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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."
I think they just mean that you can't tell the difference between reality and fakery.
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.
Most people have never been able to do that. I mean, just look at how popular religion is.
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 ]
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.
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.