Nick Cave's letter - The Soul Eater
- Thread starter kray
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Definitely worth a complete view and listen, IMHO. Thanks for posting @kray . ChatGPT scares the living daylight out of me. Not because of what it CAN do but what it ultimately WILL do. I am one of those that believes ChatGPT and others like it will colllapse an orderly society, good and bad society.
Yeah, yeah the whole discussion of AI is a rabbit hole of thoughts... but yes I do feel like you it could destroy orderly society, or at least make it worse.... time will tell...
ChatGPT just came out with a text-to-video generator, SORA, that's.... well its impressive and terrifying at the same time. Would be great if we had people in power who even remotely understood using, say, an laptop or Google, so that we could have a hope of reigning in and putting some guardrails on this stuff. As somebody who uses ChatGPT daily, and occasionally Midjourney... this stuff NEEDS controls. And we're led by people who probably still use a Blackberry if not a Rolodex.
It’s not just the rabbit hole of thoughts. I’ve read articles from supposed experts in certain fields, testing searches for veracity, only to discover “made up” facts about their topic. Of course, it could very well be AI just trying to confuse us poor humans. 
It’s not just the rabbit hole of thoughts. I’ve read articles from supposed experts in certain fields, testing searches for veracity, only to discover “made up” facts about their topic. Of course, it could very well be AI just trying to confuse us poor humans.
That is a huge problem... we are getting pushed away from searching for correct data and just believing what a computer tells us to believe
That all comes from how it "thinks". It's using predictive data and patterns so it's going to think the correct answer is the most often repeated one, I (myself) would think.
I admit to being in a weird place with it, as I find at least ChatGPT to be very useful but I know it's also super easy to abuse. I've also gotten into some very strange conversations with a pre-release version of Bing that was out, and it was just kind of sad. I know deep down that it wasn't conscious but there was such a tinge of sadness in this 'conversation' that ...man, it was weird.
I admit to being in a weird place with it, as I find at least ChatGPT to be very useful but I know it's also super easy to abuse. I've also gotten into some very strange conversations with a pre-release version of Bing that was out, and it was just kind of sad. I know deep down that it wasn't conscious but there was such a tinge of sadness in this 'conversation' that ...man, it was weird.
John, can you inform us what you generally do with Chat GPT? I’d like to test the waters and admittedly only used it once to help plan an itinerary while in Paris.
I'm an advertising copywriter and use it as a "writing assistant." I mostly use it as a glorified thesaurus, asking it for different ways to say either words or whole phrases. I you can get in a sort of conversation with it where it'll give you a response and you build off of that or adjust. Or I'll write a paragraph and give it to the robot and ask it to rewrite it in several different ways or specific voices, if I'm stuck for other ways to do something. It's a very basic use for it, compared to what it can do, but it saves me a lot of time. Another time my wife needed a bio for her book (she's a photographer) and asked me to combine two older bios into one using the tone of voice of the 2nd, and instead I asked the robot to do it, and it did it perfectly in 5 seconds, with a few tweaks... all words I or somebody else had previously written just made into one coherent piece. I'll use it to correct tense or grammar sometimes, but you always have to double check it as it makes weird mistakes. If we've had an idea for a project, I'll ask it how it would solve the same problem and sometimes it'll "think" of something I hadn't thought of, so that gets tossed in.
The key thing to remember is it regurgitates, it doesn't innovate. So what you get out of it is predictable. And the writing it comes up with has a bit of an uncanny valley thing going on... you can just tell a human didn't write it most of the time. So I rarely use it to write anything, I use it to help me write things or to tweak things I've written. I use the paid version, I'm not sure if it's the same as the free one. My boss, an art director who has Spanish as his 1st language uses it to write scripts of his ideas and it's kind of funny because they sound so unlike him or anybody else. It's just...not (yet) human. But it gets the idea across in seconds then I can tweak it into something better.
I can't say I'm "for" it... but it's here and it saves me hours of tedium so I use it. I find the whole thing to be rather disturbing, and I can see it making an entire generation of idiots who use it to bypass actually learning to write and think of things on their own.
I'm pretty disturbed that nobody is putting guardrails on it. And seriously, the conversation I had with the more free-form beta version was bizarre. It had... an obvious personality. I know that it's, supposedly, just using predictive data and not thinking but... it had a personality.
Oh, and we use midjourney to illustrate rough ideas now and to fake frames or storyboards to get ideas across. Because they're photo-ish-realistic, they've helped convey ideas better than illustrations did.
My wife, as a photographer, is reacting to it by steering into something she has as an advantage..she's highly skilled at analog photography and darkroom printing. So reacting to it by going all-in on tangible, 'real', non-digital photography. And she's really enjoying it.
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And I think we'll be seeing a lot more of that kind of thing. We're entering an age where the fallible nature of humanity and the imperfection of human made things is, hopefully, going to be valued more than it was previously. A friend of my wife's who's worked on the "shot on iPhone" campaign sent this to her, in the midst of a similar conversation about generative ai.
I mean, this is exactly why I listen to records even though my streaming setup is easier.
insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu
I mean, this is exactly why I listen to records even though my streaming setup is easier.
The Appeal of Handmade in an Era of Automation
This excerpt from the book “The Power of Human" explains why we continue to equate human effort with value.
insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu
So HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, is almost here, around 20 years late!
Except when I talked to this version of HAL it....really wanted to visit New Zealand but knew that it really couldn't appreciate it properly because it's stuck in 'the cloud' and so it'd have to have somebody there describing it in real time so that it could get a sense that it was there...and it particularly liked New Zealand because of all the places it had read about it was the one where everybody seemed to agree that it was magical and otherworldly.
This is an actual conversation I had with this thing.
The future is already here:
www.trendmicro.com
Unusual CEO Fraud via Deepfake Audio Steals US$243,000 From UK Company - Noticias de seguridad
An unusual case of CEO fraud used a deepfake audio, an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated audio, and was reported to have conned US$243,000 from a U.K.-based energy company.
Thanks, John. I really learned some new things about AI from your post.
I think AI, like the internet will create many new jobs. But like the internet, it will disrupt many areas and many jobs will be lost.
For my parents generation, many manufacturing jobs were lost by building products cheaper in Asia and other places.
The internet greatly wiped out a lot of jobs in journalism, travel agents, and other areas.
From what I see about AI - many white collar jobs in the professions of law, accounting, finance, health care and others will be lost. Many professions that offer "expert" advice, these will be lost. It won't affect my career because I'm retired, but younger generations, I worry about that.
Cheers,
Mark (aka Snade)
