Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

i can't afford a can of soda right now and i have no idea how wealthy people actually live, but i assume you would just park this car at the dealer every night so that they can repair one of the millions of tiny things in your car that can no longer be fixed by hand

On Thursday, Microsoft researchers announced a new text-to-speech AI model called VALL-E that can closely simulate a person's voice when given a three-second audio sample. Once it learns a specific voice, VALL-E can synthesize audio of that person saying anything—and do it in a way that attempts to preserve the speaker's emotional tone.

Its creators speculate that VALL-E could be used for high-quality text-to-speech applications, speech editing where a recording of a person could be edited and changed from a text transcript (making them say something they originally didn't), and audio content creation when combined with other generative AI models like GPT-3.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/01/microsofts-new-ai-can-simulate-anyones-voice-with-3-seconds-of-audio/

microsoft should be sued for creating this fucked up software even if the claims for it are overhyped in the press release

i barely follow the field, and i am confident there are many, many competitors, and that this one will be out of date in a year or two.

one of the overarching problems is how to protect people from something that is inevitable. Microsoft says "To mitigate such risks, it is possible to build a detection model to discriminate whether an audio clip was synthesized by VALL-E." ok. what happens when there are a dozen competing TTS systems?

also, it it is not that hard to build and customize your own TTS. a few years ago i made a very bad piece of art (i know, i know: many bad pieces of art). with almost no skills in linux, python, TTS, and using cheap-ass raspberry pi computers, using free open source libraries and datasets, i was able to put together a quartet of machines that "spoke" to each using speakers, and then "listened" to what was heard through open air, then passed around the message in a "telephone"-like game that was interesting in my imagination and very boring and confusing to witness in real life. skilled people who actually know what they're doing, with the benefit of having money and access to capable computers, could do a million times better than what i did. the limitation on my end was just processing power. i couldn't afford to use better computers that could have handle large corpuses and real-time TTS translation. but. other people certainly can. and also, as we often hear, the smart phones in our pockets are more powerful than yada yada yada from 20 years ago. that trend still continues.

this is what i worry about, with things like chatgpt3 and other developments in the field. right now, the thing that keeps chatgpt3 "safe" is that there are artificial constraints that are placed on them. you can't ask chatgpt3 to tell you the easiest, quickest, lowest cost way to make a bomb, because if you do, it'll tell you it's not allowed to access that training data, etc. i know 0.00001% about this field but i am confident that in not too long, people will be making their own versions of all this stuff, DIY style, and they won't have the constraints. in fact, i would guess that quite a few people will get into the field because they're frustrated with the artificial constraints.

the chatbot / general AI thing is very complicated. the TTS advances seem trivial to me, and inevitable because they're already here

and we think this is a golden age of scamming. t'ain't nothing compared to what's coming down the pike.

brb creating a rap song with KM's voice

called "Thread Delivers"

to push back against my own paranoia (which is not a healthy way to live, i know), i think it's already possible to scam people with this stuff, and it hasn't quite happened yet. i hope that the worst that happens is something similar to email spam, something that is ubiquitous, really does negatively affect a lot of people, but is still manageable and not a epoch-shifting problem, regardless

xp *programs KM.32_bot to tell a 3-minute anecdote about john stockton in iambic pentameter with as many internal rhymes as possible*

ubiquity occurring as quickly as possible is probably the best case scenario just so people will stop trusting things they shouldn't trust

i'm not sure which remote forms of communication would be outside of this realm, though.

voices on the telephone and online text interactions seem pretty common and not something that will be easily given up

nothing will stand up in court anymore, crime is abolished

I am imaginin g such cars in 15 years at the shop "yeah my radar went again how much that gonna run me"

people hate the subscription model but if i had a car like that, first i'd be rich so whatever, but secondly i could be easily convinced to get an expensive Apple Care-esque repair subscription to cover all of the millions of ways that the computers will fuck up

I think I'd rather just have some elaborate m achine that makes new cars for me every 5 years

a car that drives itself to the car wash, then drives to the beach and watches the sunset while listening to the blue nile

one more negative AI story for today, sorry. there are already plenty of articles summing up what happened, but if you haven't learned about it already, see if you can figure out what went wrong here:

We provided mental health support to about 4,000 people — using GPT-3. Here’s what happened 👇

— Rob Morris (@RobertRMorris) January 6, 2023

We used a ‘co-pilot’ approach, with humans supervising the AI as needed. We did this on about 30,000 messages...

— Rob Morris (@RobertRMorris) January 6, 2023

Here’s a 2min video on how it worked: https://t.co/3gHvc5i0rU

Read on for the TLDR and some thoughts…

— Rob Morris (@RobertRMorris) January 6, 2023

Messages composed by AI (and supervised by humans) were rated significantly higher than those written by humans on their own (p < .001). Response times went down 50%, to well under a minute.

— Rob Morris (@RobertRMorris) January 6, 2023

And yet… we pulled this from our platform pretty quickly.

Why?

— Rob Morris (@RobertRMorris) January 6, 2023

Once people learned the messages were co-created by a machine, it didn’t work. Simulated empathy feels weird, empty.

— Rob Morris (@RobertRMorris) January 6, 2023

Hello, I know that you've been feeling tired
I bring you love and deeper understanding
Hello, I know that you're unhappy
I bring you love and deeper understanding

clearly we have learned nothing from the tragic malpractice of DR_SBAITSO.exe

the irony, i guess, is that ELIZA was one of the first chatbots, in the 60's, and was designed to emulate Rogerian therapy

xp i didn't know about Dr. Sbaitso!

i guess the Rogerian kind of "and how does that make you feel?" kind of therapy is a natural fit for chatbots with limited capabilities

yes!! we had this on our computer when I was growing up! god my brothers and I would spend hours typing dirty words into that thing

https://i.imgur.com/VfgMMzt.png

also, yet more proof that although the internet gets worse every single year, at least this means that the further back in time you go, the better it gets
https://archive.ph/20130111132657/http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0952/

because it's the future, this already exists
https://bert.org/2023/01/06/chatgpt-in-dr-sbaitso/

I think ai is actually a good fit for cognitive therapy because it is logical and analytic - but can it provide human empathy?

People fake empathy all the time. Why not a bot?

faking empathy is all a bot CAN do. it's the recipient that's objecting.

I guess sometimes empathy backfires too like
"I'm so tired after that walk in the prairie"

"really? I'm not tired at all! You must be an increasingly inferior individual to tire so easily!"

Also some humans give the worst &*^%&^% advice

emptythy

https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgyjm4/ai-writing-tools-like-chatgpt-are-the-future-of-learning-and-no-its-not-cheating

“I think it’s an increase in human capability moment that we’re looking at right now,” co-director at Deakin University’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, Phillip Dawson, told VICE.

“I think a student that graduates in five years’ time is going to be able to do so much more than what we are capable to do now because they’ll be using these sorts of tools.”

Dawson described ChatGPT as a writing tool and compared students using it to help them write essays to a pilot learning how to fly a modern plane.

“Yeah, you need to be able to use all the instruments and you need to know how all those work, but you also need to be able to do it when all those instruments fail. You still need to be able to land that plane.”

i think this is right.

i distinctly remember an early 2000s drunken front porch discussion i had with a friend, back in the days when i had friends and we had discussions. he said that in "the future", it wouldn't be about knowing things, it would be about knowing the tools that you could use to find out things. fluency with finding information would be more useful than just knowing things. i took a giant bong rip. yes. yes, man. he was right, and that future is already the past.

i think this ai stuff is fucking terrible. but it's not going away. the conversation will soon shift to how to make it better and to fix the things that are bad about it. but it's not going away. i can't change that, you can't change that. it's a blow to the ego, and maybe that, in itself, is a good thing

good thoughts

I read a very click baitty piece on AI and the end of writing but all the examples were basically "look at how AI apes this style of writing from the 1400s" and then went "this will write Ulysses with a prompt" which misses the point that Ulysses has been written and this would be pointless.

You will still need to memorise and store a lot of information in your head. There is a base of canon like knowledge -- whether that's a canon of poetry or scientific knowledge -- that we all need to work at.

AI will calculate and be an aid to coming out with interesting outputs, that as prompts we can use. We can may get to a good destination faster.

I remember that argument being said about Chess and Go. Then AI taught itself from first principles (the rules) with no pre-existing body of knowledge.

But it hasn't destroyed the enthusiasm for chess playing and competition.

Far from just providing useful outputs, in these areas AI has overtaken us in reaching a good destination (superhuman playing strength) and left us in the slow lane.

It's a good example really. In the end though there are tournaments, a public that is interested and watches and plays with the knowledge that a machine would beat the best human.

Funnily enough the outrage and alienation come from when we think a human is using AI under the covers to cheat another human being.

I finally gave in and had a go on ChatGPT. It didn't seem confident in offering an opinion on whether my child's grandmother (whom it later referred to as 'your grandmother') would like Super Mario Bros, and I had to correct its punctuation after some terrible run-on sentences. It then apologised and said it should've used semicolons, but when I asked which sentence I had been referring to it quoted the wrong one.
IDIOT!
When I told it which sentence I meant though, it did correct it properly. Hmm.

I think it's great that ChatGPT has exposed Nick Cave as totally hollow talent after someone asking it something like "write some shite knockoff Flann O'Brien lyrics about murdering women in the style of a sad old aging goth"

Certainly a bit of a moment of reckoning for secondary school teachers and university professors who assign essays that are basically "regurgitate this week's syllabus in your own words please". They are going to have to get more creative in their assignments and that's got to be a good thing!

who would have known, CNET

When internet sleuths discovered last week that CNET had quietly published dozens of feature articles generated entirely by artificial intelligence, the popular tech site acknowledged that it was true — but described the move as a mere experiment.

Now, though, in a scenario familiar to any sci-fi fan, the experiment seems to have run amok: The bots have betrayed the humans.

Specifically, it turns out the bots are no better at journalism — and perhaps a bit worse — than their would-be human masters.

On Tuesday, CNET began appending lengthy correction notices to some of its AI-generated articles after Futurism, another tech site, called out the stories for containing some “very dumb errors.”

An automated article about compound interest, for example, incorrectly said a $10,000 deposit bearing 3 percent interest would earn $10,300 after the first year. Nope. Such a deposit would actually earn just $300.

More broadly, CNET and sister publication Bankrate, which has also published bot-written stories, have now disclosed qualms about the accuracy of the dozens of automated articles they’ve published since November.

New notices appended to several other pieces of AI-generated work state that “we are currently reviewing this story for accuracy,” and that “if we find errors, we will update and issue corrections.”

which is cheaper - a writer and an editor a decent wage, or hire just an editor (probably not at a decent wage)

New notices appended to several other pieces of AI-generated work state that “we are currently reviewing this story for accuracy,” and that “if we find errors, we will update and issue corrections.”

stuff a bot would say

i want to say something positive. because, reading this thread, i think i give the wrong impression. i feel that way about a lot of stuff, a lot of topics.

i think there's ai and creativity don't have to be enemies. i don't think i'll ever be a person that uses it as part of the process, but i already think about it and think about it as something akin to google image search, back when google image search was good, something you can modify and play with and use in unexpected ways. a couple weeks ago i prompted one of the crappy free ones, craiyon, with "pink floyd album covers with babes and butts", just wanting to see what it would do.

https://i.imgur.com/8ePC0l0.png

i'm not sure what that is. and if and when i ever made a drawing or a painting from that, i would change a lot. there's no point to trying to replicate it. but the left butt is incredible, as it the bikini in the middle, and i love how the black swimwear on the right doesn't make sense. it's like a miniskirt on the beach, with grumpy neil young nearby. it's a good prompt for making art. it doesn't make sense to look at it (to me) and disregard it out of hand because the source was a computer. those horizontal lines on the left and his rectangle arm. that's weird, and good, and thought provoking to me

i love how all three of the figures on the right are taller than the black-clad figure on the left

which is cheaper - a writer and an editor a decent wage, or hire just an editor (probably not at a decent wage)

― Karl Malone, Thursday, 19 January 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Or it's everyone being "paired" with an AI. So you have a editor paired with an AI, or a paired programmer. The point is to downgrade the value of what people can do, and therefore downgrade their wages.

As bad as a lot of AI art is, CrAIyon is amongst the worst at making images.

xposts - I agree, the USP of something like Craiyon is the inspirational randomness, the uncanny parts, not the final product

I think ChatGPT (or a version of it) has serious worth for students who struggle with essay-writing, helping them craft arguments and structure paragraphs of writing; it's a good writing tutor, if you can resist the temptation to copy-and-paste

sorry, "paragraphs of writing" is a horrible phrase, should've used a chatbot

those horizontal lines on the left and his rectangle arm.

that's just a brick wall, no? prompted by "pink floyd" I assume

current GPT is way too error-prone to let students use it unsupervised imo