Predictions about the impact of AI-generated imagery

[ahalpert]

Roubini chimes in on the AI.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/n...145235743.html

I think Roubini makes a good point that there may not be replacement work for job losses. An AI economy is kind of low-labor by design. Obviously, the job market is humming along right now. Maybe people will just move to other industries. But it seems likely to me that you increasingly shift to a more unequal, winner-take-all society, with lots of inescapable poverty

[DLD]

I think Roubini makes a good point that there may not be replacement work for job losses. An AI economy is kind of low-labor by design. Obviously, the job market is humming along right now. Maybe people will just move to other industries. But it seems likely to me that you increasingly shift to a more unequal, winner-take-all society, with lots of inescapable poverty

Farming robot kills 200,000 weeds per hour with lasers

As it drives itself down rows of crops, its 12 cameras scan the ground. An onboard computer, powered by AI, identifies weeds, and the robot’s carbon dioxide lasers then zap and kill the plants. The Autonomous Weeder can eliminate more than 100,000 weeds per hour and weed 15 to 20 acres of crops in one day — for comparison, Myers said a laborer can weed about one acre of his onions per day.

Farming robot kills 200,000 weeds per hour with lasers (freethink.com)

[ahalpert]

Farming robot kills 200,000 weeds per hour with lasers (freethink.com)

Should lower food prices. Can't wait for the garden variety laser weeder. Jk.

[DLD]

Should lower food prices...

Self-driving vehicles are coming to the farm as John Deere plans to roll out driverless tractors

Beginning this fall, green 14-ton tractors that can plow day or night with no one sitting in the cab, or even watching nearby, will come off the John Deere factory assembly line in Waterloo, Iowa, harkening the age of autonomous farming.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money...ng/7066741001/

[DLD]

And more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-FvYZv785U

[NorBro]

log off, dude

LOL

[ahalpert]

Pretty tangential, but here's an article about Tesla's shifting goalposts for self-driving capabilities and timeline (complete with a video supercut of Musk's broken promises) https://electrek.co/2022/10/21/elon-...-changing/amp/

My feeling is that fully autonomous cars will definitely happen. But it's an open question if the concept will succeed in 50 years, 5 years, or next year. And the scale of the timing has massive implications for people who drive for a living. Same thing with AI-generated imagery.

Autonomous farm equipment is a much lighter lift because there's nobody in the way for the vehicles to kill

[ahalpert]

But this article is right on topic. Actually penned by a college classmate of mine, who apparently also has a book called Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/t...rative-ai.html

I'll just copy the whole text here

A Coming-Out Party for Generative A.I., Silicon Valley’s New Craze


A celebration for Stability AI, the start-up behind the controversial Stable Diffusion image generator, represents the arrival of a new A.I. boom.Emad Mostaque, the founder and chief executive of the start-up Stability AI.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

By Kevin Roose

Oct. 21, 2022Updated 1:39 p.m. ET

In Silicon Valley, crypto and the metaverse are out. Generative A.I. is in.

That much became clear Monday night at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Stability AI, the start-up behind the popular Stable Diffusion image-generating algorithm, gave a party that felt a lot like a return to prepandemic exuberance.

The event — which lured tech luminaries including the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the AngelList founder Naval Ravikant and the venture capitalist Ron Conway out of their Zoom rooms — was billed as a launch party for Stability AI and a celebration of the company’s recent $101 million fund-raising round, which reportedly valued the company at $1 billion.

But it doubled as a coming-out bash for the entire field of generative A.I. — the wonky umbrella term for A.I. that doesn’t just analyze existing data but creates new text, images, videos, code snippets and more.

It’s been a banner year, in particular, for generative A.I. apps that turn text prompts into images — which, unlike NFTs or virtual reality metaverses, actually have the numbers to justify the hype they’ve received. DALL-E 2, the image generator that OpenAI released this spring, has more than 1.5 million users creating more than two million images every day, according to the company. Midjourney, another popular A.I. image generator released this year, has more than three million users in its official Discord server. (Google and Meta have built their own image generators but have not released them to the public.)

That kind of growth has set off a feeding frenzy among investors hoping to get in early on the next big thing. Jasper, a year-old A.I. copywriting app for marketers, recently raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Start-ups have raised millions more to apply generative A.I. to areas like gaming, programming and advertising. Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm, recently said in a blog post that it thought generative A.I. could create “trillions of dollars of economic value.”

But no generative A.I. project has created as much buzz — or as much controversy — as Stable Diffusion.
Image
A community-created artwork from the Stability AI Discord community.Credit...Marlop, Stability AI Discord Community

Partly, that’s because, unlike the many generative A.I. projects that are carefully guarded by their makers, Stable Diffusion is open-source and free to use, meaning that anyone can view the code or download it and run a modified version on a personal computer. More than 200,000 people have downloaded the code since it was released in August, according to the company, and millions of images have been created using tools built on top of Stable Diffusion’s algorithm.

That hands-off approach extends to the images themselves. In contrast to other A.I. image generators, which have strict rules in place to prevent users from creating violent, pornographic or copyright-infringing images, Stable Diffusion comes with only a basic safety filter, which can be easily disabled by any users creating their own versions of the app.

That freedom has made Stable Diffusion a hit with underground artists and meme makers. But it has also led to widespread concern that the company’s lax rules could lead to a flood of violent imagery, nonconsensual nudity, and A.I.-generated propaganda and misinformation.

Already, Stable Diffusion and its open-source offshoots have been used to create plenty of offensive images (including, judging by a quick scan of Twitter, a truly astonishing amount of anime pornography). In recent days, several Reddit forums have been shut down after being inundated with nonconsensual nude images, largely made with Stable Diffusion. The company tried to rein in the chaos, telling users not to “generate anything you’d be ashamed to show your mother,” but has stopped short of setting up stricter filters.

Representative Anna Eshoo, Democrat of California, recently sent a letter to federal regulators warning that people had created graphic images of “violently beaten Asian women” using Stable Diffusion. Ms. Eshoo urged regulators to crack down against “unsafe” open-source A.I. models.


Emad Mostaque, who runs Stability AI, believes that putting generative A.I. into the hands of billions of people will lead to an explosion of opportunities.Credit...Jason Henry for The New York Times

Emad Mostaque, the founder and chief executive of Stability AI, has pushed back on the idea of content restrictions. He argues that radical freedom is necessary to achieve his vision of a democratized A.I. that is untethered from corporate influence.

He reiterated that view in an interview with me this week, contrasting his view with what he described as the heavy-handed, paternalistic approach to A.I. taken by tech giants.

“We trust people, and we trust the community,” he said, “as opposed to having a centralized, unelected entity controlling the most powerful technology in the world.”

Mr. Mostaque, 39, is an odd frontman for the generative A.I. industry.

He has no Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, nor has he worked at any of the big tech companies from which A.I. projects typically emerge, like Google or OpenAI. He is a British former hedge fund manager who spent much of the past decade trading oil and advising companies and governments on Middle East strategy and the threat of Islamic extremism. More recently, he organized an alliance of think tanks and technology groups that tried to use big data to help governments make better decisions about Covid-19.

Mr. Mostaque, who initially funded Stability AI himself, has quickly become a polarizing figure within the A.I. community. Researchers and executives at larger and more conventional A.I. organizations characterize his open-source approach as either naïve or reckless. Some worry that releasing open-source generative A.I. models without guardrails could provoke a backlash among regulators and the general public that could damage the entire industry.

But, on Monday night, Mr. Mostaque got a hero’s welcome from a crowd of several hundred A.I. researchers, social media executives and tech Twitter personalities.
Image
Mr. Mostaque received a hero’s welcome from the crowd at this week’s Stability AI launch event in San Francisco.

He took plenty of veiled shots at tech giants like Google and OpenAI, which has received funding from Microsoft. He denounced targeted advertising, the core of Google’s and Facebook’s business models, as “manipulative technology,” and he said that, unlike those companies, Stability AI would not build a “panopticon” that spied on its users. (That one drew a groan from Mr. Brin.)

He also got cheers by announcing that the computer the company uses to train its A.I. models, which has more than 5,000 high-powered graphics cards and is already one of the largest supercomputers in the world, would grow to five or 10 times its current size within the next year. That firepower would allow the company to expand beyond A.I.-generated images into video, audio and other formats, as well as make it easy for users around the world to operate their own, localized versions of its algorithms.

Unlike some A.I. critics, who worry that the technology could cost artists and other creative workers their jobs, Mr. Mostaque believes that putting generative A.I. into the hands of billions of people will lead to an explosion of new opportunities.

“So much of the world is creatively constipated, and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows,” he said.

If this all sounds eerily familiar, it’s because Mr. Mostaque’s pitch echoes the utopian dreams of an earlier generation of tech founders, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter. Those men also raced to put powerful new technology into the hands of billions of people, barely pausing to consider what harm might result.

When I asked Mr. Mostaque if he worried about unleashing generative A.I. on the world before it was safe, he said he didn’t. A.I. is progressing so quickly, he said, that the safest thing to do is to make it publicly available, so that communities — not big tech companies — can decide how it should be governed.

Ultimately, he said, transparency, not top-down control, is what will keep generative A.I. from becoming a dangerous force.

“You can interrogate the data sets. You can interrogate the model. You can interrogate the code of Stable Diffusion and the other things we’re doing,” he said. “And we’re seeing it being improved all the time.”

His vision of an open-source A.I. utopia might seem fantastical, but on Monday night, he found plenty of people who wanted to make it real.

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said Peter Wang, an Austin-based tech executive who was in town for the party. “But you can at least have everyone look at the genie.”

[DLD]

NYT wouldn't want you to copy the whole text. Copyright and so on.

[DLD]

"Hotel California" + AI. Half of the time AI thinks that California is in Moscow.

[ahalpert]

https://arstechnica.com/information-...-editor/?amp=1

Adobe is working on text-prompt based video editing. You can search your footage for an object, a person, or a feeling (laughing, smiling) that way.

It's not a usable product yet, and for it to work you have to upload your video to their servers (probably for their supercomputers to analyze your footage?)

This seems like a tool for human video editors to use. But it could potentially cut down your editing times by like 75%, which could result in fewer workdays. Or a producer with some editing skill might be able to take over the edit themselves.

And that's been my feeling about what AI will do -- it puts technicians out of work. There's still a human creative behind the process. But at the end of the day, the last man standing will be just the director, producer, or writer. All the labor and technical skill required to make the creation could be automated.

And certainly, in the near-term, I evaluate the edit projects I do in terms of, "how easily can this edit be turned into an algorithm and/or described by a text prompt?" Some of it, the lower-skilled busy work, is totally automatable. Some of it, the creative work where a producer doesn't exactly know what they want and needs me to help figure out the shape of the piece, is less so.

And, of course, for any application where you really want maximum quality, you're going to want to review all available footage and give it a think. The AI they're describing can save time, but it can't maximize quality.

[NorBro]

I agree with everything you're saying but will add that I think "quality" - like the editing - will become too subjective to matter for most. To us, quality is going through every single frame and really putting in the time and stress to make everything just right based on what we think is the best direction (along with our own creativity and talent), but the kind of editing above will eventually be "good enough" as we say here.

So the..."Do you want me to take a look at everything and see what else we can do?" will turn into "No, no, it's good the way it is, we have 10 more videos we need to make today and we don't have time, it's fine."

For most, pushing out content = more money, eventually, so the algorithm then becomes more content that's "good enough" and acceptable.

New videos every single day, perhaps every hour, and that right there will become the new maximization of quality.

[ahalpert]

I agree with everything you're saying but will add that I think "quality" - like the editing - will become too subjective to matter for most.

Why does Fox Sports put so much TLC into their pre-game shows when they seem to have a captive audience ostensibly tuning in just to watch grown men pound each other? Because it's an arms race. They're competing for your attention with other football games, other sports, video games, etc.

There's a limit to how much a viewer can watch, and they need to outcompete other programs for your attention. It's just that the majority of video is not like that

[NorBro]

Not sure what you're exactly saying but that's live TV and they don't have any competition at that time besides CBS, but sometimes there aren't 1pm or 4:15pm games on both channels. And anyone who's playing video games on football Sunday was never going to watch the games anyway.

Plus, AI could easily edit a bunch of segments for the pregame show and many may not even notice. lol

At the end of the day, our clocks are ticking. Major changes are coming into the industry whether you/anyone would like to believe it or not. Automation for tasks related to our jobs will be a major part of video/film production by 2030, and the best thing we can do is prepare and be ready to adapt.

[DLD]

IMO, if you "shoot to edit", you'd be able to really cut a lot of time off your total edit time via various - AI or non-AI based - prompts.

FWIW, I will often clip&paste Russian language pieces, from news articles to Chekhov, and then run them for my English speaking friends either via Google Translate or DeepLearning. Language translation is tailor made for AI and the computer translation has been steadily improving since the late 1990's Babel Fish era. These days the news articles come out pretty close to the original source intent. Chekhov doesn't. Yet. Immediate "live" translation of a spoken word on a YouTube video, even with the original language text available, is still poor.

https://about.fb.com/news/2020/10/fi...slation-model/

This is about the Facebook translator.

M2M-100 is trained on a total of 2,200 language directions — or 10x more than previous best, English-centric multilingual models. Deploying M2M-100 will improve the quality of translations for billions of people, especially those that speak low-resource languages.

But it still doesn't deal well with languages like the Ukrainian or the Belorussian. I usually click on the "original language" option to make sure the translation is reasonably accurate. On an informal text, it rarely is.