that gets automatized is the political leveling of the field. Let me explain.
When you write a job application, or a political speech, you stick to formulas, which are algorithms. There is quite literally no difference if you pay an application consult to help you with your bland and formulaic job application, or paying OpenAI a buck for ChatGPT to do that job.
This stuff is bland, neutral and it doesn't surprise or risks offending anyone (its your voter/employer, so you maybe shouldn't risk offend them). Job applications and political talk is soothing and smooth nothingtalk, political PR speak for a cause.
Texts like these have zero edge, no texture and no personality, and that’s on purpose. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, because you want to meet the target of your communication on a leveled field, where both parties know exactly what the other one expects, and then those expectations are met.
Like a featureless business suit, texts like these offer marginalized, minimal creativity, and AI is perfect for this sort of thing: Job applications, PR text, copywriting and so forth. All of these require formulaic, noncreative text generation. In this kind of writing, there is actually a demand for minimized creativity.
If you are actually creative as a writer of political speeches, you may offend your voter base and loose. If you are actually creative for PR text or as a copywriter, you do not maximize the market outcome. In jobs like these, creativity is stiffled, it’s caged creativity brought down to a minimum.
Sure, you might say, but it’s a big problem of our times that political speech has no character, no style, no personality. And you’d be right, but [insert your fav polit-clown here] still has a pen, right? She might use it. If you have to get creative with a job app, you can paint it too.
Bland, empty political talk has been around since the cambrian explosion, and bullshit jobs not only deserve bullshit text, they love it like that. This is also why i really hesitate to feel sorry for the people who will loose jobs in those sectors. It’s industrial, technical, mechanized work in a business suit, and who really cares about that.
Highly intellectual excurse in this classic George Carlin bit on businessmen, surely no bland empty talk in this one, i promise.
What AI is automatizing here is George Carlins "big bullshit businessmen smile", and i actually think, business rhetorics and political speech is more authentic this way, if you know what i mean.
When AI is able to generate an actually funny synthetic George Carlin (which rhymes and writes 7 dirty words you can't say on Twitter), then i'll worry. Until then, it's just stochastic parrots producing bullshit for bullshit jobs.
However, we need to talk about UBI in an AI world, pronto.
Links
High frequency brain wave patterns in the motor cortex can predict an upcoming movement - "we're seeing that there is spatially organized patterning that carries information." Mark my words: Consciousness is a moiré pattern emerging from overlapping brain wave patterns.
David Chalmers Talk about AI-Consciousness at NeurIPS22 is online now.
All in the mind: Decoding brain waves to identify the music we are hearing
A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis - For implanted BCI, we are nearing realtime speech synthesis. Paralyzed people soon will be able to speak again, fluently.
Scientists unravel secret of swing in jazz - It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing.
CNET's AI Journalist Appears to Have Committed Extensive Plagiarism / A Writer Used AI To Plagiarize Me. Now What? - I guess this will be a year of GenerativeAI-lawsuits.
Image Stacks and iPhone Racks - Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine - A search engine for image macros. (Memes are not merely “funny images with text”, but i think i lost that battle a while ago).
Nick Cave on ChatGPT - This song sucks.
Generative AI is bringing the biggest disruption to film making in 100 years
Simulations all the way down: Recursive VR-Room
Natural Language Playlist - AI generated Spotify-playlists. Here's "crazy mixtape with the most eclectic sound possible" and "80s music for a sunny spring day". They are okayish, but they are no match for GOOD MUSIC.
Anti-Stable Diffusion Lawsuit Deep Dive: It’s A Neutron Bomb / Don't Let Disney Monopolize A.I.-Generated Art - Jon Stokes on the Stable Diffusion-lawsuits. I disagree with a lot here. Emad himself declared Stable Diffusion to be art history compressed into 4GB, and 'cut n paste' is mentioned nowhere in the complaint. It constantly states SD as a new form of collage tool, which is essentially what it is, except the collage bits have been atomized into postmodern grey goo, which you can morph into new forms by prompting.
As i said in my piece on the lawsuits: “The only thing that matters here is if the companies involved used unlicensed artworks in the creation of a commercial tool, and if the Fair Use defense applies to a machine that can mimic artistic style. They did, and we'll see.”12 Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life - Kevin Kelly on aliens. Our species having nothing to offer for advanced interstellar travelling civilizations has a stanislawlemian feel.
Scenario lands $6M for its AI platform that generates game art assets - Only 2D-game assets (yet), but that’s another job from the industrialized creative complex that’s eaten by AI.
AI is the #3 in the global risk report: Weapons of Mass Disruption: Eurasia Group's #3 Top Risk of 2023 - While I do not buy into the flood, because human attention is the bottleneck for content, synthetic or otherwise, i do think that making the job of manipulators easier is not a good thing. Then again, i don't really care if a flood of disinformation is produced by an army of IRA-trolls or AI, and their impact is negligible.
Google Calls In Larry Page and Sergey Brin to Tackle ChatGPT and A.I. Chatbots - Google arguably has the most used text interface in the world. If they flip the switch and add some LaMDA to that interface, ChatGPT may look like dust. Back then, Apple introduced the iPhone into a already booming market within their Mac-ecosystem, which was a perfect fit for the looming social media revolution. Nokia just had phones, and the mobile web was just starting to take shape. Then again, Microsoft wants to put a gazillion bucks into OpenAI and they have Office. It’s on.
These stickers are making the round and they are perfect.
StyleGAN-T: Unlocking the Power of GANs for Fast Large-Scale Text-to-Image Synthesis - "Every frame in the following video is generated in 0,1 seconds at a resolution of 512x512." We're approaching real-time image synthesis. Now hook this up to a BCI and enable some digital lucid dreaming.
Wonders of Streetview - Random weird places, here’s a ship of Pandas / Underwater with Seals / Scotts hut in antarctica / Jojo Museum in California
