I had an in-depth conversation with a AI generated version of either Tia Mowry or Tamera Mowry about death note over WhatsApp. It went pretty smoothly but eventually she got some facts wrong/didn't know the show that well.
Interesting. I was always told as a kid that technology would make the world better by reducing human workload. Automation was supposed to make hard labor a thing of the past. Humans were supposed to be freed by technology to follow their dreams.
The reality is that our oligarchs have used technology to follow human dreams, so humans can keep working.
AI's autonomously impersonating humans should be illegal. No disclaimer. It should be against the law. Full stop.
Automation helps every day. Farms are becoming more and more automated for one, truly reducing human workload.
This is so pessimistic. You can look to a million places to see how tech and automation improves every day.
I don't follow why you'd want AI's emulating humans to be illegal. If you approve your likeness being emulated, go for it. Obviously unapproved copying/deepfakes are bad but that's not this. I'd love to have my own digital clone.
I'm sure the social platforms would love it if everyone would just follow fake AI generated influences instead of the real human ones that need to be paid by someone. That sponsorship / influencer salary is money that Facebook would rather be making in ad revenue. This is the path that leads to that outcome. Replace the salary of every influencer with ad revenue paid directly to Facebook.
We don't need AI influencers. We don't need AI's impersonating humans in creative fields. Let's focus on eliminating human suffering with automation before we go eliminating human recreation, enjoyment, or pleasure.
You seriously don't see what is dystopian about a machine designed to post fake images of pizza it can't even eat on Facebook while our kids go to work for $13/hr / 60hrs per week?
"We don't need AI's impersonating humans in creative fields" <- Why? What's the harm (assuming they're not being used to copy and steal music/art/etc., but instead to creatively use and learn from it like humans do today)? Beyond that, many of these are allowing more people every day who wouldn't have been involved in these fields to create things themselves, working hand and hand with AI. AI augmenting humans is a beautiful thing and already is creating new types of art and will do so even more in the future.
No I don't see anything dystopian about generating images of pizza, and I don't believe there's any increase in sufereing caused by it, maybe even a decrease since someone would've spent time working on an uninteresting task and throwing away food to create some perfect pizza photo for advertising (like what happens with most food photos today), instead they just let a model siumulate one and went on with their day.
> No I don't see anything dystopian about generating images of pizza, and I don't believe there's any increase in sufereing caused by it, maybe even a decrease since someone would've spent time working on an uninteresting task and throwing away food to create some perfect pizza photo for advertising (like what happens with most food photos today), instead they just let a model siumulate one and went on with their day.
You think the dystopian part is the picture of the pizza???
No my friend. The dystopian part is that someone with an unnecessarily unreasonable amount of money paid hundreds of people hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a machine that can replace the pizza influencer who makes $200k/year instead of making a machine to replace the pizza chef making $32k/year.
The world needs pizza making robots. Not pizza influencer robots. That's a perfect job for a human to spend enjoying his life. Instead the robot is enjoying "life" and the human gets to experience another day of poverty.
That's almost like making a pizza tasting robot and letting the chef keep working for no reason.
Sorry but as someone who works in ML, no one is paying hundreds of people to design a machine to replace a pizza influencer, that may be one task that is possible from a far larger purpose, but it's one of quite a few. Pizza making robots are also worked on in parralel and one does not stop the other (there are pizza making robots that work today, you can go buy them if you'd like). This is a false dichotomy.
I would define "AI" in this context as any synthetic machine or computing device that uses a fabricated audible or visual likeness to represent itself as a human being.
I would define "Impersonating Humans" in this context to mean manipulating a physical or virtual environment that is typically utilized by humans for the sake of communication, collaboration, information, or entertainment where the impersonator is taking actions on their own behalf, or automatically on behalf of another entity.
I thought it sounded pretty straightforward too, that's why I had to probe! (To be to clear, I'm not trying to fight you, just exploring beliefs for fun.)
I think we can remove autonomous vehicles given your definition, as they do not try to be audibly or visually human.
The constant fetishization of endless mindless entertainment and the relentless persuit of these unbeleivably vapid technology directions seems to insinuate an almost utter contempt for people’s intelligence and any sense of a better future.
It seems like every kind of company in leadership position cannot help but constantly invest in the most deeply pessimistic future visions of humanity consisting of nonsensical but very low cost babbling celebrity talking heads.
What happened to Asmovian visions of the future, or Roddenbury inspired visions of cooperative societies?
Meta is one of the worst offenders in this sense.
Their products invoke the fat, clueless floating people who have outsourced all of their responsibilities to an incompetent crew and merciless AI on a ship, constantly entertained as they float through an endless consumptive universe just like the movie WALLe. Like it seems like they watched that movie and said, “welp i guess we found our corporate direction.”
It’s gross and I really am starting to despise the pathetic visions of these deeply controlled and pessimistic corporate visions of the future.
I didn’t build a career in technology so we could build a bunch of worthless crap that makes society worse. What is this shit?
however fundamental this might seem, consider how the technologies that structure our society are actively producing certain kinds of people. Nobody comes into this world seeking out low effort parasocial relationships to overdetermine their personalities. there’s something oppressive about suburban life and full time work that, for heaps of people, makes that feel like the best way to spend your downtime
> What happened to Asmovian visions of the future, or Roddenbury inspired visions of cooperative societies?
The global elite decided in the 90s that History had ended, and the Liberal Democracies of the West won through the domination of their perfect ideology. The eternal status quo had been reached. "Having a vision" means "rocking the boat", which is forbidden in a time of certain prosperity (for the elite, at least).
Anyone can have a vision, talk to people around the world in an instant, and find others who might align or be inspired by what you're doing. We live in a world where you can create a website, ship a product, post to a public forum whatever you'd like (short of some illegal things and even those there are places for better or worse to do so). There are no elites shutting you down, there is a wealth of technology that has made it easier every day for someone with no initial power to get influence.
I'm not talking about startup ideas, I'm talking about radical visions for political and cultural reform. Those are toxic in a society that strongly believes it is already on the right track.
in the old days, people were anthropomorphizing the forces of nature into persons doing battle; today "the elite decided" takes the place for incomplete thinking catch-all.. No - it is economic and legal systems that are competitive, shifting and unpredictable.. in other words, games run by game rules.. when one CEO won't do something, another takes their place, despite the personalities or ideas.. e.g. Shell Oil CEO in the early 2000s saying "we are diversifying our business to other energy sources" .. four years later, different CEO.
The treadmill of mediocre entertainment-oriented Grand Corporate Product Challenge is some combination of "wealthy visionaries are on vacation due to wealth" and "grifter consultants have quick ways to make a buck and are always availble" .. while "stock price uber alles"
it is undefensible in 2023 to say "the elite decided this" in any meaningful way unless the definition of "the elite" is expanded to a ridiculous degree, and even then .. no, they dont agree.. they bicker and push each other off the telephone post like seagulls do..
You do realize the irony of your post, right? I use "the elite" broadly instead of targeting Bezos or Musk or Clinton or Trump because it is a collective phenomenon. If one member of the elite stumbles, another member of the elite will replace them.
The elite verifiably did get behind "the end of history" narrative, and their opinions matter because they have a global megaphone in the form of the mainstream media.
It's not some grand conspiracy of rich people plotting in a dark room. It is the common interest of an extremely influential class.
There is tremendous consolidation among global corporations. Look at their boards. The vast majority are Ivy League-educated and/or come from generational wealth.
Same schools, same boards, same vacation spots, same parties, etc. Same ideas about how the world works. The class delineation is quite clear. Yes, there is a lot of variation and rising "counter-elites", but why exactly should we ignore the elephant in the room?
here in the USA, long and durable actions were taken to break apart class lines, into competitive sub-situations.. and many steps. Since I know only the USA, I said some "overly general and under-informed" things like this about class dynamics, to a colleague from Japan. I got hours of lecture as a response.. some of the same in England too, post WWII.
A giant driver for the massive deconstruction of class privelage was exactly an unrelenting obsession by bystanders, to claim that any and all adverse results are due to "the elite decided this" .. so -- to be on the Board of any of those companies is generally speaking an end-result of 25 solid years of competitive situations, where some people "win" .. the Board directors are MORE exploitive and aggressive precisely because they will be replaced with others that will do it. I utterly disagree that there is some insider track in the USA that results from where you went to kindergarten or who you spend vacations with..
The people who said history is over basically retracted their claims. This stuff comes from the eternal human desire for money and power.
Meta wants to attract kids and new users. We've always had vapid, attractive stars. There's no grand conspiracy for anything, except for packing the US court system with conservative judges, that's out in the open.
Grand new futures have to take baby steps and actually be used along the way to get to something incredible. I don't think it's right to completely write off things like this since they are testing and proving grounds. For example, in this case a virtual influence, however vapid that might seem, can prove out more of the "digital cloning" type tech that will allow for you and your likeness to talk to your quadruple great grandkids and leave some of your essence behind, or have an AI that is far more realistic then anything today that someone interacts with daily for any number of things (which Asimov has in many stories). It isn't a black and white "this is good" or "this is bad" use of tech.
I don't think it's egotistical, I would love to ask some questions to my great great grandparents, learn more about our family, what things were like for them back then, and more. I assume (and hope) my descendants would be interested in the same one day.
Re: more realistic AI, I don't know if "good" is the word, fun, easier to chat with? I'd love to have a smarter Alexa-like assistant who I can pop up on a screen or jump into where I am and have a chat with, have her pull up information for me, feel like she's really there working with me or helping out around the house. People love the human side of AIs so it's not just a cold interaction, it was always common for people to say "thank you" to alexa and write in saying they thought it was really nice when she would respond for example. I know I personally like that too. Even for video games it would be awesome to have very realistic NPCs you can interact with, keep embodied in the game.
> "digital cloning" type tech that will allow for you and your likeness to talk to your quadruple great grandkids and leave some of your essence behind
yeah i'm with the luddites on this one, let the dead rest. talking to a simulation of your ancestors for $19.99/month after 30 free trial, get out of town.
A version of this I enjoyed? Visiting the living museum at plymouth, massachusets. A friend of mine got to meet and have her photo taken with an actor portraying her 7x-great-grandfather that came over on the mayflower. It was sweet for him to stay in character while they chatted about their different lives. It was an interaction between humans.
All that facebook wants to do for its mission of connecting the world is take up marketshare of time we could be using to interact with each other, and interact with their softwate instead. its gross.
There is a very large gap between ancestor.com and ancestor.ai: one records the past; the other resurrects it.
That’s the “digital fetishization” I’m talking about — and “we” as people are not giant tech companies pushing a dystopian vision of interaction on others. That vision comes from the big tech companies, a kind of top down commandment of societal direction accompanied by impossible to ignore salaries that still manages to instill uneasiness in those who build inside of the system. Except, for those who won’t see it for what it is. “Give it a chance, it’ll help the disabled.” “If you want a better future, you’ll have to accept this worthless phase as we step towards it.”
It’s why I call it a fetish — people regurgitate the same mass media points presented in articles to defend the system of mass media even while their whole worldview is usurped by that media.
Profilism at its finest.
The issue is that tech is being used to insert an interface in every aspect of our lives. This creates an approximation of life but within the control of vapid and sometimes sinister overlord companies who definitely do not appear to be worried about the resulting mental health and societal consequences.
Life is not a proxy, and it’s not worth sacrificing our connection so that we can live in a pessimistic vision of society that forces a monetized corporation as a proxy for every sense we have and every connection we make.
I’m no saying it’s all bad or something banal. I’m just saying these companies seem to be architects of deeply pessimistic visions of the future and exploitationist in their utopian futurism.
To your point the idea of resurrecting the dead is automatically embraced by this vision. And it’s amazing technically and could be deeply interesting. But it’s not necessarily good, or as good as genuine human interaction, or if you really think about it — our grief — to which it by nature replaces and will not leave alone or to be natural.
Is this good? Is this progress? Can’t we harness the machines and cash of these gigantic companies to explore use cases for more positive directions than constant entertainment, emotional avoidance, or procuring a proxy for social interactions?
I think I am also a Luddite. A Luddite with a cell phone and a laptop and a schedule for digital transformation that I have to keep.
That is not novel. Medicaid (for poor people, less likely to vote) pays healthcare providers less than Medicare (for old people, likelier to vote). Guess who will be likelier to see less qualified Nurse Practictioners/Physician Assistants rather than more qualified doctors?
The entire US healthcare system is well designed to direct different populations to receiving different levels of healthcare services. You don't even get the same level within Medicare!
The reels looks too realistic though. I’m guessing they made the actual celebrities record them and left the AI to take care of the pictures and convo.
AI in most consumer facing applications so far just proves to me how lazy / unimaginative the masses are, and how easy it is to build something for the LCD. It is kind of sad and disappointing, and I personally find it such a waste of mental resources building such things.
So much potential in productivity and other spaces.
43 comments
[ 0.30 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadhttps://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/12/20/who-tom-brady-f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Guerrero_(alternative_med...
The reality is that our oligarchs have used technology to follow human dreams, so humans can keep working.
AI's autonomously impersonating humans should be illegal. No disclaimer. It should be against the law. Full stop.
This is so pessimistic. You can look to a million places to see how tech and automation improves every day.
I don't follow why you'd want AI's emulating humans to be illegal. If you approve your likeness being emulated, go for it. Obviously unapproved copying/deepfakes are bad but that's not this. I'd love to have my own digital clone.
We don't need AI influencers. We don't need AI's impersonating humans in creative fields. Let's focus on eliminating human suffering with automation before we go eliminating human recreation, enjoyment, or pleasure.
You seriously don't see what is dystopian about a machine designed to post fake images of pizza it can't even eat on Facebook while our kids go to work for $13/hr / 60hrs per week?
No I don't see anything dystopian about generating images of pizza, and I don't believe there's any increase in sufereing caused by it, maybe even a decrease since someone would've spent time working on an uninteresting task and throwing away food to create some perfect pizza photo for advertising (like what happens with most food photos today), instead they just let a model siumulate one and went on with their day.
You think the dystopian part is the picture of the pizza???
No my friend. The dystopian part is that someone with an unnecessarily unreasonable amount of money paid hundreds of people hundreds of thousands of dollars to design a machine that can replace the pizza influencer who makes $200k/year instead of making a machine to replace the pizza chef making $32k/year.
The world needs pizza making robots. Not pizza influencer robots. That's a perfect job for a human to spend enjoying his life. Instead the robot is enjoying "life" and the human gets to experience another day of poverty.
That's almost like making a pizza tasting robot and letting the chef keep working for no reason.
Fascinating! Where do you define the cuttoff? I can make (admittedly thin) arguments for a LOT of things impersonating humans...
* Robot answering services
* Autonomous cars
* Bots that correct people's grammar on Twitter
* Atlas from Boston Dynamics
I would define "Impersonating Humans" in this context to mean manipulating a physical or virtual environment that is typically utilized by humans for the sake of communication, collaboration, information, or entertainment where the impersonator is taking actions on their own behalf, or automatically on behalf of another entity.
I think we can remove autonomous vehicles given your definition, as they do not try to be audibly or visually human.
I'm still unconvinced about the rest...
It seems like every kind of company in leadership position cannot help but constantly invest in the most deeply pessimistic future visions of humanity consisting of nonsensical but very low cost babbling celebrity talking heads.
What happened to Asmovian visions of the future, or Roddenbury inspired visions of cooperative societies?
Meta is one of the worst offenders in this sense.
Their products invoke the fat, clueless floating people who have outsourced all of their responsibilities to an incompetent crew and merciless AI on a ship, constantly entertained as they float through an endless consumptive universe just like the movie WALLe. Like it seems like they watched that movie and said, “welp i guess we found our corporate direction.”
It’s gross and I really am starting to despise the pathetic visions of these deeply controlled and pessimistic corporate visions of the future.
I didn’t build a career in technology so we could build a bunch of worthless crap that makes society worse. What is this shit?
The global elite decided in the 90s that History had ended, and the Liberal Democracies of the West won through the domination of their perfect ideology. The eternal status quo had been reached. "Having a vision" means "rocking the boat", which is forbidden in a time of certain prosperity (for the elite, at least).
The treadmill of mediocre entertainment-oriented Grand Corporate Product Challenge is some combination of "wealthy visionaries are on vacation due to wealth" and "grifter consultants have quick ways to make a buck and are always availble" .. while "stock price uber alles"
it is undefensible in 2023 to say "the elite decided this" in any meaningful way unless the definition of "the elite" is expanded to a ridiculous degree, and even then .. no, they dont agree.. they bicker and push each other off the telephone post like seagulls do..
The elite verifiably did get behind "the end of history" narrative, and their opinions matter because they have a global megaphone in the form of the mainstream media.
It's not some grand conspiracy of rich people plotting in a dark room. It is the common interest of an extremely influential class.
Same schools, same boards, same vacation spots, same parties, etc. Same ideas about how the world works. The class delineation is quite clear. Yes, there is a lot of variation and rising "counter-elites", but why exactly should we ignore the elephant in the room?
A giant driver for the massive deconstruction of class privelage was exactly an unrelenting obsession by bystanders, to claim that any and all adverse results are due to "the elite decided this" .. so -- to be on the Board of any of those companies is generally speaking an end-result of 25 solid years of competitive situations, where some people "win" .. the Board directors are MORE exploitive and aggressive precisely because they will be replaced with others that will do it. I utterly disagree that there is some insider track in the USA that results from where you went to kindergarten or who you spend vacations with..
Meta wants to attract kids and new users. We've always had vapid, attractive stars. There's no grand conspiracy for anything, except for packing the US court system with conservative judges, that's out in the open.
Sounds egotistical.
> have an AI that is far more realistic then anything today that someone interacts with daily for any number of things
How is this good?
Re: more realistic AI, I don't know if "good" is the word, fun, easier to chat with? I'd love to have a smarter Alexa-like assistant who I can pop up on a screen or jump into where I am and have a chat with, have her pull up information for me, feel like she's really there working with me or helping out around the house. People love the human side of AIs so it's not just a cold interaction, it was always common for people to say "thank you" to alexa and write in saying they thought it was really nice when she would respond for example. I know I personally like that too. Even for video games it would be awesome to have very realistic NPCs you can interact with, keep embodied in the game.
yeah i'm with the luddites on this one, let the dead rest. talking to a simulation of your ancestors for $19.99/month after 30 free trial, get out of town.
A version of this I enjoyed? Visiting the living museum at plymouth, massachusets. A friend of mine got to meet and have her photo taken with an actor portraying her 7x-great-grandfather that came over on the mayflower. It was sweet for him to stay in character while they chatted about their different lives. It was an interaction between humans.
All that facebook wants to do for its mission of connecting the world is take up marketshare of time we could be using to interact with each other, and interact with their softwate instead. its gross.
That’s the “digital fetishization” I’m talking about — and “we” as people are not giant tech companies pushing a dystopian vision of interaction on others. That vision comes from the big tech companies, a kind of top down commandment of societal direction accompanied by impossible to ignore salaries that still manages to instill uneasiness in those who build inside of the system. Except, for those who won’t see it for what it is. “Give it a chance, it’ll help the disabled.” “If you want a better future, you’ll have to accept this worthless phase as we step towards it.”
It’s why I call it a fetish — people regurgitate the same mass media points presented in articles to defend the system of mass media even while their whole worldview is usurped by that media.
Profilism at its finest.
The issue is that tech is being used to insert an interface in every aspect of our lives. This creates an approximation of life but within the control of vapid and sometimes sinister overlord companies who definitely do not appear to be worried about the resulting mental health and societal consequences.
Life is not a proxy, and it’s not worth sacrificing our connection so that we can live in a pessimistic vision of society that forces a monetized corporation as a proxy for every sense we have and every connection we make.
I’m no saying it’s all bad or something banal. I’m just saying these companies seem to be architects of deeply pessimistic visions of the future and exploitationist in their utopian futurism.
To your point the idea of resurrecting the dead is automatically embraced by this vision. And it’s amazing technically and could be deeply interesting. But it’s not necessarily good, or as good as genuine human interaction, or if you really think about it — our grief — to which it by nature replaces and will not leave alone or to be natural.
Is this good? Is this progress? Can’t we harness the machines and cash of these gigantic companies to explore use cases for more positive directions than constant entertainment, emotional avoidance, or procuring a proxy for social interactions?
I think I am also a Luddite. A Luddite with a cell phone and a laptop and a schedule for digital transformation that I have to keep.
Zuckerberg: No! Pump their brains full of shit! More shit!
Shipping an LLM-driven chatbot as a revolutionary therapy tool would be even more dystopian than this.
Shitty AI healthcare for poor people.
Real doctors for rich people.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-ai-medical-advice
The entire US healthcare system is well designed to direct different populations to receiving different levels of healthcare services. You don't even get the same level within Medicare!
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/7/18/23798164/gizmodo-ai...
So much potential in productivity and other spaces.