PhilNote: really good opinion piece using SciFi director Alejandro Jodorowsky (unrealized Dune film) as the framing device for a discussion of AI moviemaking.
I was recently shown some frames from a film that I had never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 version of “Tron.” The sets were incredible. The actors, unfamiliar to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant and psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian. ...
The truth is that these weren’t stills from a long-lost movie. They weren’t photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were generated in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence. ...
Just because you cannot watch Alejandro’s “Dune” doesn’t mean it didn’t change the world. This unfilmed film’s influence on our culture is nothing short of astounding. Specific ideas and images from the “Dune” art bible have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in movies such as “Blade Runner,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Prometheus,” “The Terminator” and even the original “Star Wars.” His “Dune” does not exist, yet it’s all around us. ...
I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure? ...
If asked to guess what under 25-year-olds are listening to, it's unlikely that many of us would land upon orchestral music. And yet a survey published in December 2022 by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) found that 74% of UK residents aged under 25 were likely to be tuning into just that at Christmas-time, compared with a mere 46% of people aged 55 or more. These figures reflect not only the RPO's broader finding that under 35-year-olds are more likely to listen to orchestral music than their parents, but also the widespread surge in popularity of classical music in general, particularly among younger generations. ...
Unsurprisingly, social media has played a huge part in this, as a quick search of the popular TikTok hashtag "classictok" (currently at 53.8 million views) attests. There, as well as on Instagram, young classical artists have been making use of the digital realm's democratic potential to lift the heavy velvet curtains on their art form, presenting classical music and its storied history in ways that are accessible, unintimidating and, most importantly, fun. ...
Nigerian-US baritone and lifelong hip-hop fan Babatunde Akinboboye enjoyed a similarly swift and surprising rise to social media fame when he posted a video of himself singing Rossini's renowned aria Largo al factotum over the top of Kendrick Lamar's track Humble. "I was in my car and I realised that the two pieces worked together musically, so I started singing on top of the beat," he tells BBC Culture. He documented the moment on his phone and posted the video on his personal Facebook account, guessing that his friends would enjoy it more than his opera peers. "But I went to sleep, woke up the next morning, and it had expanded to my opera network, and far beyond that," he laughs, explaining that within two days, his self-dubbed brand of "hip-hopera" had caught the attention of The Ellen Show, America's Got Talent and Time magazine. ...
Virtual stars proved a resounding success at numerous New Year celebration galas hosted by television stations and video platforms to attract young audiences.
Designed to increase human interaction, these digital avatars are created by technology powered by artificial intelligence.
At the New Year’s Eve gala staged by Bilibili, a short-video sharing platform popular with young people, celebrity virtual idol Luo Tianyi performed five songs in 10 minutes and appeared alongside real-life dancers to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her debut. The show attracted more than 1.4 billion views. ...
A virtual rock band mesmerised its audience at a concert staged by Sichuan Television to mark the arrival of 2023. The band comprises five digital avatars based on cultural relics found at the Sanxingdui site in Deyang, Sichuan province, which is known for its exotic-looking bronze statues. ...
... The firm is stopping research and development (R&D) into its AR contact lens prototype due to a lack of capital. ...
"The slumping global economy, extremely tight capital markets, and the yet-to-be proven market potential for advanced AR products have all contributed to a situation where Mojo Vision has been unable to find additional private funding to continue its development of Mojo Lens.”
Due to the product cancellation, Mojo Vision is removing roughly 75 percent of its staff.
The layoffs come as Mojo Vison refocuses its direction towards MicroLED production for smart and immersive wearables. ...
... According to a recent survey by PwC, 38% of companies are anticipating having the metaversebe part of their everyday business model within the next year, and 44% think the transition will happen within the next two to three years. Regardless of how far employers plan to settle into the metaverse, one thing is for sure: they have to be prepared. ...
"The metaverse already existed — anyone with children or who experienced it through gaming understood what it was immediately," says Angela Lester, design and innovation leader at PwC. "But we didn't really understand the power of it on the business side until recently. It could be anything from onboarding and training or collaborating and interacting with our colleagues. It's also things like creating virtual content and creating new ways to interact with our customers." ...
Fifty-one percent of companies already have designated roles that focus exclusively on the metaverse, and 46% are hiring people with metaverse-related skills — everything from cryptocurrency and NFT-focused jobs to creative positions focused on 3D design. Those kinds of skills may still be foreign to most business leaders, which is why 32% of employers plan to hire or appoint a "metaverse leader" that can help manage those teams and relay progress to the C-suite. ...
... "The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 web3 it's making me uncomfortable," François Chollet, an influential deep learning researcher at Google and the creator of the deep learning system Keras, wrote in a blistering Twitter threat. "Narratives based on zero data are accepted as self-evident." ...
"Everyone is expecting as a sure thing 'civilization-altering' impact (and 100x returns on investment) in the next 2-3 years," he continued. "Personally I think there's a bull case and bear case. The bull case is way way more conservative than what the median person on my TL considers as completely self-evident."
The bull case, he believes, is that "generative AI becomes a widespread [user experience] paradigm for interacting with most tech products." But Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — AI that operated at the level of a human or above — remains a "pipe dream." So, startups based on OpenAI tech might not be rendering us humans obsolete quite yet, but they could well find a long-term role within specific niches. ...
Microsoft calls VALL-E a "neural codec language model," and it builds off of a technology called EnCodec, which Meta announced in October 2022. Unlike other text-to-speech methods that typically synthesize speech by manipulating waveforms, VALL-E generates discrete audio codec codes from text and acoustic prompts. It basically analyzes how a person sounds, breaks that information into discrete components (called "tokens") thanks to EnCodec, and uses training data to match what it "knows" about how that voice would sound if it spoke other phrases outside of the three-second sample.
... Besides profound effects on tasks and jobs, generative AI models and associated externalities have raised alarm in the AI governance community. One of the problems with large language models is their ability to generate false and misleading content. Meta’s Galactica –a model trained on 48 million science articles with claims to summarize academic papers, solve math problems, and write scientific code – was taken down after less than three days of being online as the scientific community found it was producing incorrect results after misconstruing scientific facts and knowledge.
This is even more alarming when seen in the context of automated troll bots, with capabilities advanced enough to render obsolete, The Turing Test – which tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour similar to or indistinguishable from a human. Such capabilities can be misused to generate fake news and disinformation across platforms and ecosystems.
How is generative AI governed?
In the private sector, two approaches to the governance of generative AI models are currently emerging. In one camp, companies such as OpenAI are self-governing the space through limited release strategies, monitored use of models, and controlled access via API’s for their commercial products like DALL-E2. In the other camp, newer organizations, such as Stability AI, believe that these models should be openly released to democratize access and create the greatest possible impact on society and the economy. Stability AI open sourced the weights of its model – as a result, developers can essentially plug it into everything to create a host of novel visual effects with little or no controls placed on the diffusion process. ...
This is a task not only reserved for private companies, but which is equally important for civil society and for policymakers to weigh in on. This includes disruption of labour markets, legitimacy of scraped data, licensing, copyright and potential for biased or otherwise harmful content, misinformation, and so on. Only when solid checks and balances are in place can more thoughtful and beneficial expansion of generative AI technologies and products be achieved.
Expanding Overton window and AGI governance: As conversations about AGI become more commonplace, the Overton window — the range of ideas and policy options that people view as reasonable to discuss — is rapidly expanding. This will bring AGI governance to the forefront of the public discourse. Important questions include both how AGI will interact with existing governance structures and how AGI itself should be governed. Economists have much to contribute to these topics, providing ample opportunities for cutting-edge research papers and dissertations. Our Oxford Handbook of AI Governance, set to be published in early 2023, will make an influential contribution — and many of the chapters are already available online.
Preparing for the nonexistent future of work: In the medium term, our society will have to adjust to a world in which human labor is largely redundant. And this may happen sooner than many expect, perhaps even within the current decade. Cognitive automation is making policies such as a universal basic income more urgent and more appealing. To better understand how to prepare for this nonexistent future of work, I recently published a report on the topic. What is more, if cognitive work becomes redundant, we must also reevaluate the purpose of education at a fundamental level.
