Hi people. This just made my head explode. Maybe, I am just having a strange day, but… there are now AI-generated podcasts (of course there are!) between dead and alive people. I can’t begin to understand what that means. Possibly nothing. Possibly, that computers can now use the recorded likeness of people as sock puppets and play with them based on what it can come up with. We’ve known this to be a thing at least since Leo keeps pointing to the fact that his likeness is easily usable for AI. But have the likeness AND the content generated by AI means that… Who on earth needs anyone to still produce content? Soon, we all be reading and watching those books and series written by those billions and billions of chimpanzees. For some strange reason, this really seems disheartening to me. Any suggestion of original human though and creativity can be replaced by AI is… well. It’s not Turing-test level quality, but does that even matter? It is essentially for free and it is good enough. Good bye creators. Creating (for income) will become that much more difficult in the next five to ten years. It really seems to me that we’re shooting ourselves more and more in the foot with this AI thing. But possibly, I am just having a pessimistic day. Where’s Jeff to tell me this is awesome and Stacey to tell me I’m kinda right? Looking forward to today’s TWiG. Hope her toe is better.
PS: Part of the problem is that we have societal leadership people that talk so much BS that it can be hard to distinguish from what AI comes up with. So maybe it’s not that AI gets better but we humans are slowly degrading.
Add AI as paying listeners and we can exit the whole game.
Have you ever brought up the keyboard on your mobile and just kept tapping the dictionary suggestions to see what sentence the suggestions come up with? That’s what I’m getting from this, except the dictionary source is Jobs biographies. The content is as jumbled and mis-interpreted as the sentences my phone generates. It’s my diction and lexicon, but without substance.
I don’t think this should be considered an Artificial Intelligence. I really wish we’d stop tossing that moniker around for anything that comes out of machine learning systems. I submit this is more along the lines of a Virtual Intelligence, as defined in the Mass Effect game series - Virtual Intelligence | Mass Effect Wiki | Fandom
Sure, that’s the precise point of view. However, it seems academic to me. In my mind, this is not about what is intelligent or not - most humans are not intelligent most of the time - but whether we’ve found a solution to produce content for 0 USD that’s good enough to put between two ads. If that’s met, if AI becomes good enough, we will regress to that state of development because we can have “OK” for 0 USD, it will become difficult to argue that we need “Great” for 1000 USD.
I think the saving grace at the moment, is that it is so obviously AI. Whilst the voices and some of the mannerisms might be there, it is still very stilted and it doesn’t flow like a natural conversation.
Once it improves, it will be harder to tell.
Of course, the quality is certainly not 100% and also not 80%, but possibly 30 or 40% of “passes as full quality”. But it works as background noise. I’d really like to hear a fully AI’d This Week in Google experiment with Leo, Jeff, Stacey, and Ant. @Leo - do you guys have the opportunity to try this? Possibly for club TWiT? It would be a hoot to listen to what an AI thinks you guys would say. This (below) would be my bingo card. It would be such a hoot to play.
I think I have been trained on enough shows that I feel like a TWiG AI.
This is fun. What did I forget?