Remember that time Google showed off its artificial intelligence prowess by demoing conversations with Pluto and a paper airplane? That was powered by LaMDA, one of Google’s latest-generation conversational AI models. Now, Google’s using LaMDA to build Wordcraft, a prototype writing tool that can help creative writers craft new stories.
AI-powered writing tools aren’t new. Chances are you’ve heard of Grammarly or copywriting tools like Jasper. What makes Wordcraft a bit different is that it’s framed as a means to help create fictional work. Google describes it as a sort of “text editor with purpose” built into a web-based word processor. Users can prompt Wordcraft to rewrite phrases or direct it to make a sentence funnier. It can also describe objects if asked or generate prompts. In a nutshell, it’s sort of like wrapping an editor and writing partner into a single AI tool. Read More
Monthly Archives: November 2022
AI, Artists, and the Future of Images
An Introduction to Vilém Flusser, and thoughts on on AI art
In recent months, AI text-to-image artworks have been flooding the internet, releasing a deluge of discourse around the role of artists in a rapidly changing world. I’ve recently been revisiting the 1985 book Into the Universe of Technical Images by Vilém Flusser, a philosopher and media theorist who I first encountered in the context of film, but turns out to be shockingly relevant to the current wave of AI image models and the questions they raise about creativity, art, and labor. A close reading of Flusser’s prophetic text can help to answer some of these questions, and to clarify the role of artists in the fast-approaching future.
In broad strokes, Flusser’s account of cultural history can be summed up:
From traditional images (2D art images made by hand, like cave paintings),
to linear texts (i.e. written language works, like the Bible),
to technical images (images created mechanically by an apparatus, like a photograph). Read More
Google’s text-to-image AI model Imagen is getting its first (very limited) public outing
Google is being extremely cautious with the release of its text-to-image AI systems. Although the company’s Imagen model produces output equal in quality to OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 or Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, Google hasn’t made the system available to the public.
Today, though, the search giant announced it will be adding Imagen — in a very limited form — to its AI Test Kitchen app as a way to collect early feedback on the technology.
AI Test Kitchen was launched earlier this year as a way for Google to beta test various AI systems. Currently, the app offers a few different ways to interact with Google’s text model LaMDA (yes, the same one that the engineer thought was sentient), and the company will soon be adding similarly constrained Imagen requests as part of what it calls a “season two” update to the app. In short, there’ll be two ways to interact with Imagen, which Google demoed to The Verge ahead of the announcement today: “City Dreamer” and “Wobble.” Read More
3 ways AI is scaling helpful technologies worldwide
Decades of research have led to today’s rapid progress in AI. Today, we’re announcing three new ways people are poised to benefit.
… Today, we’re excited about many recent advances in AI that Google is leading — not just on the technical side, but in responsibly deploying it in ways that help people around the world. That means deploying AI in Google Cloud, in our products from Pixel phones to Google Search, and in many fields of science and other human endeavors.
We’re aware of the challenges and risks that AI poses as an emerging technology. We were the first major company to release and operationalize a set of AI Principles, and following them has actually (and some might think counterintuitively) allowed us to focus on making rapid progress on technologies that can be helpful to everyone. Getting AI right needs to be a collective effort — involving not just researchers, but domain experts, developers, community members, businesses, governments and citizens.
I’m happy to make announcements in three transformative areas of AI today: first, using AI to make technology accessible in many more languages. Second, exploring how AI might bolster creativity. And third, in AI for Social Good, including climate adaptation. Read More
Ways to think about a metaverse
Your boss wants a metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean? If we strip away the noise, what can we say about this, and what can we predict?
Sometimes it seems like every big company CEO has read the same article about the same tech trend, and sent the same email to their team, asking “What’s our strategy for this?!” A couple of years ago there were a lot of emails asking for a 5G strategy, and now there are a lot of emails asking about metaverse.
Answering the 5G email was actually pretty easy, partly because almost no-one needs a 5G strategy at all (I wrote about this here), but also because we knew what 5G meant. We probably don’t know what ‘metaverse’ means. More precisely, we don’t know what someone else means. This word has become so vague and broad that you cannot really know for sure what the speaker has in mind when they say it, since they might be thinking of a lot of different things. Neal Stephenson coined the word but he no longer owns it, and there’s no Académie Française that can act as the tech buzzword police and give an official definition. Instead ‘metaverse’ has taken on a life of its own, absorbing so many different concepts that I think the word is now pretty much meaningless – it conveys no meaning, and you have to ask, ‘well, what specifically are you asking about?” Read More
Inside Eric Schmidt’s push to profit from an AI cold war with China
A prominent private-sector voice amplifying rhetoric that pits the U.S. against China in a battle for AI supremacy, Schmidt’s borrowing from a Cold War-era playbook to urge the government toward decisions the AI industry wants it to make.
Eric Schmidt has prodded the Pentagon for years to hurry along its software-buying process.
Today the AI tech investor and former Google CEO is more determined than ever to urge government decision-makers to pick up the pace, but not just when it comes to buying more software for the Defense Department.
Schmidt wants the government to implement his sweeping blueprint to fight what he considers an existential threat to democracy posed by China’s AI plans, an effort that could also bolster his own commercial AI interests.
He says the U.S.’s national security and economic leadership are dependent upon spending billions to procure smarter software, bolster AI research, and build the country’s computer science talent pool. And he says he knows better than the Pentagon itself how to remove the bureaucratic blockades preventing more agile use of AI by the government. Read More
The Corporate Metaverse Can’t Compete
The metaverse can’t succeed if no one wants to be there, which Meta and other big metaverses seemingly don’t yet understand.
… At the 1990 SIGGRAPH conference for computer graphics and interactivity, where he appeared on a panel titled “Hip, hype and hope—the three faces of virtual worlds,” John Perry Barlow, a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted as saying that bullshit is “the grease for the skids upon which we ride into the future.” As we watch Mark Zuckerberg click his avatar’s heels to show off virtual legs that don’t yet exist, and people clamor to pay too much money grabbing virtual land to immediately recreate entrenched landlord-tenant structures and financialized real estate, everything about the new metaverse hype seems to be riding that grease.
Corporations like Meta are attempting to manufacture enthusiasm for the metaverse (more specifically, its own metaverse). Clearly, it isn’t working. In its recent earnings report, Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which operates its metaverse and virtual reality projects, reported an almost 50 percent decline in revenue and an operating loss of $3.7 billion in the last year. Meanwhile, virtual social spaces like Roblox, VRChat, Rec Room, and Second Life already have loyal, active, creative user bases. People who were involved in these successful spaces told Motherboard what modern pushes toward a corporatized metaverse are missing. Read More
The Weird Science of Generative AI
… The current thing in tech no longer involves crypto. Suddenly, all the hype is filtering toward generative AI, broadly defined as artificial intelligence that doesn’t just process preexisting data sets, but creates wholly original text, images, audio, videos and code. In this week’s cover story, Margaux assessed the emerging leaders of the text- image-, video-, audio- and data-generating pack, some of which are already worth billions.
We’re living through the palace revolution of artificial intelligence. Creatives, once thought immune to the looming threat of AI, are suddenly competing with software like Open AI’s Dall-E and Jasper’s text-generation platform, which use neural networks to generate original images and text. Annie and Arielle identified 14 creators who are among the first to experiment with the new generative AI tools—often with dazzling results. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 