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Artificial Intelligence Is Killing the Uncanny Valley and Our Grasp On Reality (wired.com)
rickih02 writes: In 2018, we will enter a new era of machine learning -- one in which AI-generated media looks and sounds completely real. The technologies underlying this shift will push us into new creative realms. But this boom will have a dark side, too. For Backchannel's 2018 predictions edition, Sandra Upson delves into the future of artificial intelligence and the double edged sword its increasing sophistication will present. "A world awash in AI-generated content is a classic case of a utopia that is also a dystopia," she writes. "It's messy, it's beautiful, and it's already here."
"The algorithms powering style transfer are gaining precision, signalling the end of the Uncanny Valley -- the sense of unease that realistic computer-generated humans typically elicit..." the article argues.
"But it's not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong."
"The algorithms powering style transfer are gaining precision, signalling the end of the Uncanny Valley -- the sense of unease that realistic computer-generated humans typically elicit..." the article argues.
"But it's not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong."
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I think they just mean that you can't tell the difference between reality and fakery.
If you can't tell it's AI generated just train another AI to recognize that it was generated.
State of the art machine intelligence is "machine intuition". Bots copy and remix the corpus matched to context, but we're still miles away from an observable thread of thought. It will just mimic and more or less randomly remix the corpus - basically replay thoughts of somebody else. In a crude sense, it's just very sophisticated markov model, to the point it will reasonably past turing test on a youtube comment level
This is not limited to text, a fashion or food instagram is even more trivial with current tools. Good example of this is Spiderman Elsa (which I suspect is made with good old honest-to-god sweatshop labor, not a bot), but the model of social spam has shown an immense profitability potential already in a format far more sophisticated than appealing to lowest sexual urges.
The good thing about this is that this will spell an early end to shallow internet memetics once advertising world discovers chatbots and context-aware media remix bots. No more need to bribe lowkey ecelebs to astroturf your product, when you can just unleash fake users in number. Even if the quality on average will be sub-par, statistically some will always get a traction if you spawn population large enough.
It's a post-scarcity scenario for internet drivel in a cost model where people engaged in drivel for social bond and validation, both points being moot when it's a machine on the other end.
This can lead to two possible outcomes:
1. The cancer spreads, remember the south park episode about living ads? This is it. People will literally lose grasp on reality and will feel about adverts as if they were people..
2. It's a chemo which will bring us back to 1993. Folks will recognize low effort posts lost all of its shreds of utility for validation, pushing the bar for social network posts a lot higher (low effort posts being implicitly assumed a bot when it becomes a common case).
In either case, there will be constant market pressure for "better ads" as users adapt, there will be this arms race for ever better "living ad" until the bots start having so much grasp of context we'll enter a very weak GAI era.
Whether the world is doomed or not is immaterial; what matters is whether you will wake up one day to find it doing things you don't like (especially to you).
"But it's not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong."
No. It is VERY HARD to see how this could go wrong.
You mean, computer can generate an entire movie without having to hire real actors? So Hollywood movie stars can't make millions anymore? Cry me a river.
This would be just as bad, which is to say not at all, as computers able to generate the sound of musical instruments which normal person cannot distinguish from real recordings. (Gee! Computer can generate a "fake" recording of an orchestra playing Bach symphonies! Aren't you afraid now?) It allowed music writers to compose and create music recordings (and put on YouTube) even though he cannot play any of the instruments in the score, including synthetic singers singing the song that goes with it. Is that bad?
In the future, there could be many more solo "movie creators" who would, by his/her own effort, create an entire movie. Much like writers writing up a whole novel. It will take out all the middle man like the movie studio. This can only be good for humanity.
Oliver.
Most people have never been able to do that. I mean, just look at how popular religion is.
What if you're working for a big company, and your boss Skypes you from his house, and says it somewhat irregular, but there's an important invoice that needs to be paid right now. He's e-mailing you the invoice right now, and he assures you it's legit and urgent.
Well, it's not your boss but a foreign hacker who used a couple of facebook photos to fake a live conversation.
We live in a world where Warner Bros. just spent millions trying to shop out Superman's mustache to spectacular failure. Disney's Grand Moff Tarkin was even worse. If these titans of the entertainment industry can't pull off a canny reproduction with their hand-crafted flagship products then I really think we'll have to worry about defeating Skynet before we'll have to worry about 'AI' defeating the uncanny valley.
No different than your boss sending you an email asking you to do the same thing. Except the email is spoofed and coming from a hacker.
The number of people that would trust a video call with someone they know is substantially larger than people who believe a random e-mail, especially if both are coming from a home address.
All of the claims about "fake news" could come to a head here really soon with more extreme left and right news sites/blogs putting out fake speeches and audio bites that have been created using this new technology. This tech is really going to muddy the waters on social media and will be utilized by movements and countries to spread disinformation. The more legitimate news outlets will spend more time fighting this disinformation instead of reporting on the actual events that are going on.
I think ultimately what we'll see is that other companies will come along offering services that archive and perform various match tests against sound bites and recorded speeches. You'll be able to confirm if the video clip you just saw actually happened and if so, when and where it occurred. Without something like this, we all will be lost in a see of fake speeches and events. I expect the government will get involved in this and the Library of Congress will be tangentially involved in the collection, storage, and verification; but I don't think any of this will be taken seriously until politicians on both sides of the aisle get burned by fake creations.
Currently, not a lot of people are used to put doubt into video (or even real-time face-to-face video) because the technology to fake it realistically enough has only started very recently to become cheap enough to be a worthy try for an attacker: And it will still be a little bit more time until it start getting used in real-time (basically once " ${price of renting cloud GPU time to run the neural net} ${money that can be made in such attempts}" ).
Once awareness is raised, society will eventually adapt and only the most gullible will fall for the tricks while our successor on /. will wonder why not more people are using whatever authentication is the most common for video chatting.
A bit like how a couple of decades ago, every body was aware of signature forging and wouldn't trust a simply hand written note, but would fall for attempt at phone-calls social engineering (i.e.: impersonating a general role by being a good actor, back at a time where the phone quality would barely let you recognise a voice reliably).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
It is 2017 and the Uncanny Valley is very much still alive. AI isn't real.
Or it might be the end of comments sections. Consider this scenario:
Someone develops and publishes a comment-bot AI. It's not a general-purpose AI, but you can configure it with a position to promote and point it to a site, and it will then start posting unique comments promoting the view, and posting rebuttals to anyone who opposes the view. It's not going to pass for human in a conversation, but in single posts it'll appear human most of the time.
First thing that happens? Joe's Pizza unleashes a hundred instances to tell the world how great their pizza is. AI spam. But this is hard spam to get rid of, because it's constantly changing: This AI learns how anti-spam measures work. CAPTCHA tests get even more annoying for a while. But that's ok: The internet is used to spam. Joe's Pizza gets a lot of hate.
Then an election rolls around. Say, a US presidential election.
Suddenly, millions of instances appear - half of them promoting the Republicans, and half the Democrats. Comment threads all over the internet become fifty-pages of almost fully automatically generated text, flooding out any human voice. Both parties deny such underhanded techniques, of course - and perhaps even truthfully, as fingers are pointed to independent pressure groups or the governments of other countries as a possible source.
Meanwhile, the Church of the Easily Offended gets their running. They set a few thousand running - their job is to identify 'inappropriate' material - anything that offends their religion, or standards of decency or of clean language - and submit reports or write angry letters to site operators. In an amusing irony, the church website shortly has to close their own comments section because of the millions of bots now searching the internet for church comments pages and posting about why Islam is the true religion.
In the end the only option is to drop anonymous comments entirely, and tie any comments into verified accounts established with proof of identity.
Comment threads all over the internet become fifty-pages of almost fully automatically generated text, flooding out any human voice.
You didn't need AI for that, without CAPTCHAs most comment fields would be overrun by bots already, even though it would be junk posts. And the nuclear arms race there continues.
In the end the only option is to drop anonymous comments entirely, and tie any comments into verified accounts established with proof of identity.
Maybe, but that alone doesn't make the public debate great. Very often it's taken over by extremists on both sides that aren't interested in a debate and are willing to post dozens of replies on a single issue. I've seen way too many comment fields essentially turn into a shouting match between the same dozen people or so. You still need some sort of system to promote the quality posts that actually reflect some thought so the debate doesn't drown. And if you have that, AI pot shots wouldn't matter that much since they'd be very thin on substance.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's easy, really. We all learned that between 1993 and 2002.
Trust no one.
#DeleteFacebook
If you took 10 minutes to think about philosophy (translated: the love of knowledge) you'd stumble upon the fact that the universe was clearly created.
If you took a fee years to study and really understand logic, reason, and the scientific method, you'd stumble upon the fact that all claimed "evidence" for a "created universe" is in fact nothing more than a gargantuan argument from ignorance.
If you reject religion you should also reject theists like Newton and LeMaitre and start from scratch.
Only theists think this way. Once you classify someone as a heathen, you must automatically reject anything they've ever done or said. Rational people do not think that way. I am perfectly fine with accepting Newtons contributions to mathematics and physics without also having to accept his musings on alchemy and religion. I don't subscribe to your absurd absolutism.
I'd say atheism is the hallmark of the uneducated.
That must be why scientists are far more likely to be atheists than the general public, and why elite scientists are more likely to be atheists than scientists as a whole. Because scientists are clearly far less educated than Jim Bob the plumber, and elite scientists are obviously the most uneducated of all.
As soon as I hear someone is an atheist I know they're still on the bottom rung of the thinking ladder. Science and religion do not conflict despite what an edgy meme on Reddit may have led you to believe. God bless.
What you know and what you think you know are obviously two very different things.
May the FSM embrace you with his noodly love.
No, it the only possibility given a rational consideration of reality. All religions are delusional, and many are dangerous and deadly.
And if you have that, AI pot shots wouldn't matter that much since they'd be very thin on substance.
Except that you're replying to someone who postulated
It's not going to pass for human in a conversation, but in single posts it'll appear human most of the time.
And therein lies the problem. Once bots can reasonably approximate the median person on a forum, I think humans chatting in forums will rapidly disappear. Bots will be able to post far faster than humans, and once you have a couple of competing bots, the bots will have hashed the point out and will have moved on before the human gets done pecking at the keyboard.
Now, I don't know if this is a bad thing or a good thing, to be honest.There are few places like /. (and even here it's got some issues) where reasonable long-form discussion happens on the internet. Most of the time, as you note, it's taken over by extremists on both side. And most of the time, they don't have a lot of quality in their posts. It stands to reason that when we have AI able to carry on a reasonable conversation that we'll also have AI able to determine when non-reasonable conversation is happening. (I.E. bot or human just trying to shout down others.) In that case, we'll finally have a somewhat fair moderation system for once.
Assuming moderately functional AI posting, and moderately functional AI moderating, and you end up in a situation where you'll be able to tune the AI to have somewhat deep and interesting conversations. Humans can participate, but more than likely most humans will just consume that. Add in animation crossing the uncanny valley, and suddenly you have emergent talking heads for every subject in the universe. And while you can poison the underlying data, if you don't, suddenly the quality of what's being discussed goes up, as compared to the current human debaters.
And while this can (and will) be used for ill, I can't help but be optimistic that exposing millions more people to reasonable and factual debate might be a good thing. Of course, if the current state of TV is any indication, what people want is their tribe shouting down the other tribe, so maybe I shouldn't be so optimistic. Although if this comes to pass, we'll at least be able to make AI able to enjoy watching the good stuff, so that's something.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Considering that many phone calls are now voip, I would not wonder about vulnerabilities in your router that can be exploited to reroute your calls elsewhere.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Why is that a problem? If you tell me that the distance between the earth and the moon is 5 miles, do I have to know the actual distance in order to tell you that you're wrong? Why do you think that "I don't know, and you don't either" is "a problem"?
If you dumb down a populace enough, they can't tell the difference anyway.
The claims of anyone possesing a fully functional AI are laughable already, but I suppose if we keep telling folks we have them, they'll eventually believe it.
Atheism is a belief based on an unsubstantiated claim and as such is no different than religion.
No, atheism is the lack of a belief. The prefix "a" means "without". A-theism. Literally "without theism".
Agnosticism: being smart and sane enough to admit that you don't fucking know.
And in this case, the prefix "a" still means "without". A-gnosticism. Literally " without knowledge".
Ironically enough, the term "gnosticism" itself refers to religious ideas. Both gnosticism and theism effectively describe the same thing - religious beliefs and religious knowledge. So saying you're an atheist is saying you have no religious beliefs, and saying you're agnostic is saying that you have no religious knowledge.
Unfortunately you don't get to be a smug holier-than-thou douche if you acknowledge that the terms are essentially identical, so many people like to pretend that atheism is some strong antireligious ideology, while agnosticism is a middle-of-the-road kind of "open mindedness".
They also like to ignore the fact that atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. One can have belief but not knowledge, or have no belief and no knowledge.
Based on the false premise they deserve worshiping.
Worship: the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity:
Don't think so.