Convincing Human Thread Title Not Generated by AI

[jazzo]

Not sure if this has been posted anywhere here, but this is an original podcast by Soderbergh’s fairly regular collaborator, Scott Z Burns, as he works with AI to develop a concept/screenplay for Contagion II.

https://www.audible.ca/pd/B0F4GFLBCZ?so ... r_overflow

It’s a pretty interesting listen, although I’m not entirely sure I like Burns by the end of it, or at least the version of himself he seems to be channeling for the podcast.

[Beloved Aunt]

Given the problems with pesticides here in the U.S.

AI is supposed to start losing people their jobs by the many millions, I heard from at least one source, in like six months. & I'm sure the Trump admin will insult them all by saying something jolly like, "Just go get a job pollinating crops by hand, now that all the bugs are dead!"

*I hope this comment isn't too political to pass muster!

[tenia]

Despite companies eager adoption of AI tools, jobs actually aren't cut by millions, in good part because said-compabies realised those AI-tools don't "learn" and thay employees relying on them tend to lose time vs employees not using them.

[Drucker]

A little anecdote. I was at my parents house the other weekend and they have a new washer/dryer. The old machine has a dryer called something like "sensor dry" where when the dryer detects something is done, it turns off. That button isn't on the new machine. But where it was is a new button called "AI" with the icon of a transparent human head and the letters "AI" in the middle.

That is to say, my take is still that the AI hype is mostly marketing. Not that there aren't real people whose lives really are being disrupted. But press releases and speaking engagements are not reality.

[tenia]

Oh for sure, some are just algorithms and other automated stuff now being called AI-somethingsomething.

But in cases of actual AI tools, like say Copilot and al, plenty of companies are pushing for it, but it's kinda not really productive so far.

As for the robot pollinating bees, yeah, I've seen that Black Mirror episode already.

[MichaelB]

That is to say, my take is still that the AI hype is mostly marketing. Not that there aren't real people whose lives really are being disrupted. But press releases and speaking engagements are not reality.

The economist Paul Krugman recently observed that:

As far as I can tell, large language models — which we are, misleadingly, calling artificial intelligence — are still, essentially, a souped-up version of autocorrect. On the other hand, there are a lot of jobs, some of them highly paid, that could also be described as souped-up autocorrect, so AI may have large economic impacts.

[domino harvey]

A little anecdote. I was at my parents house the other weekend and they have a new washer/dryer. The old machine has a dryer called something like "sensor dry" where when the dryer detects something is done, it turns off. That button isn't on the new machine. But where it was is a new button called "AI" with the icon of a transparent human head and the letters "AI" in the middle.

I suspect this is just a consumer-friendly rebranding of IoT, since AI is easier for the public to understand

[colinr0380]

The issue I have with autocorrect is that sometimes it refuses to be wrong, and whilst you are typing it 'corrects' words automatically and without notification, which can annoyingly result in it adding unexpected errors to correct typing! Or in recent years Word defaults to the "Americanized" spellings of certain words, so it becomes more of a chore to keep correcting it! I miss the situation of a few years back when text processing applications would just put a red highlight under the text that it considered to be incorrect and then leave it up to the user to decide whether they need to act on it or not.

On "A.I." just being a buzzword marketing term now, this is where watching The China Show really helps to counteract some of the propaganda coming out about technology in general, because the CCP has been doing a big push on talking up its robots (without noting that things like the Robocup project have been ongoing since the late 1990s) without mentioning the human remotely controlling them(!), so luckily at least the A.I. in Terminator robots is nowhere near autonomous as yet! (Although I presume that mannequin dummy being sent to a Film Studies class at a university is a reason why all of the print publications are impulsively getting rid of their human film critics! )

[MichaelB]

Although autocorrect can be useful with fat-fingered typing on an iPhone screen, I was horrified to find that it had been extended to my main desktop Mac OS following a recent upgrade, and made a point of switching it firmly off.

In fact, is there a way of switching Google AI summaries off too? I never use them, as I usually spot a factual howler at even the most casual glance, and I'd rather not have the distraction.

[Michael Kerpan]

I call it "auto-mistake" -- more of a pain than an aid.

[mizo]

In fact, is there a way of switching Google AI summaries off too? I never use them, as I usually spot a factual howler at even the most casual glance, and I'd rather not have the distraction.

I used the instructions in this article to de-AI my searches in Google Chrome, which was very easy. It looks like doing it on Safari is a little more complicated, though, if that's your default browser.

[domino harvey]

I switched to DuckDuckGo as my default search browser on my iPhone because there’s a simple switch you shut off. It’s not as good as Google, but at least I don’t see that stupid summary anymore (it also can block AI images in image searches)

[Lemmy Caution]

A little anecdote. I was at my parents house the other weekend and they have a new washer/dryer. The old machine has a dryer called something like "sensor dry" where when the dryer detects something is done, it turns off. That button isn't on the new machine. But where it was is a new button called "AI" with the icon of a transparent human head and the letters "AI" in the middle.

I suspect this is just a consumer-friendly rebranding of IoT, since AI is easier for the public to understand

In a grander more nefarious case, Builder.com pretended they had proprietary AI which could code bespoke apps and software programs for major companies. They raised $450M over a few years, the stock valuation hit $1.3B, but it turns out that it was just Indian programmers grinding away in the usual way. While phony accounting inflated income. All came crashing down, bankruptcy, likely criminal charges.

Microsoft ($100M invested, $50M in unpaid cloud services) and other big player were duped by the promise of AI. This fraud started pretty early as the WSJ was already questioning its AI claims as early as 2019. Reminds me a good deal of Theranos, the blood testing company which pretended it had a device capable of quick accurate wide-spectrum results, whereas they were actually just sending samples to traditional labs.

In both cases, I presume the owners decided to run with the hype, hoping that if they got enough investment they could really create the technology (AI/medical device) they claimed to have. And if they managed such a feat, then likely nobody would bother to check and discover the early fraud. But of course, it's easier to run a fraud and provide hype than it is to achieve a a technical breakthrough.

[domino harvey]

The Theranos thing was wild, one of the biggest and most flagrant frauds ever. I know Adam McKay was trying to make a movie about it with Jennifer Lawrence (called Bad Blood, which is a great title for this story) but I don’t think it ever ended up happening and then Netflix made its own treatment instead

[cdnchris]

The Hulu one with Amanda Seyfried is actually pretty good, though more because of her; it's a standard TV serial dramatization that (if I recall correctly) falls into that trap of telling things non-sequentially, something it feels several streaming dramatizations of real events do now due to the early portions of the actual story not being as interesting (the Dr. Death ones, a couple on the Fentanyl crisis, etc.) and benefits dramatically more from how fucked up and batshit crazy the whole things was. She plays the delusion up very well, and though it's ultimately still more than just a simple impersonation, her impersonation is spot on (though played up as more performative on Holmes' part).

[Lemmy Caution]

I liked how Elizabeth Holmes intentionally contrived a persona, especially that weird deep voice. Maybe the role playing allowed her to detach herself from the fraud and deceit, and live with herself. I could be wrong, but it seemed she was shallow and just wanted a rich lifestyle. I was impressed how she kept prolonging her freedom by churning out babies, but I guess that's a real issue if you're a childless early 30's female facing a decade locked up yet wanting a family. Holmes received 11 years but will get out earlier.

[The Curious Sofa]

Jennifer Lawrence apparently dropped out of the Adam McKay movie because she said she couldn't top Amanda Seyfried's work in the series.

[colinr0380]

Red Letter Media has just done a video about A.I. in general and brought up a bizarre trend that had completely passed me by, of A.I. generated 'behind the scenes footage' of films like Titanic, Home Alone and Interstellar! That's really strange to consider happening, and may need to have an eye kept on!

On one of the other issues that they bring up about artificial 'female influencers' that are progammed to sit in the right way, in the right environment, looking in the proper direction and smiling enthusiastically to camera, it just made me think that this is the logical end point of how Hollywood chooses and grooms actors already, just with the actual human being removed! And Disney is never realistically going to "come to the rescue" of 'real' cinema when it can use A.I. as a new tool in the way that colour, widescreen, stereo sound and special effects/CGI have changed the rules of the game. Cinema has always been about the 'art of the fake' to some extent, and the one small comfort that we might be able to take from creations like Tilly Norwood et al is that this may (likely after a period of intense attempts at competing which may push everything to extremes in the short term) destroy the idea of people being motivated (or uncharitably, coerced) into having plastic surgery or other treatments to maintain themselves at their absolute peak of beauty for the sake of their careers. Because if things progress far enough it may be easier to have an actress that stays at the peak of mid-20s beauty permanently (all the better for remaining available for starring in Titanic 2, Titanic 3D and Titanic 4: The Revenge!) or the actor remains buff enough to do Fast & Furious 8, 9 and beyond, etc. I would like to hope that might lead to an interest in the 'actual, normal' aging process being seen as a uniquely human quality perhaps! Or at least until the A.I. can convincingly fake the aging process as well!

[Roger Ryan]

Red Letter Media has just done a video about A.I. in general and brought up a bizarre trend that had completely passed me by, of A.I. generated 'behind the scenes footage' of films like Titanic, Home Alone and Interstellar! That's really strange to consider happening, and may need to have an eye kept on!

An AI-generated image showing how Harold Lloyd accomplished the "hanging from the clockface" stunt in Safety Last (1923) showed up on social media a few months back and looked so much like a vintage photograph that silent comedy expert John Bengston commented that he "hadn't seen that photo before". I felt compelled to reply that I was fairly certain the "photo" was AI-generated if only because the shot would have to have been taken from a helicopter or drone (!) judging from the camera angle.

[colinr0380]

OK, I was fine when it was just affecting Hollywood celebrities, but this A.I. stuff is getting into my cute cat video recommendations now.

[Lowry_Sam]

When human-generated pop music has become as bad as it has, it's hard to hate something like (NSFW) Keep Your Cheap-Ass Xmas Gift Because I Don't Need It.

[domino harvey]

Don’t praise the machine

[spectre]

OK, I was fine when it was just affecting Hollywood celebrities, but this A.I. stuff is getting into my cute cat video recommendations now.

Gotta say this is particularly odious to me. Videos of cats doing crazy things may not exactly be high art, but they formerly belonged to a class of funny/weird-yet-true recordings that once made up the bulk of internet ephemera. Now, stuff like this is just another form of fake news, tricking the gullible into understanding the world differently from how it actually is (e.g. many boomers now believe that there are flowers that look like monkeys!) while diminishing the actually amazing things the world has to offer. Can’t wait to find out what big tech ruins next!

[Noiretirc]

My very quick perusal of this thread sees me leaning much harder towards my main goal in late-life:

A cabin in the woods. No phone. No internet. Maybe a cat.

[Lowry_Sam]

my main goal in late-life:
A cabin in the woods.

Mine is a Dream Home In New Zealand, or maybe Uruguay as it's further south & doesn't have Mark Zuckerberg as a resident, preferably with a nuclear-winter-proof bomb selter equiped to sustain 2 years underground.