A.I. is B.S.

Next thing you know it'll turn out the SAG AFTRA strike folk were right to be scared of their likeness being reproduced and stuff. Imagine that.
 
Man, seeing non-artists applaud this is soul destroying. All of the chanting that being an artist will soon be like being a blacksmith.

Yeah, the death of culture because everything is filtered through some corporate machine is sure something to cheer.

Literally nothing has made me lose any and all hope in life more than the rise of AI.
 
Man, seeing non-artists applaud this is soul destroying. All of the chanting that being an artist will soon be like being a blacksmith.

Yeah, the death of culture because everything is filtered through some corporate machine is sure something to cheer.

Literally nothing has made me lose any and all hope in life more than the rise of AI.
The ability to completely filter what is coming out of any actor/comedian/artist's mouth in nearly real time is terrifying.
 
That's literally what happened here though, right? An AI writing comedy and attributing it to someone who's long dead, presumably to get more views and income for whoever controls the AI?
I specifically meant that it makes me apprehensive since the lack of transparency means I cannot definitively rule out the possibility that the person(s) managing the simulation did not introduce their own bias(es) into the finished product, polluting that final product with what is essentially subtle deceit and/or propaganda dressed in Carlin's voice.
There is a Japanese phrase I was trying to find which translates to something like "Faithful Copy." It describes an attempt to recreate/reproduce something, but in a manner which is as much of a tribute/homage of the original as possible, such as a museum might do to restore an ancient artifact. It is distinctly opposite from a word such as "Forgery," because while both describe an attempt to emulate something as closely as possible, one is doing so to deceive, while the other's entire purpose is to honor the original.
This effort is certainly an attempt to copy/reproduce, but while I do not believe it was created as an intentional attempt at forgery, I DEFINITELY do not believe its purpose was to be a "faithful copy."

--Patrick
 
I specifically meant that it makes me apprehensive since the lack of transparency means I cannot definitively rule out the possibility that the person(s) managing the simulation did not introduce their own bias(es) into the finished product, polluting that final product with what is essentially subtle deceit and/or propaganda dressed in Carlin's voice.
There is a Japanese phrase I was trying to find which translates to something like "Faithful Copy." It describes an attempt to recreate/reproduce something, but in a manner which is as much of a tribute/homage of the original as possible, such as a museum might do to restore an ancient artifact. It is distinctly opposite from a word such as "Forgery," because while both describe an attempt to emulate something as closely as possible, one is doing so to deceive, while the other's entire purpose is to honor the original.
This effort is certainly an attempt to copy/reproduce, but while I do not believe it was created as an intentional attempt at forgery, I DEFINITELY do not believe its purpose was to be a "faithful copy."

--Patrick
I feel like your attempt to find a distinction is, in effect, pointless. There is no possibility of a 'pure' creation because an AI cannot create. It is bereft of originality, by pure definition of what it is. There is no creation without the biases of its creators as well as the works its creators had it plagiarize.
 
There is no creation without the biases of its creators as well as the works its creators had it plagiarize.
I understand you. I am saying that there is a distinction between "We fed this AI a shit-ton of George Carlin as a tech demo to show how awesome our AI is and look what came out" and "We made this because we are huge fans of George Carlin and took these tools and tuned them to output something that would honor his legacy, not ours."
In other words, there is plenty of room for improvement that an actual GC fan would've obsessed over prior to releasing it.
I tried to watch it all and didn’t get as far as I thought I would. The voice was off most of the time. The thoughts [...] had some jarring transitions that George wouldn’t have used.
I was hoping you would at least get through the part about how AI will mean the death of stand-up comedy. I agree that it suffers greatly from some kind of stand-up version of the uncanny valley, where it's almost close enough but obviously doesn't have the "flow" that Carlin would have ensured. George was an absolute master of language and how to employ it, and his routines were like gallery pieces painstakingly and exactingly carved from ebony and bone, then posed and exhibited with excruciating care. This was more like a white-and-black plastic 3D printed version in a tourist gift shop's window. Close enough to make you double-take at first, but obvious when inspected.

--Patrick
 
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I understand you. I am saying that there is a distinction between "We fed this AI a shit-ton of George Carlin as a tech demo to show how awesome our AI is and look what came out" and "We made this because we are huge fans of George Carlin and took these tools and tuned them to output something that would honor his legacy, not ours."
This is where I disagree. I don't think there's any difference, because I don't see any way an AI reconstruction could honor anyone's legacy. It can't create new George Carlin, and even if it somehow -could- the idea that the artistry of a person can be distilled into a product to produce is, to me, the very death of art. If so called fans truly want to honor his work, they could do so by furthering causes he believed in, not committing cultural necrophilia that he would more than likely hate.
 

Dave

Staff member
I was hoping you would at least get through the part about how AI will mean the death of stand-up comedy. I agree that it suffers greatly from some kind of stand-up version of the uncanny valley, where it's almost close enough but obviously doesn't have the "flow" that Carlin would have ensured. George was an absolute master of language and how to employ it, and his routines were like gallery pieces painstakingly and exactingly carved from ebony and bone, then posed and exhibited with excruciating care. This was more like a white-and-black plastic 3D printed version in a tourist gift shop's window. Close enough to make you double-take, but obvious when inspected.

--Patrick
I disagree with this assessment. Live comedy will always be something people go to see. HBO specials are something different, but even that would require a human to write the material. At least for now AI is absolutely unable to write meaningful social commentary that's original. Oh, they will absolutely steal material from others...
 

Dave

Staff member
AI did not write that. AI changed it into Carlin's voice. AI's start good and tend to end up sounding like Trump.

Waitaminute....!
 
Well, I mean, that kind of deliberate oversizing isn't totally abnormal for that sort of diagram. In biology textbooks you'd find dozens like that with blown up chest cavities or stomachs or whatever to be able to more clearly label and identify specific bits.
It's the totally random gibberish labels that do it for me... That means nobody looked at/corrected/checked them at all
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I genuinely don't know if this is satire, or just clueless AI supporters being oblivious:

AI proponent complaining about someone stealing their prompt.png

Source tweet

This appears to be an A.I. proponent complaining about how someone generated a new image from a copied prompt and got more attention on the internet with it. They say that the image they prompted "is unique, there is no other like it. And I created it." but they're also livid that someone else "created" something very much like it.

This could be very on-the-nose satire, but I'm not sure how anyone would be able to tell.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
This is a fascinating perspective on A.I. that I had not considered before:



Here's the Threadreader version.

The TL;DR is that it's from a teacher who found out students have been using ChatGPT to try to sound "more respectable" in the teacher's words and "more white" in the words of one of the students.

"The student also told me that in therapy, their therapist had been misunderstanding them, blaming them, and denying that these misunderstandings were because of a language barrier. They felt that they were so bad at communicating, because of their language, and their culture, and their head injury, that they would never be a good scholar. They thought they had to use chatGPT to make them sound like an American, or they would never get a job."

Students who were doing the work, and understood the subject, were then passing their writing through ChatGPT in order to make it seem more polished.

"They also told me that when they used chatGPT to help them write emails, they got more responses, which helped them with research recruitment. I've heard this from other students too. That faculty only respond to their emails when they use chatGPT."

EDIT: Forgot to mention that while ChatGPT is effecitve in making emails sound more professional, it backfires on the students when used for polishing research papers. It works well for pleasantries, but turns researched arguments into wordy gibberish.
 
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