chatGPT and DALL-E

[thatguy]

In other AI news:

https://www.engadget.com/scientists-recr...53359.html

Scientists recreate an iconic Pink Floyd song by scanning listeners' brains
The research looked at how brains interact with music. 
Sarah Fielding
[/url]August 16, 2023 7:40 AM

You know when a certain song comes on and it encompasses your whole being for a few minutes? Music has a way of causing a unique and engaging [url=https://www.engadget.com/2017-06-04-deep-brain-stimulation-without-implants.html]stimulation in your brain, one that scientists are working to understand and mimic. Such was the case in a recent study published in PLOS Biologyin which researchers successfully implemented technology that recreated Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1 solely using brain activity. It utilized a technique known as stimulus reconstruction and built on previous innovations allowing researchers to recreate a song akin to the one a person had heard.

The 29 participants had pharmacoresistant epilepsy and intracranial grids or strips of electrodes which had been surgically implanted to aid in their treatment. Researchers utilized these electrodes to record activity across multiple auditory regions of the individuals’ brains that process aspects of music like lyrics and harmony — while the participants actively listened to Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1. The entirety of the recordings took place at Albany Medical Center, in upstate New York.

Scientists used AI to analyze then create a copy of the words and sounds participants had heard. Though the final product was quite muffled, but the song is clear to anyone listening so you can check it out for yourselfa. The researchers are also confident that they could increase its quality in future attempts.

The listening experience primarily engaged the right side of participants’ brains, mostly in the superior temporal gyrus and especially when absorbing unique music. There was also a small level of stimulation in the left side of the brain. Researchers further found that a point in the brain’s temporal lobe ignited when the 16th notes of the rhythm guitar played while the song played at 99 beats per minute. 

This finding could provide more insight into the part that area plays in processing rhythm. It could also aid in restoring people who have lost their speech ability, through conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Instead of creating a monotone, almost robot-like response, better understanding the way a brain processes and responds to music might lead to more fluid prosthetics for speech.

—tg

[Drunk Monk]

This made me lol for realz.

[Greg]

ChatGPT, indeed.

Need verification.

[Drunk Monk]

Search the web!

all you’ll find is cheese…

[Drunk Monk]

Just received another bot article submission for KFM titled 'New life for singing Aibo Robot Dogs' 

WTH?

Do these AI freelancers ever even read KFM before submitting articles?

[Greg]

Are the bots just sending you the submissions to cut down on the meat interface?

[Drunk Monk]

I don’t know why the bots send KFM so much. They never bother to read our submission guidelines.

[thatguy]

For years I’ve had this idea to recreate Kelly Freas’ Astounding Science Fiction cover (also the cover of a Queen album), but swapping the roles of the two figures, but my artistic abilities are way too limited. I had tried using text prompts in the craiyon and Draw Things apps (the latter uses stable diffusion) but the results were crap…I didn’t try mid journey because you only get a couple tries before you need to pony up.

Now, Dall-e 3 can be used for free from within the bing app (if you sign in with your Microsoft account).
I’m putting this up on the doom refrigerator so you all can look at it.

I have mixed feelings as I didn’t do it myself, but it was my vision….It makes me think of the quote by Lily Tomlin "i worry that drugs have made us more creative than we really are"

https://www.bing.com/images/create/in-th...de=overlay


—tg

[thatguy]

Sounds like "Ouij-AI"

https://www.engadget.com/sundance-docume...25316.html

Sundance documentary Eternal You shows how AI companies are ‘resurrecting’ the dead
Devindra Hardawar

---

But are we ready for that reality?


Beetz Brothers Film Production

A woman has a text chat with her long-dead lover. A family gets to hear a deceased elder speak again. A mother gets another chance to say goodbye to her child, who died suddenly, via a digital facsimile. This isn't a preview of the next season of Black Mirror — these are all true stories from the Sundance documentary Eternal You, a fascinating and frightening dive into tech companies using AI to digitally resurrect the dead.

It's yet another way modern AI, which includes large language models like ChatGPT and similar bespoke solutions, has the potential to transform society. And as Eternal You shows, the AI afterlife industry is already having a profound effect on its early users.

The film opens on a woman having a late night text chat with a friend: "I can't believe I'm trying this, how are you?" she asks, as if she's using the internet for the first time. "I'm okay. I'm working, I'm living. I'm... scared," her friend replies. When she asks why, they reply, "I'm not used to being dead."


Beetz Brothers Film Production

It turns out the woman, Christi Angel, is using the AI service Project December to chat with a simulation of her first love, who died many years ago. Angel is clearly intrigued by the technology, but as a devout Christian, she's also a bit spooked out by the prospect of raising the dead. The AI system eventually gives her some reasons to be concerned: Cameroun reveals that he's not in heaven, as she assumes. He's in hell.

"You're not in hell," she writes back. "I am in hell," the AI chatbot insists. The digital Cameroun says he's in a "dark and lonely" place, his only companions are "mostly addicts." The chatbot goes on to say he's currently haunting a treatment center and later suggests "I'll haunt you." That was enough to scare Angel and question why she was using this service in the first place.

While Angel was aware she was talking to a digital recreation of Cameroun, which was based on the information she provided to Project December, she interacted with the chatbot as if she was actually chatting with him on another plane of existence. That's a situation that many users of AI resurrection services will likely encounter: Rationality can easily overwhelm your emotional response while "speaking" with a dead loved one, even if the conversation is just occurring over text.

In the film, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle suggests that our current understanding of how AI affects people is similar to our relationship with social media over a decade ago. That makes it a good time to ask questions about the human values and purposes it's serving, she says. If we had a clearer understanding of social media early on, maybe we could have pushed Facebook and Twitter to confront misinformation and online abuse more seriously. (Perhaps the 2016 election would have looked very different if we were aware of how other countries could weaponize social media.)


Beetz Brothers Film Production
Eternal You also introduces us to Joshua Barbeau, a freelance writer who became a bit of an online celebrity in 2021 when The San Francisco Chronicle reported on his Project December chatbot: a digital version of his ex-fiancee Jessica. At first, he used Project December to chat with pre-built bots, but he eventually realized he could use the underlying technology (GPT-3, at the time) to create one with Jessica's personality. Their conversations look natural and clearly comfort Barbeau. But we're still left wondering if chatting with a facsimile of his dead fiancee is actually helping Barbeau to process his grief. It could just as easily be seen as a crutch that he feels compelled to pay for.

It's also easy to be cynical about these tools, given what we see from their creators in the film. We meet Jason Rohrer, the founder and Project December and a former indie game designer, who comes across as a typical techno-libertarian.

"I believe in personal responsibility," he says, after also saying that he's not exactly in control of the AI models behind Project December, and right before we see him nearly crash a drone into his co-founders face. "I believe that consenting adults can use that technology however they want and they're responsible for the results of whatever they're doing. It's not my job as the creator of the technology to prevent the technology from being released, because I'm afraid of what somebody might do with it."

But, as MIT's Turkle points out, reanimating the dead via AI introduces moral questions that engineers like Rohrer likely aren't considering. "You're dealing with something much more profound in the human spirit," she says. "Once something is constituted enough that you can project onto it, this life force. It's our desire to animate the world, which is human, which is part of our beauty. But we have to worry about it, we have to keep it in check. Because I think it's leading us down a dangerous path."


Beetz Brothers Film Production

Another service, Hereafter.ai, lets users record stories to create a digital avatar of themselves, which family members can talk to now or after they die. One woman was eager to hear her father's voice again, but when she presented the avatar to her family the reaction was mixed. Younger folks seemed intrigue, but the older generation didn't want any part of it. "I fear that sometimes we can go too far with technology," her father's sister said. "I would just love to remember him as a person who was wonderful. I don't want my brother to appear to me. I'm satisfied knowing he's at peace, he's happy, and he's enjoying the other brothers, his mother and father."

YOV, an AI company that also focuses on personal avatars, or "Versonas," wants people to have seamless communication with their dead relatives across multiple channels. But, like all of these other digital afterlife companies, it runs into the same moral dilemmas. Is it ethical to digitally resurrect someone, especially if they didn't agree to it? Is the illusion of speaking to the dead more helpful or harmful for those left behind?

The most troubling sequence in Eternal You focuses on a South Korean mother, Jang Ji-sun, who lost her young child and remains wracked with guilt about not being able to say goodbye. She ended up being the central subject in a VR documentary, Meeting You, which was broadcast in South Korea in early 2020. She went far beyond a mere text chat: Jang donned a VR headset and confronted a startlingly realistic model of her child in virtual reality. The encounter was clearly moving for Jang, and the documentary received plenty of media attention at the time.

"There's a line between the world of the living and the world of the dead," said Kim Jong-woo, the producer behind Meeting You. "By line, I mean the fact that the dead can't come back to life. But people saw the experience as crossing that line. After all, I created an experience in which the beloved seemed to have returned. Have I made some huge mistake? Have I broken the principle of humankind? I don't know... maybe to some extent."

Eternal You paints a haunting portrait of an industry that's already revving up to capitalize on grief-stricken people. That's not exactly new; psychics and people claiming to speak to the dead have been around for our entire civilization. But through AI, we now have the ability to reanimate those lost souls. While that might be helpful for some, we're clearly not ready for a world where AI resurrection is commonplace.

--tg

[King Bob]

I've recently seen a few good articles about what a crock AI is, particularly these by Cory Doctorow:
The Real AI Threat to Workers
What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Echoing the second one, this piece is about how AI companies pretty much can't turn a profit or demonstrate any good use case for their products. Reading it made me think another tech crash is coming.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

I've recently seen a few good articles about what a crock AI is, particularly these by Cory Doctorow:
The Real AI Threat to Workers
What Kind of Bubble is AI?

Echoing the second one, this piece is about how AI companies pretty much can't turn a profit or demonstrate any good use case for their products. Reading it made me think another tech crash is coming.

Doctorow is really good. His essays are also pretty much spot-on. I think AI has less than 5 years before it collapses. It is being pushed by the same Cyber-Snakeoil salesmen as crypto.

[thatguy]

Do an internet search for "Managing AI Hallucinations".... apparently, GPT-like tools often make-shit-up™ and then cite that as source material. It's like a teenager avoiding a term paper.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

I use AI almost every day to generate spam copy. I embrace it.

It has made that part of my job so much easier.

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

Do an internet search for "Managing AI Hallucinations".... apparently, GPT-like tools often make-shit-up™ and then cite that as source material. It's like a teenager avoiding a term paper.

--tg

It straight-up lies. A lot. H has been doing a lot of research on LLM’s and their ilk.

[King Bob]

The fake citations are a good way to catch AI-generated term papers. And I read the other day where a lawyer got censured for his AI-generated filing because of the fake cases cited.