ChatGPT has professionals in a range of industries justifiably nervous. Should music writers — those concert-addicted, record-hoarding gatekeepers of good taste — be worried too?
When TIDAL asked me to write an essay about whether Artificial Intelligence could fulfill the role of the music critic, my first thought was “Can I get A.I. to do the piece for me?” I turned of course to ChatGPT, the program that has stirred up a lot of, well, chat recently. (It’s currently available to the public free of charge, the idea being that users’ interactions with the chatbot will help its developers at the company OpenAI improve it.) I made the instructions as simple and straightforward as possible:
Write an essay in the style of music critic Simon Reynolds that expresses skeptical views about A.I. taking over the role of the music critic.
Within seconds, the program served up 200 words of disconcertingly clear and well-organized argument. The effect was at once mind-blowing and underwhelming. Although millions of my own sentences can be found on the internet, the program proved unable to duplicate any stylistic mannerisms. The argument itself struck me as averagely intelligent, making entry-level points about how A.I.-generated prose is necessarily deficient in empathy and nuance, and how it would lack the unique and personal perspective of a human critic. (I had to give the chatbot points for self-awareness, at least.) Similar formulations on the same topic, substituting the names of music journalists with highly individual prose voices, produced equally neutral and characterless results. Read More
Daily Archives: January 23, 2023
Will the Metaverse Live Up to the Hype? Game Developers Aren’t Impressed
Companies like Meta are still betting big on immersive virtual worlds, but people who have been building digital spaces for years don’t see the long-term potential.
THE PERFECT VERSION of the metaverse, to hear tech heads like Mark Zuckerberg tell it, marries social media, entertainment, and—most exciting of all—meetings in one pristine virtual space. Long ago foretold in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, it is a place where the online world offers more experiences than the flesh-and-bone one. But whereas Stephenson’s metaverse was part of an apocalyptic future, modern inventors have promised a digital utopia.
Unfortunately, the metaverse they’ve built has, so far, lived up to those expectations about as well as a Craigslist apartment rented based on photos alone. Zuckerberg’s Horizon Worlds, clunky and strange, may have been at its most thrilling when Meta informed users that legs for their avatars were “coming soon.” The hardware needed to visit such virtual worlds—often a headset like Meta’s Quest Pro—can be pricey and cumbersome, and once you get there, it’s no party. Read More
DeepMind’s CEO Helped Take AI Mainstream. Now He’s Urging Caution
Demis Hassabis stands halfway up a spiral staircase, surveying the cathedral he built. Behind him, light glints off the rungs of a golden helix rising up through the staircase’s airy well. The DNA sculpture, spanning three floors, is the centerpiece of DeepMind’s recently opened London headquarters. It’s an artistic representation of the code embedded in the nucleus of nearly every cell in the human body. “Although we work on making machines smart, we wanted to keep humanity at the center of what we’re doing here,” Hassabis, DeepMind’s CEO and co-founder, tells TIME. This building, he says, is a “cathedral to knowledge.” Each meeting room is named after a famous scientist or philosopher; we meet in the one dedicated to James Clerk Maxwell, the man who first theorized electromagnetic radiation. “I’ve always thought of DeepMind as an ode to intelligence,” Hassabis says.
Hassabis, 46, has always been obsessed with intelligence: what it is, the possibilities it unlocks, and how to acquire more of it. He was the second-best chess player in the world for his age when he was 12, and he graduated from high school a year early. As an adult he strikes a somewhat diminutive figure, but his intellectual presence fills the room. “I want to understand the big questions, the really big ones that you normally go into philosophy or physics if you’re interested in,” he says. “I thought building AI would be the fastest route to answer some of those questions.” Read More
An Interview With the Guy Who Has All Your Data
It’s 10 pm. Do you know where your data is? Chad Engelgau does. He’s the CEO of Acxiom, a data broker. Your info is probably on one of his servers.
Chad Engelgau is the CEO of Acxiom, a data broker that operates one of the world’s biggest repositories of consumer information. The company claims to have granular details on more than 2.5 billion people across 62 different countries. The chances that Acxiom knows a whole lot about you, reader, are good
In many respects, data brokering is a shadowy enterprise. The industry mostly operates in quiet business deals the public never hears about, especially smaller firms that engage with data on particularly sensitive subjects. Compared to other parts of the tech industry, data brokers face little scrutiny from regulators, and in large part they evade attention from the media. Read More
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