Catch up
AI voices. Barbie and Tanner. Google follows Apple's coredump. Wendell's birthday. Silence is golden and holy.
It’s passed time to do the usual catching up. Links below, arranged under the headings linked to the Technocomplex posts. (The posts go quite a ways back, too!)
Cadillac Ranch - Boulangerie: March 2023
FIFTY YEARS of tipped-on-front-end Cadillacs! One national monument I still want to visit before it rusts away. Marks, Michael. “Why Cadillac Ranch Still Captivates, Even after 50 Years by the Highway.” Texas Standard, July 2, 2024. https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/amarillo-cadillac-ranch-photo-exhibit-wyatt-mcspadden/.
Mostly fake people, dead ones. & Billion-Dollar babies. Fake and real, too?
An expansion of a previous post, this time stretching the mortal coil a bit. Virtual influencers are trying to be a thing. For oldies, that's weird. For young 'uns, it's normal?
“A.I. agents are already triggering an avalanche of synthetic conversation, as they are deployed as tireless, unflagging talkers, capable of endless invented chatter. As they improve, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish these A.I. voice agents from humans and, even when you can identify them, you will still be forced to talk to them.” Ratliff, Evan. “I Created an A.I. Voice Clone to Prank Telemarketers. But the Joke’s on Us.” The New York Times, October 10, 2024, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/10/opinion/ai-voice-telemarketers.html.
The video is worthwhile, too. “When I asked Hany Farid, a digital-forensics expert at the University of California, Berkeley, how we can spot synthetic audio and video, he had two words: good luck.” Stern, Joanna. “I Cloned Myself With AI. She Fooled My Bank and My Family.” Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2023. https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-cloned-myself-with-ai-she-fooled-my-bank-and-my-family-356bd1a3.
“When the museum’s new A.I.-powered installation is completed in the fall, visitors will be able to pose questions by voice or text and an algorithm will find the most relevant prerecorded video clips among the testimonies of 10 survivors selected by the museum from its speakers’ bureau.” Berger, Joseph. “Long After Surviving the Nazis, They Use A.I. to Remind the World.” The New York Times, August 2, 2024, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/arts/museum-of-jewish-heritage-ai-holocaust.html.
Voice-over performers Paul Skye Lehrman and Linnea Sage listened to a podcast as they drove. “This particular podcast had a unique hook—they interviewed an AI-powered chat bot, equipped with text-to-speech software, to ask how it thought the use of AI would affect jobs in Hollywood. But, when it spoke, it sounded just like Mr. Lehrman. ‘We needed to pull the car over,’ he said.” Derico, Ben. “‘A Tech Firm Stole Our Voices—Then Cloned and Sold Them.’” BBC News, August 31, 2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3d9zv50955o.
“Malicious actors have long used misleading identities to deceive others online. They carry out fraud, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns from multiple online aliases, email addresses, and phone numbers. Historically, such deception has sometimes seemed an unfortunate but necessary cost of preserving the Internet’s commitments to privacy and unrestricted access. But highly capable AI systems may change the landscape: There is a substantial risk that, without further mitigations, deceptive AI-powered activity could overwhelm the Internet. To uphold user privacy while protecting against AI-powered deception, new countermeasures are needed.” Adler, Steven, Zoë Hitzig, Shrey Jain, Catherine Brewer, Wayne Chang, Renée DiResta, Eddy Lazzarin, et al. “Personhood Credentials: Artificial Intelligence and the Value of Privacy-Preserving Tools to Distinguish Who Is Real Online.” arXiv, August 26, 2024. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.07892. And Oremus, Will, “AI researchers call for ‘personhood credentials’ as bots get smarter” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/21/human-bot-personhood-credentials-worldcoin/).
Barbie. My long, tortured, wonderful relationship.
A true story, remembered. "If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you."
“What a good doggy!” Part of Sean Jacobsohn’s collection of failures: “Recalled in 2007, this lets your child experience the joys of picking up dog poop! You put little brown food pellets in Tanner’s mouth, push his tail down, and then he poops them right out. The little poo pellets are a hazard to a kid’s health.” Failure Museum. “Barbie & Tanner.” Accessed October 11, 2024. https://failure.museum/barbie-tanner/.
Separated by more than a century, two musicians share a complaint
Rick Beato and John Philip Sousa agree on a "menace" to music and to human creativity even though they never met.
McIntyre, Hugh. “‘How Music Got Free’ Shows The Human Side Of Music Piracy’s Origin Story.” Forbes, July 11, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hughmcintyre/2024/07/11/how-music-got-free-shows-the-human-side-of-music-piracys-origin-story/.
Apple left its fingers in the press
Some thoughts on thin tablets, a reprise of villainous things, and the weirdly hazy boundaries between things and us.
Google follows Apple’s lead… Google + Team USA — Dear Sydney, 2024.
Listening to voices of a designer-artist and farmer-poet.
Sara Hendren and Wendell Berry talk with me as I write about the work of humans
Wendell Berry turned ninety years old in August. Library of America. “‘Your Friend, Wendell’: A 90th Birthday Tribute to Wendell Berry,” August 5, 2024. https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/your-friend-wendell-a-90th-birthday-tribute-to-wendell-berry/.
Almost like a person?
ChatGPT-4o offers a friendly, flirty voice. It's a new dimension to AI, and a very powerful one. It's a call to examine fundamentals in lots of professions
OpenAI’s report on GPT-4o. Under “Anthropomorphization and emotional reliance”: “During early testing, including red teaming and internal user testing, we observed users using language that might indicate forming connections with the model. For example, this includes language expressing shared bonds, such as ‘This is our last day together.’ While these instances appear benign, they signal a need for continued investigation into how these effects might manifest over longer periods of time.” “GPT-4o System Card,” August 8, 2024. https://openai.com/index/gpt-4o-system-card/.
We're playing the role of King Thamus
Large Language Models in education could reform or transform. My stab at using ChatGPT in my seminar. I think it worked, but there are big questions.
“Working hard and struggling is actually an important way of learning. When you’re given an answer, you’re not struggling and you’re not learning. And when you get more of a complex problem, it’s tedious to go back to the beginning of a large language model and troubleshoot it and integrate it.” Shein, Esther. “The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education.” Communications of the ACM, July 30, 2024. https://cacm.acm.org/news/the-impact-of-ai-on-computer-science-education/.
