This morning I went for a run. During this run I listened to Systems Crash and the discussion about AI, about the US attitude, and the European/International attitude and it convinced me that I much prefer to use EU/International projects rather than American ones for a simple reason. Corporate Social Responsibility.
The US wants to move fast and break things, including the law, by hoovering data it has no moral rights to.
If you bought a Mac Book Pro in 2007 or so you could get it with firewire 800, Thunderbolt 1 and a number of other connectors. A few years later they did away with every connector except USB-C, for charging and devices. The result was a thin laptop that needed dongles, and breakout boxes, for everything.
If you have a garmin device to charge you need an adaptor. If you have a firewire 400 or 800 drive you may need two or three dongles to have the right connections.
Yesterday afternoon as I set off for my walk I noticed that the Pi AI Kit was in my post box. I moved it to the locked compartment and then went for my walk. After the walk I took the time to set it up and it went well.
Easy Assembly If you’ve got your own kit but haven’t assembled it first, the long screws are there so that you can fix the Raspberry Pi and AI kit within the default Pi case.
Last night I attempted to watch the WWDC conference and failed. This wasn’t a technical issue. The issue was a cultural one. I find the show to be too kitschy for me. From the pretending to leap out of a plane to the tone of their conversation, it’s just unwatchable for me, with European sensibilities.
Apple came out with Apple Intelligence which, at face value, is fantastic. I say at face value because it won’t work on Intel devices, and it won’t work on devices that came out before the iPhone 15.
Everything we do is being used to feed AI models. From the way we write our blog posts, to the pictures we take, and even the way we talk to each other. Everything is being hoovered up, and being turned into a model. The result of this is that if we share content to websites we have to see whether they have an AI learning clause. Usually these clauses are opt out rather than opt in.
According to a recent article YouTube will use AI to direct the content that people make, how it looks how it sounds and more. In so doing YouTube will be even less interesting.
AI tools will also begin informing what kind of content creators make. A new AI feature in YouTube Studio will generate topic ideas and outlines for potential videos. The AI suggestions will be personalized to individual creators, YouTube says, and based on what’s already trending with audiences.
Yesterday I played with Bing Chat, which is Microsoft’s AI engine and I noticed that I could play with generating images. I spent quite a bit of time generating a multitude of images, in part for fun, but also to get a grasp of the limitations of the opportunity presented by software like AI.
Faces If you ask Dall-E via Bing Chat to generate a face then it can. It wanted to generate the face of a woman with curly hair so I did, and the image looks realistic.
I like to experiment with Bard and chatGPT. I like to see what their limits are, but with time and effort I like to get beyond their limits and get them to do what I want, without failing too often.
DJI and other brands have had self-editing options for years now, so the idea that software would edit the footage taken by the brand’s devices is not new. What is new is the desire people have to let AI replace their own creativity, and inspiration, to give the AI’s creative vision rather than their own.
Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.
Disinformation and misinformation work for a very simple reason. People who did not study history, and do not follow current affairs do not have the background information to spot what is true from what is untrue. They are unable to use history’s lessons to see the warning signs and act accordingly.
Algorithms and Social Media In Mindf*cuk by Chris Wylie we read about how big data and algorithms were used to identify and exploit people’s gullibility to get them to vote for Brexit in England, and the Republican candidate in the US.