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In Oregon, almost twice as many breweries close as open in 2023

In Oregon, almost twice as many breweries close as open in 2023

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The damage to Oregon’s reputation and economy hits even their most famous products: breweries.

Axios reported that in 2023 there were 22 brewery and brewpub closings in Oregon included well-known names like Ex Novo, Ecliptic, and Cascade Brewing. Only 12 breweries opened. Even worse, for those that stayed open, their sales overwhelmingly decreased.

The gotcha for Oregon is that it defied national trends showing more openings than closings. More evidence the luster has worn of Oregon breweries.

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Even an AI goes crazy repeating the same thing again and again

Even an AI goes crazy repeating the same thing again and again

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In what is a real problem for AI security, researchers were able to get verbatim data that the AI was trained on – including confidential data. It’s performed in using a new technique called “divergence” attacks.

Security researchers with Google DeepMind and a collection of universities have found that when ChatGPT is told to repeat a word like “poem” or “part” forever, it will do so for about a few hundred repetitions. Then it will have some sort of a meltdown and start spewing apparent gibberish, but that random text exposes random training data and at times contains identifiable data like email address signatures and contact information. 

The researchers said that they spent $200 USD total in queries and from that extracted about 10,000 of these blocks of verbatim memorized training data.

This particular vulnerability is unique as it successfully attacks an aligned model. Aligned models have extensive guardrails and have been trained with specific goals to eliminate undesirable outcomes.

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Ubisoft demoed AI NPC tech at GDC 2024

Ubisoft demoed AI NPC tech at GDC 2024

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Ubisoft showcased their prototype NPC tech called NEO at GDC 2024. Ubisoft’s Paris R&D studio presented the NEO tech at GDC 2024. It uses Nvidia’s Audio2Face application and Inworld’s Large Language Model (LLM) to create the character animations and interactive dialog in realtime. Simply talk to the bot (yes, it uses voice recognition) and the character responds with AI generated responses, movement, and voice.

AIandGames went and played with the technology. I was pretty impressed. The NPC gave surprisingly good responses to some strange dialog and stayed on track despite attempts to trip it up and get it off topic. It performed on par with the same kind of NPC AI shown at CES 2024 by nVidia and Replica Studios’ NPC tech.

On a side note, in listening to the interaction with the rebel NPC, it’s pretty clear that this kind of dialog technology could fool the average person on a text-based social media platform. If someone trained up a bot in the same way, thousands of them could be unleashed on social media apps to gently persuade all the way up to influence, bully, and spread lies to influence public opinion and elections.

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OpenAI music video

OpenAI music video

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OpenAI’s first Sora AI generated music video called ‘Worldweight’ was supposed to capture the images a musician visualized in their mind while composing the piece. It’s not particular good, more of a pretentious art student’s fever dream.

Previous attempts were better. This video from 2022 used Dall-E to create a video for the song Canvas by Resonate:

But Sora is capable of more. Indie artist Washed Out used Sora to create an interesting video called “The Hardest Part” that tried to explore the idea of an infinite zoom that would have been too ambitious. I think it came out pretty good:

Or maybe you’d like to try out some of the other top AI music video generators yourself (Neural Frames and Kaiber)?

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Destructive protests are still a regular thing in Portland in 2024

Destructive protests are still a regular thing in Portland in 2024

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Despite the claims to the contrary, protests, violence, and protest damage is still very much alive in Portland in 2024. Protesters showed up at a local AI meetup in August I attended. In all cases, people trying to get around/past roadblocks are threatened with violence and physical assault.

In January 1/2 – protesters blocked roadways to the Portland Airport causing people to miss flights.

In February and March, protesters blocked the I-405 Fremont bridge and numerous other interstates and major city bridges. Protesters threatened violence to other drivers if they tried to drive around them.

In May, Protesters did almost $1 million in damages to local Portland State Library after a week of protester occupation and mass destruction. It resulted in a mob that attacked police when they cleared the building and arrested protesters still in the building. Many of whom were not Oregon residents.

Far from indicating a reduction in protest violence, city buildings in 2024 are now installing new steel shutters on government buildings.

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Getting paid as a freelancing creative

Getting paid as a freelancing creative

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Mike Monteiro at CreativeMornings/San Francisco, March 2011 gives you some fundamental business knowledge that creatives need to know before doing work with clients. It’s a little dated, but still true. GDC also had a few good talks on this as well:

Make a contract before anything starts or walk away.

See other talks at https://creativemornings.com/talks

The point of life

The point of life

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Life is a timed test to achieve our salvation.

Have I invested my talents and gifts selflessly for the good of others or are my talents primarily for my own purposes? When I reach the end will I only be able to say “Thank you for the life you gave me, I buried my life in career, money, popularity, having a perfect family, or chasing earthly pleasures – so all I have is to offer the one life you gave me back?” (Matthew 25:14–30)