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| Uncanny Valley, by Ideogram AI |
Eki nailed it: AI is a new species. It will grow up and go to work. Even now, in its teenage stage, it has made a big splash. ChatGPT can record audio books in 95 languages. A friend was texting. Up popped :‘I can write this message for you’. It writes articles, creates illustrations, incl. for the LMP blog. Eki made an AI copy of my voice to narrate a short video. Smarter, faster, cheaper than us, AI doesn’t take time off or get a salary.
It has made a huge impact in Health Care. AI is more accurate at diagnosing illnesses than human doctors. It discovered two types of testicular cancer: benign (no op necessary) and the other invasive. In China ‘AskBob’ beat six doctors with more accurate, quicker diagnoses. It assists 1.32m doctors. A New Zealand company has developed an AI ’doctor’ that looks and acts human. But humans get an eerie, creepy feeling* when they’re up-close to an AI bot that looks like us.
A big stumbling block for AI is the humongous amounts of electricity it uses. But still, AI will have the biggest impact, good and bad, on our lives since the 19C Industrial revolution - when Luddites wrecked the electric weaving machines. Welcome to the new world.
*"Uncanny Valley": UUV AI post photography, Palmer gallery, London
Next week: TikTok on the LOCK
Sources: Economist, BBC, Financial Times, Eki
Note to EKI re. third party candidates: in 2020 Ralph Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida. Al Gore lost in that state to George Bush by 543 votes - the Supreme court wouldn’t allow a re-count. It cost him the election. In 1996, Ross Perot got 19,743,921 votes. Bob Dole lost to Bill Clinton. Neither Nader or Perot had a star-power name of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who doesn’t care if he dumps Trump on the US.
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| Uncanny Valley, by Ideogram AI |
Note: I didn't coin the "AI is a new species" thing, got it from a TED talk - by whom, I do not remember right now. And it's not ChatGPT that reads audio books, but rather some other AI.
Which reminds me, the logical follow-up for AI images, videos and voices is AI music. And of course AI nails that too, the likes of Suno and Udio (and soon Elevenlabs Music, by the same company I used to clone Maggy's voice) can create custom songs in any style from heavy rock to classical opera in mere minutes for essentially no money or effort, and the results are rather stunning: like other art generating AI:s, though they still fall short from the crème de la crème, they are better than *most* musicians.
Little Margie's Blues by Udio
When it comes to AI generated art (except perhaps AI video), we are past the uncanny valley - the AI generated humans look real, they sound real. But in robotics we're still on the other side of the valley - sure, the robots are deliberately made to look somewhat like humans or animals, but also still clearly machines. So far there have not been any robots that cross the uncanny valley to the other side, looking and behaving so realistically that they would pass for real humans or animals - all attempts so far look repulsive.
About the elections: Yea, wormbrain may get some votes, but I think more from the Trump conspiracy theorist pool than from Biden's side.
CU
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Eki
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