This guy!👍👍
The Wall Street Journal: “AI Doesn’t Kill Jobs? Tell That to Freelancers”
Tag: AI
AI “Art” I Sorta Like: “Pooky Park”
OK, those scare quotes are unfair; this is indeed art, even if the creator is phoning in bits where he or she could certainly have applied a small amount and greatly improved their work.
Yes, “Pooky Park” is credited like so:
This is an AI-generated 1950s TV commercial for a family theme park called Pooky Park, where customers are chased by giant, somewhat terrifying puppets. Script: ChatGPT Photos: Midjourney Video: PikaLabs, Runway
That leaves the impression that someone typed “Make a 1950s TV commercial for a family theme park called Pooky Park, where customers are chased by giant, somewhat terrifying puppets” into ArtGT, hit the GO! button, and it pooped out this short, festive romp whole.
But that’s not how any of these tools work. For example, I can tell you from experience that Runway only gives you three or so seconds of footage at a time. The creator is eliding the fact that a lot has gone into editing the visuals and creating the audio. Yes, the script sounds like it’s straight ChatGPT (“Colossal howdy-doody-type puppets”? 🙄), and us thus hella week. But this is still an excellent creative application of new artistic tools—evidenced by the fact that I watched it and shared it not because of the gimmick (“AI made this!!!1!“), but because it captivated me and entertained me and unsettled me and made me want to share it with other people so they could be captivated and entertained and unsettled, too. And that, my best belovéd, is what art is all about.
The Groundbreaking “Computer Speech” Record from Bell Labs (1963)
Hear the groundbreaking “Computer Speech” record from Bell Telephone Laboratories, which features synthesized speech created by one of the earliest computer speech synthesis systems. Directed by D.H. VanLenten, this record represents a significant milestone in the development of speech synthesis technology. … You’ll also discover how punched cards were used to provide the computer with detailed instructions on how to manipulate the various formants to produce different sounds [and] explore the fascinating technique called formant synthesis, which involves simulating the resonances of the human vocal tract, and the IBM 704 computer used to generate the speech sounds.
Incidentally, this record predates Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey by four years, and came out at least a year before he began considering the project in earnest. We know that his work in 2001 was influenced by educational materials from the time; hard to believe this wasn’t one of them.
Anyway, just for the record: this “talking computer” was exactly as intelligent as ChatGPT or any current AI, and considerably less so than a parrot—and inspired the same blue-sky certainty in the media. Hell, here’s an article about computers talking and reliably taking natural-language instruction within the next decade!!! (It was written in 1959.):
subject: “DAVID, BE YOURSELF – You are perfect in every way!”
Whenever folks are like “Dave, aren’t you worried about AI making your job obsolete?” I’ll just remember this crackerjack spam bot’s best attempt at closing the sale:
SPOILER ALERT: I’m an emphatically Jewish straight cis-gendered father who looks awful in long-sleeved T-shirts/crew-necked sweatshirts.
This is a fun little film…
… but just a reminder to my American readers: We already live in this reality. This country isn’t just full of guns; it’s full of ammunition. If you have access to even a single bullet, you are $10 and a trip to the hardware store from making a wonderfully lethal weapon: unserialized, untraceable, highly concealable, nearly foolproof. You won’t be doing any civil massacres with a hardware-store slam gun, but you can mostly definitely kill the guy standing in front of you with little effort.
The reason no one will shoot you today is because no one feels like shooting you today.