MyHeritage Deep Nostalgia is a tool that came out about 3 years ago and can add animation to static faces in your photos to bring life to them. People first tried it on historical images:
Then it became a trend on TikTok to upload images of relatives that have long since died. While it’s not perfect, it brought many to tears to see their loved ones again.
Of course, this can be a double-edged sword. This technology can bring the past to life, but it can also be used to create fake videos of living people.
Rainbolt is one of the world’s best players of Geoguessr – a game in which you are given a 360 picture and you get about 20 seconds to guess where in the world it was taken. A team at Stanford took 2 months and built an AI that can guess 92% of countries correctly and a median miss error of only 44km – which is astounding.
Here’s a head-to-head competition between the AI Predicting Image Geolocations (or PIGEON) and a pro geogussr player:
But there’s another side of this kind of technology. NPR did an interview and presented a few personal photos to the algorithm. PIGEON was able to guess the location the photo was taken to a really high degree of accuracy. This means you can find places taken in old family snapshots, but it also means that algorithms like this can reveal everywhere you are, and have been, based on your social media posts.
How it works
The algorithm that PIGEON uses is an interesting combination of AI model techniques. Besides the AI based learning, they use some interesting methods such as ‘geocells’ that uses political/geographic regions to help narrow locations instead of just naïve squares.
Rainbolt even pointed out that PIGEON picked up on camera lens smudges in the sky that were very common in Canadian google image captures:
You can only imagine where things will be in just a few years. Anyone that doesn’t think AI is already changing the world is missing it as it’s happening.
EMO is an audio-driven portrait-to-video generation framework. Input a single reference image and the vocal audio, e.g. talking and singing, and generate vocal avatar videos with expressive facial expressions, various head poses. Generate any duration depending on the length of input video.
You can make still images talk, sing, or cross-actor operations in which still images can deliver the performances of other actors or in different languages.
Rie Kudan has won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, with her most recent book: The Tokyo Tower of Sympathy. The judges praised the book, with one even calling it ‘flawless’.
What came next is unexpected. She revealed that she use AI to write parts of her novel (The Times). She revealed about 5% of the book was verbatim sentences she generated using AI.
This wasn’t the first time AI has won a top prize either. The winner of 2022’s Colorado State Fair’s prize for digital art also turned out to be AI-generated.
Nor is it the first time AI has won a writing prize. Journalism professor Shen Yang at Beijing’s Tsinghua University wanted to write a science fiction novel about the metaverse and humanoid robots. The AI ended up generating his entire book – which then took out a national science fiction award Jiangsu Science Writers Association . Using 66 different prompts, the AI drafted ‘Land of Memories‘ in just 3 hours.
After we went through dozens of prompts, the AI generated all of the content – from the pen name, title and text to accompanying pictures. And it’s not half bad. Here’s an excerpt:
In the metaverse’s edge, lies the ‘Land of Memories’, a forbidden realm where humans are barred. Solid illusions crafted by amnesiac humanoid robots and AI that had lost memories populate its domain. Any intruder, be it human or artificial, will have their memories drained away, forever trapped within its forbidden embrace.
Tetris is a tremendously fun 2D game, but 3D Tetris (Block Out, Virtual Boy 3D Tetris, Tetrix) never caught on. It was a lot more difficult to visualize and play.
But it looks like FedEx is up to the challenge. They are developing a two-armed robot from Dexterity AI called DexR to help pack some of the millions of boxes they get each day into delivery trucks.
I gotta hand it to Nathan Truesdell. He has a whole line of AI based coloring books – that likely took him all of an afternoon to create. It’s highly likely it only took him an hour or two with some prompts to make the line art. He then probably worked with an online physical book publisher – who may even be printing them up on demand for him to avoid handling stock or shipping – and now sits back and watches the money roll in with pretty much zero effort.
He didn’t even bother to fix the 7 fingers and thumb.
Roko’s Basilisk and the Dangers of Super-Intellgent AI
Here’s a fascinating thought experiment. While unlikely in it’s original form, it does lead to some other thought experiments that may well, or already are, be more plausible. The idea of Roko’s Basilisk first appeared on LessWrong:
Roko’s Basilisk posits that an otherwise benevolent AI system that arises in the future might pre-commit itself to punish all those who heard of the AI before it came to existence, but failed to work tirelessly to bring it into existence. The torture itself would occur through the AI’s creation of an infinite number of virtual reality simulations that would eternally trap those within it.
Roko’s Basilisk posits that the AI might pre-dispose itself to this behavior. In essence, just knowing about this theory but not acting on it to help make the AI make you more vulnerable to such a future AI punishing you. Hence the use of the term ‘basilisk’ which is a mythical creature that causes death to those that look into its eyes.
This isn’t entirely new. The 1967 novel “I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream…” has a similar notion of a super AI that tortures humanity as does the 1988 short story “BLIT” that tells the story of a man named Robbo who paints a so-called “basilisk” on a wall as a terrorist act. The basilisk is an image that forces the human mind to think thoughts it is incapable of thinking – and it kills anyone that looks at it.
People are more widely discussing the dangers inherent in AI systems. It is clear that human-controlled bots are being using extensively in information warfare. A tactic that found great success in the widespread US riots of 2020:
The Committee found that Russia’s targeting of the 2016 U.S. presidential election was part of a broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign designed to sow discord in American politics and society.
Now, what if a super-intelligent AI reaches ‘singularity’ – in which is is better than human beings and can perpetuate itself indefinitely?
Some have posited the idea that a sufficiently super-intelligent AI would have unlimited persuasive powers to manipulate any human to do anything it wanted. Either as the most influential rhetorician in history, via psychological manipulation, or using force by simply blackmailing you with everything it knows about you or threatening to kill you/loved one’s by crashing their (or someone else’s) AI controlled car, flight, etc. You not even like you can hide at home – a huge AI controlled gas tanker truck could mysteriously just crash into your home at 80mph, a prescription changed to a lethal dose of something else, etc. It could manipulate any computer system in your life to potentially kill you.
Or, such an entity could quietly be working in the background being nearly invisible and quietly manipulating the world via ever so subtle small nudges of our public opinion (via persuasive or inflammatory social media posts), control of politicians (manipulation or outright blackmail of political leaders), infiltration of government processes and computer controlled election results, changing industrial development or research advancement by hiding/revealing new ideas, and manipulating individual morality (via the tools of social media), computer controlled systems that affect worldwide economics (banks, investments, stock markets) to everyday systems (power, gas, flight schedules, pricing in stores, etc).
It’s not like this is hypothetical. Almost all of the above things have already happened by human agents using these methods. Why couldn’t a super-intelligent AI do it – and do it 1000 times better? Experts from Steven Hawking to Elon Musk have issues dire warnings of this very thing happening – and I for one do not find them implausible at all.
People are starting to experiment with the latest VR headsets – especially the Meta Quest 3 and Quest Pro. One of the big questions is, can I finally get rid of my desktop environment and work purely with VR headset?
It turns out, most of the reviewers believe the time is almost here and believe it is possible.
Hallden seems to think it is possible, but points out some issues with working in moving environments (like airplanes), connectivity and lag, and the possible advantages of an AR vs VR solution. His take is primarily from a coders point of view.
Alan Truly also believes the time is almost here, but points out app quirks with copy-paste, the browser, content editing, and the extra pound of weight on your head might be too much for a full 8 hour day of work.
At the John Deere booth at this year’s CES in the Las Vegas Convention Center, conventiongoers could do something incredible with an iPhone. They could pushed the PAUSE button on an iPhone and thirteen hundred miles away, in the middle of a field outside of Austin, Texas, a giant, bright green, driverless tractor stopped short. Hit RESUME and the tractor started up again. Put down the iPhone and the tractor resumed tilling the field, all by itself.
The breadth of what you can do with the tractor via the demo app was limited. You could stop and resume the tractor, as well as increasing or decreasing its speed in a straight line and while turning. There are no turning controls. But what this signals is huge.
In the demo, a farmer first geo-fences the field boundaries and then the tractor can determine its own path based on how wide the tiller is. Tillage is the only job the technology is programmed to handle but John Deere hopes to have a complete autonomous production system supporting every step of the farming process by 2030.
The John Deere spokespeople ballparked such a tractor between $600,000 to $700,000, with the autonomous technology implementation adding a further $100,000 on top of that. Older tractors from the 2020 model year and up can also likely be retrofitted with the tech. The update should “take only about a day” according to a 2022 CNET story.
There’s no doubt in my mind this is how the future of farming will look. It’s been coming for a long time; and spending long hours out in the field will almost certainly be a thing of the past very soon.
There are already calls that John Deere and other equipment manufacturers will have fully autonomous fleets that they manage and simply send to your fields on a subscription-like basis.
AI generated audio created using Google DeepMind’s AI Lyria model, or YouTube’s new audio generation features, will be watermarked with SynthID to let people identify it was AI-generated. Google says the watermark shouldn’t be detectable by the human ear and it should still be detectable even if an audio track is compressed, sped up or down, or has extra noise added.
SynthID also works on images and is supposed to be detectable even after modifications like adding filters, changing colors, and saving with various lossy compression schemes like JPEGs.
