philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

5 strategies to activate your agency and stay relevant in the age of AI

... The “Complex Five”: know your unknowns...

Known knowns: ...there is no uncertainty...

Unknown knowns: Things we think we know, but we find that we don’t understand them when they manifest. ...

Known unknowns: ... These are obvious, highly likely events, but few acknowledge them. ...

Unknown unknowns: Things that we don’t know that we don’t know. ...

Butterfly Effects: ... how small changes can have significant and unpredictable consequences. ...

All these degrees of uncertainty share a common trait: ignorance, or absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence. ...

[PhilNote: the article gets into examples and what to do about them]

See the full story with diagram here: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/07/5-strategies-agency-relevant-age-of-ai/

Video game performers will strike over AI concerns

... SAG-AFTRA performers working in games "deserve and demand the same fundamental protections as performers in film, television, streaming, and music: fair compensation and the right of informed consent for the A.I. use of their faces, voices, and bodies," said the union's National Executive Director & Chief Negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. ...

The strike includes the following studios:

• Activision Productions Inc.
• Blindlight LLC
• Disney Character Voices Inc.
• Electronic Arts Productions Inc.
• Formosa Interactive LLC
• Insomniac Games Inc.
• Llama Productions LLC
• Take 2 Productions Inc.
• VoiceWorks Productions Inc.
• WB Games Inc.

See the full story here: https://www.engadget.com/video-game-performers-will-strike-over-ai-concerns-201733660.html

AI And The Changing Character Of War – OpEd

... The United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) identified in 2017 that an increasing number of states were pursuing development and utilization of the autonomous weapon systems that present risk of an ‘uncontrollable war.’ According to a 2023 study on ‘Artificial Intelligence and Urban Operations’ by the University of South Florida, “the armed forces may soon be able to exploit autonomous weapon systems to monitor, strike, and kill their opponents and even civilians at will.” The study further highlights that in October 2016, United States Department of Defence (US DoD) conducted experiments with micro drones capable of exhibiting advanced swarm behaviour such as collective decision making, adaptive formation flying and self-healing. Asia Times reported in February 2023 that the US DoD had launched Autonomous Multi-Domain Adaptive Swarms-of-Swarms (AMASS) project to develop autonomous drone swarms that can be launched from sea, air and land to overwhelm enemy air defences.   ...

Notably, in January 2024, a group of researchers from four US universities found, while simulating a war scenario, using five AI programs including OpenAI and Meta’s AI program, that all models chose nuclear attacks over peace with their adversary. Findings of this study are a wake-up call for the world leaders and scientists to come together in a multilateral setting to strengthen the UN’s efforts to regulate AI in warfare. ...

See the full story here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/22072024-ai-and-the-changing-character-of-war-oped/

AI is making robots smarter. They’ll need boundaries.

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Where AI meets the physical world — and creates the potential for conflicts — is in manufacturing and logistics. Robots are already roaming factory, and warehouse floors and AI will make them smarter and more agile.

As is usually the case with new technology, the military is prodding innovation. This marriage of AI and robots will require special rules to keep them constrained by humans, especially as these mobile machines move beyond the confines of a factory and become more prevalent in the service economy.

...

It may be too late for that debate. Fully autonomous aerial drones are already killing people in Ukraine. The effort by a small group of activists and diplomats failed in an attempt to ban killer robots because the machines are too useful, said Peter Singer, a senior fellow at New America in an April 14 article. ...

Who’s in charge? Should there be a kill switch? Can just anyone pull it? These questions should be addressed now because robots are dangerous if not handled properly. A Bell employee was killed by a robot in 2022 while lubricating the rollers on a conveyor belt that formed part of an automated palletizer. The motion of the can of WD-40 over the conveyor triggered the system’s camera and a robotic arm was activated, crushing the 54-year-old worker, according to a report from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. ...

See the full story here: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2024/07/23/world/ai-smarter-robots/

A.I. Can Write Poetry, but It Struggles With Math

... Chatbots like Open AI’s ChatGPT can write poetry, summarize books and answer questions, often with human-level fluency. These systems can do math, based on what they have learned, but the results can vary and be wrong. They are fine-tuned for determining probabilities, not doing rules-based calculations. Likelihood is not accuracy, and language is more flexible, and forgiving, than math. ...

Traditionally, computers have been programmed to follow step-by-step rules and retrieve information in structured databases. They were powerful but brittle. So past efforts at A.I. hit a wall.

Yet more than a decade ago, a different approach broke throughand began to deliver striking gains. The underlying technology, called a neural network, is loosely modeled on the human brain.

This kind of A.I. is not programmed with rigid rules, but learns by analyzing vast amounts of data. It generates language, based on all the information it has absorbed, by predicting what word or phrase is most likely to come next — much as humans do. ...

A few months ago, Khan Academy made a significant change to its A.I.-powered tutor, called Khanmigo. It sends many numerical problems to a calculator program instead of asking the A.I. to solve the math. While waiting for the calculator program to finish, students see the words “doing math” on their screens and a Khanmigo icon bobbing its head. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/23/technology/ai-chatbots-chatgpt-math.html

Will.i.am on vulnerability, AI, and the future of music

... The 49-year-old hitmaker emphasised that it was down to musicians to shape its use proactively, but insisted that no amount of AI in the industry would take away from the vulnerability required to make good music. ...

See the full story here: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/william-ai-black-eyed-peas-exit-festival-b2582668.html

The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast

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Yacine Jernite, a machine learning researcher at Hugging Face, a company that provides tools and data to A.I. developers, characterized the consent crisis as a natural response to the A.I. industry’s aggressive data-gathering practices.

“Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing blowback from data creators after the text, images and videos they’ve shared online are used to develop commercial systems that sometimes directly threaten their livelihoods,” he said.

But he cautioned that if all A.I. training data needed to be obtained through licensing deals, it would exclude “researchers and civil society from participating in the governance of the technology.”

...

A.I. companies have claimed that their use of public web data is legally protected under fair use. But gathering new data has gotten trickier. Some A.I. executives I’ve spoken to worry about hitting the “data wall” — their term for the point at which all of the training data on the public internet has been exhausted, and the rest has been hidden behind paywalls, blocked by robots.txt or locked up in exclusive deals. ...

But there’s also a lesson here for big A.I. companies, who have treated the internet as an all-you-can-eat data buffet for years, without giving the owners of that data much of value in return. Eventually, if you take advantage of the web, the web will start shutting its doors. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/technology/ai-data-restrictions.html

Why Olympic venues are using digital twins

See the 4 minute video here: https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0jbsxq6/why-olympic-venues-are-using-digital-twins

Hacker group says it leaked Disney data over the company’s ‘approach to AI’

A group of hackers says it recently leaked internal communications at Walt Disney Co. over the company’s handling of “artist contracts, its approach to AI, and its pretty blatant disregard for the consumer.” ...

California lawmakers are also trying to regulate AI through legislation, and tech companies have responded by urging caution against overregulation. ...

See the full story here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2024-07-16/disney-leak-hack-nullbulge-ai-artificial-intelligence

These IATSE Artists Are Voting ‘No’ on Their Next Contract, and AI Is to Blame

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While actors “were able to maintain the rights to their own images and identities and to choose to be replicated or not,” the memo read, “in the new contract language, we have not been given any protections relating to our individual processes when designing, building models, illustrating or creating documents.” ...

Zach Berger, the lead creature designer of the in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” also published a social media thread outlining why he was voting against the contract. Berger explained he was part of the AI task force for the ADG that constructed “proposals that both acknowledged AI’s proliferation, but attempted to protect members’ jobs.”

To his dismay, he did not find any trace of the proposals the task force had assembled in the tentative agreement. ...

“If a producer wants to effectively pre-design the movie for themselves before it even gets to an art department…they want to have the power to do that,” Saunders said. “It’s a huge, huge, huge cost savings. I don’t believe for a second that it’s an accident that stuff was left out.” ...

“We can’t say, ‘Well, this work would normally have taken 10 illustrators three months, and now you’re having two illustrators do it in three weeks,’ Saunders said. “The displacement doesn’t come from the prompts. The selling point of these AI systems is that it means fewer people need to be hired to start with, and that will lead to the credits lists getting shorter on films.” ...

See the full story here: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/iatse-artists-voting-no-next-132200635.html