DALL·E 2 is a pretty astounding new natural language AI system that can create realistic images and art from simple written descriptions. It can also combine concepts, attributes, and styles – all by simply typing in what you want in text.
Below (and on the website) are some examples of what the AI generated from the simple text description. 1. “An astronaut riding a horse in a photorealistic style”
2. “A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension as digital art”
3. “Teddy bears shopping for groceries in the style of ukyo-e”
A decent video that covers the state of recent AI developments. It presents capabilities a bit more advanced than the ground-level truth, but it’s a good summary. This video doesn’t even touch on some of the more interesting/frightening deep-fake technologies that can create nearly undetectable faces, facial animations, and chat, forum, and news writing bots (GPT-3).
I do not, however, like the recent trend of this sort of AI coverage that claims there is any ‘consciousness’ to these systems. Even after thousands of years we still don’t even know what makes us conscious, or if that is even a real thing. Despite our advancements, we don’t even have a good definition of life. AI systems are all run on standard Turing based computers operating on nets of what usually break down to linear regression models. Yes, they achieve really amazing feats but technical achievement doesn’t indicate consciousness or intelligence. Your pocket calculator can calculate values better and faster than the best person in the world, but nobody would say their calculator was conscious because it exhibits abilities better than a human’s. Even a single cell found on Mars would be considered ‘life’ – despite the fact it might not be capable of doing more than moving a bit, ingesting minerals from dirt, and splitting.
I have no doubt that AI based systems will be able to match human behaviors so well that they will be indistinguishable from living humans on all fronts: speaking, writing, singing, movement, making art, etc. However, that is not the same as arguing for consciousness or having life – a nut that we haven’t even cracked in the thousands of years we have tried to understand it in ourselves.
Dennis James shows us around 2 of the more unusual musical instruments – ones that require wetted hands that make their glass parts sing. The Cristal Baschet and Glass Armonica are fascinating historical glass instruments.
The Glass Armonica was invented by Benjamin Franklin and was purported to be dangerous to both players and listeners by driving them mad or even killing them.
The Cristal Baschet was developed by the French brothers Bernard and Frncois Baschet as a sculpture that could be played to produce music. They also invented an inflatable guitar and an aluminum piano.
As a kid, I LOVED catching the latest Knight Rider episode each week. Besides the episodes with KARR, one of my other favorites as a kid was the episode that featured Michael’s evil twin Garth and Goliath: a giant semi with the same protective shell as KITT.
Yunchul Kim created this kinetic sculpture which looks like some sort of segmented alien robot. It’s on display at the 59th International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy through Nov 27 2022.
Chess, like all pursuits, continues to evolve and change over time. Apparently a lot of the chess kids these days are learning new Hypermodernismchess techniques. A school of chess that emerged after World War I. It featured challenges to the chess ideas of central European masters, including Wilhelm Steinitz‘s approach to the centre and the rules established by Siegbert Tarrasch.
The Kings Indian Defense is one of these new openings. Popular in the early 2000’s, it’s popularity has recently been reigned back in by the likes of Vladimir Kramnik who scored excellent results against it, so much so that even Kasparov gave up the opening.
Anyway, if you want to play against modern chess kids, it’s good to know what they’re using these days.
AI is increasing at ever fast rates and in all conceivable parts of our lives. We have commercially viable AI driving cars, AI that can identify pictures and elements in pictures, teach robots how to run/walk/jump and navigate, language bots that can write news and informational articles that are indistinguishable from real writers, comprehend and explain jokes, and even generate art.
It appears that Ai-Da is likely just a camera, image filters much like you’d find in Photoshop, and a computer controlled limb to generate art using her robotic arm. The creators seem to also enjoy putting words into her mouth. Lots of them – even to the point of giving a Ted talk. It can come off a bit pretentious, and I even feels like there is a touch of deliberate misleading going on. Folks that don’t understand there is ‘someone behind the curtain’ pulling the strings and putting the words in her mouth might believe it’s the AI’s opinion – which it really isn’t.
Still, it’s an interesting accomplishment – I just wish the creators would be a bit more honest about what they’re doing and no try to convince people the AI itself is coming up with the words and that her artwork is more a product of well-known image algorithms as opposed to intelligence – let alone consciousness.
