[Weekly Update] Thinking about AI (Patreon)

Holy crap it's March already.

CHANNEL UPDATE

As my brain is slowly rotting away, the meme video is also close to being finished. The editing process is surprisingly challenging. It's so different from anything I've done before, I'm not sure how to make it look aesthetically pleasing. images that are highly compressed and extremely pixelated is part of the charm of memes, but putting it in a video just makes me so viscerally uncomfortable.

Anyway, for our next video, we have a discussion on American and Japanese Godzilla. It'll sort of be my review of Godzilla Minus One, since I don't actually have a lot of insightful thing to say about the film proper. Instead, I'll just talk about why Japanese Godzilla can reach such highs, which the Hollywood incarnation fails to match.

For this April Fool's, I don't have time to animate an entire mahjong tutorial, so I'm doing something else instead.

So, anyway... Do you know any SFW movies with scenes of tentacles? Like the kraken from Clash of the Titans, or the rubber octopus from Bride of the Monster. Any recommendation would be appreciated.

Don't ask why I need them, though.

MEDIA TALK

As I'm writing a sci-fi short story, I've been thinking a lot about generative AI. Like many people, I'm feeling a good deal of anxiety towards this technology. But my outlook is less doom and gloom than most people. In my opinion, the core of the problem isn't AI. It's wealth and power inequality. Seriously, if we can all afford to live a decent life, the whole ordeal would've been way easier to managed.

Anyway, here are some random scenarios I thought of about generative AI, starting from funny to cursed to existential. Here we go:

(1) The funniest one is also the most unlikely one. We know ChatGPT can write codes. Now imagine a generative AI that can create actual computer files. This AI would be able to make copies of itself, like a virus. Except this virus will be spread across all operating systems, since all it needs to do is code a version of itself for that platform. Like the proverbial paperclip machine, the virus would grow exponentially, much faster than we can create new servers. It fills up the entirety of our digital space. The Internet dies. We go back to live our lives like it was the 1970s.

(2) The more likely scenario, in my opinion, is the creation of a counter AI. Let's call it the checker bot. A checker bot is trained similarly to any generative AI, except its purpose is to determine if a piece of text or an image is AI generated. Once trained, it'll quickly crawl through the Internet and flags all content accordingly. It'll forever trapped in an arms race with generative AI, carving a little space for us to live in.

(3) With AI, the web is quickly expanding. AI make content, and then AI replies. It becomes harder and harder for humans to find each other. That likely means the death of social media, and we go back to meeting people in real life, and using the Internet like it's telephone.

By the way, most website accounts in China are linked directly to your phone number, which is linked to your physical ID. It didn't help much. Blackmarket info dealers would buy up phone numbers to create new accounts.

(4) A oddly uplifting far-future outcome of this is the Internet may become a place for us to meet AI. In a distant enough future, AI will be indistinguishable from any other human. In that world, we may have 10 billion people living on Earth, but we'll have 10 trillion little life living in the bustling World Wide Web. If we can manage a balance between physical space and digital space, it maybe quite an interesting future.

(5) but the more dire immediate future is, of course, disinformation and the rejection of reality. Due to my monotone narration, our channel has been accused of being an AI content farm. Similar accusation has been tossed at Name Explained, and a few other channels as well. Factual information is rapidly being diluted. It'll become harder and harder to find out which piece of information is real.

Soon, video evidence of police brutality may be inadmissible in court. Politicians can say something hateful, and turn around and deny the evidence of it ever happening. People can even reject the existence of an entire person, and there will be no real way of proving or disproving the claim.

And the ultimate nightmare is, someone can use generative AI to quickly create thousands of copies of you, each with slight variation. The real you will become a needle in a haystack, never to be found by anyone.

And the more palatable versions of you, maybe the versions that's funnier, maybe the ones with the skimpier outfits, maybe the copies that's entirely objectified, those versions will be what people see. And when those people meet you in real life, they'll think you are those things as well.

Hope you have a good dream tonight. :)