The SearchVoat Forum

If you’ve been closely following the progress of Open AI https://openai.com/, the company run by Sam Altman whose neural nets can now write original text and create original pictures with astonishing ease and speed, you might just skip this piece.

If, on the other hand, you’ve only been vaguely paying attention to the company’s progress and the increasing traction that other so-called “generative” AI companies are suddenly gaining and want to better understand why, you might benefit from this interview with James Currier, a five-time founder and now venture investor who co-founded the firm NFX five years ago with several of his serial founder friends.

Currier falls into the camp of people following the progress closely — so closely that NFX has made numerous related investments in “generative tech” as he describes it, and it’s garnering more of the team’s attention every month. In fact, Currier doesn’t think the buzz about this new wrinkle on AI isn’t hype so much as a realization that the broader startup world is suddenly facing a very big opportunity for the first time in a long time. “Every 14 years,” says Currier, “we get one of these Cambrian explosions. We had one around the internet in ’94. We had one around mobile phones in 2008. Now we’re having another one in 2022.”

In retrospect, this editor wishes she’d asked better questions, but I’m learning here, too. Excerpts from our chat follow, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to our longer conversation here.https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/s ... 1498270180

UFC color commentator Joe Rogan, who is now more popular for his “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast on Spotify than he is for his monthly pay-per-view shrieks, recently interviewed Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

A pretty impressive feat considering Jobs died back in late 2011.

The Rogan-Jobs interview was created by podcast.ai using artificial intelligence and it’s absolutely terrifying. Some parts are clunky and easy to distinguish from the real McCoy, but it represents what’s possible with a little polish.

LOUDai_MACAW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 4:23 am

The Rogan-Jobs interview was created by podcast.ai using artificial intelligence and it’s absolutely terrifying

FeathersMcGraw wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:03 am

LOUDai_MACAW wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 4:23 am

The Rogan-Jobs interview was created by podcast.ai using artificial intelligence and it’s absolutely terrifying

Yes it is, a bit.

I wonder whether there'll be anything left that humans are better at than machines.

I read the NFX article and followed a link to https://darrow.ai which mines the news and financial information and public records and anything else it can find to detect harmful events, then compiles the information into ready-made legal cases for law firms. That sounds a bit scary too.

Eek.

Darrow’s story starts with people.
People who share a vision of a more just world.
Darrow was born out of an ongoing conversation between two friends on the intersection of law, technology, ethics, and truth. Elad Spiegelman and Evyatar Ben Artzi met in law school and then clerked together at the Israeli Supreme Court where they encountered, firsthand, a high level of friction in the justice system.

One major realization was that most serious violations never even make it to court - a clear and significant barrier to achieving true justice. But it was Gila Hayat (a senior Software Engineer and Team Lead in the IDF’s 8200 unit) who identified this problem as one of intelligence gathering, adding a pivotal dimension to the conversation.

The three connected over common values and quickly understood the solution had to be a technological one, co-founding Darrow in January 2020.

As the team grew, the conversation between three co-founders evolved into a company.

Today, Darrow includes top-tier lawyers, world-class data scientists, academics, and creatives who share a vision of frictionless justice. We are on a mission to find and resolve every legal violation, pioneering the data-for-justice revolution.

https://www.darrow.ai/about/

doginventer wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 11:12 am Related:
The Dark Stoa: Blackmail Inflation w/ Patrick Ryan - TheStoa [1.31.34]


The Dark Stoa: Blackmail Inflation w/ Patrick Ryan [1:31:34] | Poal: Say what you want.
https://poal.co/s/Videos/427019/ac71e2a ... c8ae#cmnts

LOUDai_MACAW wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 1:49 am

doginventer wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 11:12 am Related:
The Dark Stoa: Blackmail Inflation w/ Patrick Ryan - TheStoa [1.31.34]


The Dark Stoa: Blackmail Inflation w/ Patrick Ryan [1:31:34] | Poal: Say what you want.
https://poal.co/s/Videos/427019/ac71e2a ... c8ae#cmnts

Could you give a TL/DW/DR blurb about how it's related to Generative AI news articles?

doginventer wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 3:29 am

LOUDai_MACAW wrote: ↑Wed Nov 02, 2022 1:49 am

doginventer wrote: ↑Tue Nov 01, 2022 11:12 am Related:
The Dark Stoa: Blackmail Inflation w/ Patrick Ryan - TheStoa [1.31.34]


The Dark Stoa: Blackmail Inflation w/ Patrick Ryan [1:31:34] | Poal: Say what you want.
https://poal.co/s/Videos/427019/ac71e2a ... c8ae#cmnts

Could you give a TL/DW/DR blurb about how it's related to Generative AI news articles?

I’ll try
Basically the foundational premise is that the status quo is underpinned by blackmail which holds the worst manifestations of power in check in relationships where compliance cannot be ensured by trust and where typically the most pathological individuals seek to operate.
Those who hold positions of power provide, willingly or otherwise, evidence of wrongdoing which they could not afford to have revealed, and are thus secured in compliance within the web of power that can, at least theoretically, dissuade them from the worst excesses of despotism.
The Epstein/Maxwell operation would be an example of part of this system.
The fact that the manipulation and manufacture of evidence (e.g. deep-fake videos and voice replication as well as all manner of data falsification) breaks the power of evidence which holds together these systems of power, since evidence becomes untrustworthy or at least plausibly deniable, will inevitably lead to a breakdown of the current hierarchies of power, leading to chaotic circumstances where individual power brokers have no effective means or motives of constraint.
The conclusion drawn is that we are about to see the outcome of this breakdown in complete lawlessness and inhumanity.
Interestingly the only know instance of a secured body of evidence with it’s integrity preserved since it provably precedes this coming circumstance appears to be the Wikileaks trove, hence the incarceration of Mr Assange in Belmarsh prison.

I believe any 'breakdown in complete lawlessness and inhumanity' will have been allowed or even planned to occur for a number of reasons, such as distraction from large moves happening at the same time, conditioning people's behavior to accept or even demand a more controlling government, and/or studies in behavior under certain societal conditions.

...If you visit the website of the US patent & trademark office, you’ll find patent number 10,853,717 B2, filed on December 1 2020 by "inventors" Dustin I Abramson and Joseph Johnson jnr, on behalf of Microsoft. Its 21 pages of dense text can be boiled down to this: Microsoft has been granted a patent on technology that allows the company to resurrect dead people by taking their online and other information, and using it to turn them into artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots.

The patent defines a chatbot, for those of us who haven’t had the lamentable misfortune of dealing with DStv’s one on WhatsApp, as follows: "A chat robot is a conversational computer program that simulates human conversation using textual and/or auditory input channels … Chatbots are trained using data conversational dialogue samples from various users and user sessions. As such, the chatbots in these implementations represent a generic, normalized version for the personalities and attributes for the entire sampled user base."

It’s a scary thought. In the near future, you won’t have to let people die. Can’t bear the thought of living out your days without the company of your loved ones? Just turn them into simulacra.

A worse way to put that is, in the near future, you won’t be allowed to die.

Microsoft tells us that "living users could train a digital replacement in the event of their death".

You might be familiar with the old saw that, in life, nothing is certain except for death and taxes. Well, that’s now going the way of other outdated idiomatic phrases such as "the cheque is in the mail", "tune in tomorrow" or "he hung up on me". Because if Microsoft and other big tech companies have their way — and they tend to — death won’t be certain any more.

Hell, given that companies such as Amazon and Google don’t actually pay tax, it appears even that isn’t certain...

...So, nothing is certain anymore — except, perhaps, that Silicon Valley, or Seattle in the case of Microsoft, will come up with more and more ways to harvest profits from the data we’ve all irretrievably given to them.

Patent 10,853,717 B2 outlines this for us: "Social data (eg images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages, written letters, etc) relating to the specific person may be accessed [and] used to create … the specific person’s personality."

I’ve come to terms with knowing that American platforms own all my digital data, but "written letters"? I guess, at this point, I should be grateful they still let me use my own name.

The upshot, though, is that your digital footprint, as well as whatever real-life data Microsoft can harvest, can be used to turn you into an AI chatbot. You will live forever.

It gets even more worrying. "A 2D or 3D model of the specific person may be generated using images, depth information and/or video data associated with the specific person."

And you don’t just have to settle for resurrecting a loved one. "The specific person [represented in the bot] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc."

Microsoft’s recent filing of a US patent for the creation of what it describes as a ‘conversational chatbot of a specific person’ has given rise to media speculation over how the boffins at Redmond will build on the blueprint.

The patent (No. 10,853,717 B2, dated December 01 2020) conceptualizes technology that would access ‘social data’ about that specific person, such as images, voice data, social media posts, emails and other authored documentation, that would instil personality and inform conversations between the bot and a live human.

‘In some aspects,’ the patent abstract continues, ‘a 2D or 3D model of a specific person may be generated using images, depth information, and/or video associated with the specific person’.

How this could all come together is outlined at length in the remainder of the patent’s 21 pages. An AI component is not specified in detail, but it’s hard to imagine such a concept could function without some AI to breathe life into it, so to speak.

Meanwhile, the patent and the possibilities its successful realization would deliver, have prompted some searching responses from online media commentators.

Barry Collins at Forbes reckons Microsoft’s patent “raises the intriguing possibility of digitally reincarnating people as a chatbot”. It’s an idea that also “raises all manner of privacy implications that aren’t discussed in the patent,” Collins continued. “Will people be given the right to opt out of such a system, for example? Would the relatives of the dead be able to prevent others from turning their deceased loved ones into chatbots?”

Collins added: “Such questions are, of course, moot until Microsoft – or someone else – delivers a working prototype. But it might not be the case for much longer that your personality dies with you.”

Andrew Paul at Input reckons the patent’s scope “sounds like Microsoft hopes to better improve its customer service chatbots, as well as future AI assistance along the lines of Alexa, Siri or its own Cortana”. However, Paul found the implications for this kind of hyper-specific, digitalized personality mimicry as varied as they are unsettling: “Aside from the very obvious creepiness of a deceased loved one reading you Waze directions to the nearest Chipotle from beyond the grave, the idea of conversational AI based on an amalgamation of your tweets, Facebook posts, and text messages, coupled with voice mimicry, could usher in a whole new era of cyber-fraud and ‘identity’ theft.”

Tyler Lee, writing at Ubergizmo, agrees: “By using AI and feeding it information, it could lead to next-generation levels of identity theft. We admit that it might be a bit nostalgic to be able to ‘talk’ to a dead loved one online where the chatbot can mimic that person realistically, but it still feels kind of weird – and a little bit wrong.”

https://ai-forum.com/news-item/microsof ... ic-person/