philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

China Moves to Censor AI

New rules would hold companies like Alibaba, SenseTime responsible for subversive content produced by their bots

See the full story here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-lays-out-strict-rules-for-chatgpt-like-ai-tools-32f70c89

(US Dept. of Commerce) NTIA Seeks Public Input to Boost AI Accountability

Just as food and cars are not released into the market without proper assurance of safety, so too AI systems should provide assurance to the public, government, and businesses that they are fit for purpose. NTIA is seeking input on what policies should shape the AI accountability ecosystem, including topics such as:

• What kinds of trust and safety testing should AI development companies and their enterprise clients conduct.
• What kinds of data access is necessary to conduct audits and assessments.
• How can regulators and other actors incentivize and support credible assurance of AI systems along with other forms of accountability.
• What different approaches might be needed in different industry sectors—like employment or health care.  

See the full post here: https://ntia.gov/press-release/2023/ntia-seeks-public-input-boost-ai-accountability

AI bots mingled at a bar and had a party when researchers gave them a town

Twenty-five AI “agents” were given a virtual town and were observed going to a bar for lunch, planning a party and expressing other human-like behavior.

A society of 25 artificial intelligence (AI) bots were observed waking up, cooking breakfast, heading to work, going to the bar for lunch with friends, and even throwing a party, according to six researchers who created a town for them.

The researchers from Google and Stanford University wrote in an April 7 paper titled “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior” that they built a virtual town populated with ChatGPT-trained “generative agents.”

The purpose of the study — which is yet to be peer-reviewed — was to create a small, interactive society of AI bots inspired by life-simulation games such as The Sims. ...

See the full story here: https://cointelegraph.com/news/ai-bots-mingled-at-a-bar-and-had-a-party-when-researchers-gave-them-a-town?mc_cid=748ee8c8f7&mc_eid=116e9f337b

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ High-Tech Sets Made The Cast A Little Space Sick

Read More: https://www.slashfilm.com/1249993/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-high-tech-sets-made-cast-space-sick/

PhilNote: the issue is using AR Wall on the set.

"I think it was totally a learning experience because of the technology of how it works. The wall moves to make sense for the camera angle. The wall is constantly moving and there are constantly things happening. And at first, it was about having to like gain your bearings of understanding that while the world may move around, you are standing very still. It was almost trying to remember not to get dizzy or if there are grand movements it's best to not try and follow it because you will confuse your brain." ...

Read the full story here: https://www.slashfilm.com/1249993/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-high-tech-sets-made-cast-space-sick/

Shelly Palmer’s 45min pre-NAB vendor pitch video “Intelligent Content”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xwjVFI3ff4

Approximate start times

1:00 AWS

6:45 Microsoft

14:30 Veritone

20:00 Imax SSIMWAVE

24:10 Nomad

29:10 CastUS

33:00 Arc XP

36:10 Amagi

Stuart Russell calls for new approach for AI, a ‘civilization-ending’ technology

... This technology has the power to change the world, said Stuart Russell, a UC Berkeley computer science professor and leading AI expert. It could improve quality of life for people across the planet or destroy civilization, he said. At an April 5 event, he urged both companies to pivot how they’re building AI and countries to regulate AI to ensure it furthers human interests. ...

Existing AI systems like ChatGPT operate in a black box, Russell said. It’s unclear whether these tools have goals of their own, if those goals align with ours or whether they can pursue their goals, he said. ...

The last “civilization-ending technology” – atomic energy – has been the subject of intense governance and extreme care on behalf of its engineers, Russell said. Even less charged technology fields, like aviation, are meticulously regulated. AI should be, too, he said. ...

See the full story here: https://data.berkeley.edu/news/stuart-russell-calls-new-approach-ai-civilization-ending-technology

Virtual reality storyteller creates project showcasing historically Black community in Seattle

... Inside her VR experience, users wandered the Central District’s main streets, visiting recreated facades of vanished sites such as the long-time jazz hot spot the Black and Tan Club, as well as present-day Edwin Pratt Park, named for a local civil rights leader who was assassinated in 1969. The VR weaves together digital illustrations, historic photos and recent video interviews, with a narrator providing details. ...

Barton began the project seven years ago while working on a UW master’s degree in communications in digital media. The idea for it was sparked by her concerns about how rapidly the area was gentrifying — or “paving over,” as Barton describes it. ...

The VR experience highlights superstar artists such as jazz legend Ernestine Anderson; rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot; multiple Grammy winner Quincy Jones; and, of course, guitar virtuoso Hendrix. It also features present-day interviews with mixed-media artist Melvin Freeman, also known as the Fly Blind Guy; a venture promoting Black-owned entrepreneurs called Black Dot; and Delbert Richardson, founder of the American History Traveling Museum. ...

See the full story here: https://www.geekwire.com/2023/vr-visionary-shares-storytelling-project-showcasing-historically-black-community-in-seattle/

The biggest problem with GPT-4 is philosophical: What is truth? And do we trust AI to tell us?

... The hardest question ever asked is: What is truth? GPT-4’s programmers think they have the answer. That’s what disturbs me the most. It turns out that the biggest problem of all is philosophical rather than technical, and I get the impression that the researchers have put little thought into this. The researchers’ perspective appears to be that all questions do have “right” answers, hence the model just needs to be trained and properly queried to say the right thing.

But this entirely misses the point that in human society “right” answers and “socially acceptable” answers often aren’t the same thing. ...

https://bigthink.com/the-future/biggest-problem-gpt-4-philosophical-what-is-truth/

AI-equipped eyeglasses can read silent speech

Zhang is the lead author of “EchoSpeech: Continuous Silent Speech Recognition on Minimally-obtrusive Eyewear Powered by Acoustic Sensing,” which will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) this month in Hamburg, Germany.

“For people who cannot vocalize sound, this silent speech technology could be an excellent input for a voice synthesizer. It could give patients their voices back,” Zhang said of the technology’s potential use with further development.

In its present form, EchoSpeech could be used to communicate with others via smartphone in places where speech is inconvenient or inappropriate, like a noisy restaurant or quiet library. 

See the full story here: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/04/ai-equipped-eyeglasses-can-read-silent-speech?fbclid=IwAR0wJTOJTlM08oand4b-c3G6KDxgPqaf6IYGGy4kWxqTMngW7O70DhEeN0M

PROMPTING AN EXAMINATION OF AI ART

... “There are some ethical considerations mainly about who owns data,” notes Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Founder and Chief Scientist at All These Worlds LLC. “If you put it out on the web, is it up for grabs for scrubbers to come and grab those images for machine learning?  ... But we are out at an inflection point with the Internet where there are millions of things out there and we have never put walls around it. We have created this beast and only now are we getting pushback about, ‘I put it out to share but didn’t expect anyone would just grab it.’” ...

We wanted to develop the technology to bring magic into our daily lives, and to do it ethically. We brought generative AI to the public in 2017. We knew that AI progress would be rapid, but we were shocked at how rapid it turned out to be, especially starting around 2020.” Baragona sees AI as having positive rather than negative impact on the artistic community. ...

Should AI art be the final public result? “I think that the keyword prompts used should also be displayed along with it, and any prompt that directly references a notable piece of existing art or artist should require a licensing deal with that referenced artist,” remarks Joe Sill, Founder and Director at Impossible Objects. ...

AI has given rise to a new technological skill in the form of “the person who can write a compelling prompt for a program like DALL·E 2 to extract a compelling image,” states David Bloom, Founder and Consultant at Words & Deeds Media. “To some extent it’s a different version of what artists have always faced. If you are a musician, you had to learn how to play an instrument to able to reproduce the things that you were hearing in your head. I remember George Lucas saying in the 1990s when they put out a redone version of Star Wars, ‘I’m never going to show the original version again because the technology now allows me to create a film that matches what I saw in my head.’ It’s just like that. ...

Clients will never stop wanting to deal with human beings to produce some work for whatever film or project that they have. However, there will be less of us to produce the same amount of work in the same way when tools in any industry evolve to become more efficient. ...

 The release of the free, open-source neural network for generating photorealistic and artistic images based on text-to-images was such a resounding success that Stability AI was able to raise $101 million in funding for its open-source AI research, which involves other types of diffusion models for music, video and medical research. ...

I had a meeting with an indie studio creating a workflow using Stable Diffusion, and it’s as complex as a Hollywood workflow would be, and the results are incredible. ... We are moving towards a procedurally generated future where there is a whole other method of filmmaking coming.”

https://www.vfxvoice.com/prompting-an-examination-of-ai-art/?fbclid=IwAR2rqkw_E6ywbnJsThu_KyGbWOaCqNMAURXpl2M-6Mohysdr0nCroNpA74c