Tag: Petite Singularity

Hume & Suno Are 2 New Cool AI Apps

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I had a telling discussion with some people on Threads about AI recently. I was making the case that Hollywood could be disrupted by AI by the end of the decade and people came out of the woodwork to poo-poo this idea. They told me that, lulz, that will NEVER happen.

Sigh.

I think it’s pretty clear that anyone who doesn’t think that AI is a serious threat to human Hollywood is full of shit. It definitely seems to me that soon enough sheer greed, if nothing else, could cause Hollywood executives to use some later version of Sora to flood the market with AI generated movies.

The upside of this will be live entertainment will probably become significantly more popular. So, it’s possible that instead of going to Hollywood, future would-be starlets will go to Broadway to find fame and fortune.

But there are two new AI apps that I’ve discovered recently that I’ve found to be really intriguing, if nothing else. One is Sono, which allows you to do text-to-song. So, you give the app a prompt and it spits out a complete two minute song. It’s pretty interesting.

I find it really interesting as someone who has wasted a lot of time in the past writing song lyrics without knowing anything about music. I think it would be a bit more useful if I could give the AI song lyrics and then it put a voice and music to those lyrics. But that’s a bit niche.

The other new AI I really like is Hume AI, which is like ChatGPT, but voice activated. As someone who likes to talk and has no one to talk to, I could see this service becoming very, very addictive. Talking to your AI takes a bit of getting used to because the synch up is not exact.

I think what will happen is the other major AI players will co-opt this feature, making Hume moot. But, for the time being, it’s fun.

‘X10 Writer’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I am using AI to help me rework scenes as I go through the methodical process of touching up the alpha release of the third draft in the transition to it becoming I can hand to someone in person.

I have to admit that I’m getting mixed results in doing this. And there are some scenes in the novel where I just can’t use AI at all because it balks and having to deal with spicy shit. I can only get so angry about this, of course, it kind keeps me honest in the scene that I still have to do all the hard work on some scenes without the an of an AI manuscript consultant.

But I do hope to zoom through things at a pretty nice clip. I am still on course to wrapping up A Version of this novel by April 19th. Then the next hard deadline is, of course, July 22.

So, we’ll see. I hope to be really judicious about what scenes I feel like I absolutely HAVE to re-write rather than just edit. Once I reach the second half of the novel, though, I fear I will be slowed down a great deal because of how many placeholder scenes I have there.

What Am I Going To Do About Getting An Editor For My Manuscript?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems as though the thing that may slow me down some going forward is simply not having the funds to get someone to edit my manuscript. I live in poverty, so it’s going to take me a while to save up the funds to get someone to edit the manuscript.

My heroine has a sleeve tattoo much like this one that Megan Fox now sports.

As such, I think I may need to readjust my timetable some. I’ll have a fished third draft done before July 22, I think, but because of the money situation, it could be early next year before I can begin to query.

Now, obviously, I could just query without the middle step of getting an editor. And I may do that, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m torn. On one hand, I want to present the absolute best manuscript I can when I begin to query. But at the same time, lulz, I’d like to begin to query before I drop dead.

And there is the issue of the Petite Singularity and The Fourth Turning to worry about. It could be I’ll be too busy trying to flee an imploding United States in early 2025 as the the disembodied mind of Trump uses a robot army to take over.

Or something. I’m worried about something like that happening.

And, yet, the argument could be made that the longer I have to wait to query because of the editor situation, the more I can have ANOTHER novel in the series finished and ready to sell. And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of the scifi novel I have rolling around in my mind.

Zoom!

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Barring something I can’t predict — which could very well happen — I am well on track to zooming through the second half of the alpha release of my first novel. Once I finish that, then I will pause for a bit to reflect on how I can take the beta release of the third draft to the next level.

I’m kind of a kook. (That’s me ~2007 in the background.)

I need to focus on consistency, canon and character. I finally — finally — understand what this novel is about and what motivates my heroine and as such I feel pretty confident I can cruise through the remainder of the alpha release. The beta release, however, may take me a while because that will be the release that I either hand over to and editor (somehow) or I begin to query with.

This beta release of the third draft of the novel Is It, one way or another. I will have Finished A Novel and the the post-production / editing / querying process will begin.

Now, obviously, there are all kinds of fucked up things that might happen. The Petite Singularity could happen and everyone will have a Mind In A Box that they can tell to write them a personalized novel in seconds. Or The Fourth Turning could happen and the US will descend into chaos or autocracy.

I hope to write a heroine as intriguing as Lisbeth Salander.

But fuck it, I’m really pleased with this novel. I’m really pleased with what I’ve come up with and the novel is VERY MUCH a reflection of my personality to the point that if you finish reading it, you’re going to maybe know a little bit more about me than you might think.

Anyway.

All of this is happening in the context of me potentially finishing ANOTHER NOVEL in the same series at some point this year. And, really, in a sense, the only thing that would slow me down on that front is my own arbitrary perfectionism and having to accommodate all the changes to the story that I made when I finished the first novel.

Corrie Yee has the phenotype of the heroine of my first novel.

I’m feeling pretty excited. It will be interesting how long it takes for me to find an agent. I’m going to give myself about five years before I say, “Well, I guess this novel isn’t it.” And I hope to keep writing while I query this particular novel so I might have a more marketable scifi novel I can pitch if things don’t work out with this particular mystery-thriller homage to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Series.

Only time will tell, I suppose.

Burn Hollywood Burn — Hollywood May Be About To Be Severely Disrupted By Sora

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems as though the Petite Singularity is careening towards a reality just about when I predicted — at some point in late 2024, early 2025, just as political Fourth Turning is also taking place.

So, it’s possible, we’ll have something akin to a Perfect Storm of disruption in which we kind of lurch forward with a Vibe Shift where we come out the other side in a totally new political and technological era.

Or not, who knows.

But it does seem as though after about 20 years of being in one era — the post 911 era — that we’re about to enter a new, unknown era. It could be that a lot sooner than any of us could have possibly predicted, the movie Her will just be our reality.

We will have AGI and instead of there being *any* humans involved in the production of *any* entertainment, it will all just be AI generated. As an aspiring novelist on the cusp of wrapping up my first novel in a few months….I don’t quite know what to make of that.

AGI In Fiction: Apple Knowledge Navigator & ‘Sam’ in The Movie ‘Her’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Here is what Claude 3 told me when I asked it to contrast and compare the 1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator with Sam in the movie “Her.”

The Apple Knowledge Navigator was a concept video created by Apple in 1987 to envision a future intelligent personal assistant. In the video, the Knowledge Navigator was depicted as an anthropomorphized digital assistant with a vaguely human-like face that could understand natural language, answer questions, retrieve information, and assist with tasks like scheduling and writing.

Sam, from the 2013 film Her, was an advanced artificial intelligence operating system that developed self-awareness and the ability to form relationships with humans. Sam was disembodied, communicating through an conversational interface, but had highly sophisticated natural language abilities that allowed for deep, emotional exchanges. Sam could learn and grow, expressing creativity through writing and even composing music.

Some key similarities were their conversational abilities powered by natural language processing and their roles as knowledgeable assistants. However, Sam demonstrated more advanced AI capabilities like self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and generative creativity that went well beyond the Knowledge Navigator’s envisioned role of retrieving information and performing simple tasks based on commands.

While the Knowledge Navigator represented an early vision of an AI assistant, Sam embodied speculative ideas about the future development of a superintelligent AI that could be conscious, emotionally connected to humans, and generative in nature – exceeding the boundaries of a helpful but fundamentally limited digital assistant.

The issue for me is I think we’re way, way underestimating the coming disruption of the global economy because of LLMs and whatever comes next. Every day, it seems, I see evidence that we’re just one severe recession away from the entire knowledge economy being dramatically disrupted by AI technology.

And it’s only going to get worse once we reach AGI.

Sometimes, I Wonder About A.I. People

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I don’t think it makes me an AI “doomer” to simply suggest there be SOME sort of guardrails built in to AI, especially given the very real possibility that AI could consume, well, everything.

Just like nuclear power can both power a city and blow it up, so, too, can AI power take humanity to a new level of peace and prosperity…and make reality a living hell.

Of course, some of all this desire to have “unbiased” and “unaligned” AI comes from people who are either oblivious to the consequences of that desire or people who want to blow up the world. The whole thing is fucked up.

If AI is going to be as important as I believe it will be, then, yeah, we need some controls to make sure it doesn’t let people easily figure out how to hurt a lot of people. But, alas, Something Bad is going to happen — really bad — before we have the political will to do anything about “aligning” or “unaligning” AI.

I do think that the AI / robotics revolution has only just begun. We’re not even at the end of the beginning yet. It could very well be that we reach a Petite Singularity between now and early 2025 — so we could face The Fourth Turning politically and the Petite Singularity on the technological front.

AGI: ‘Learn To Code’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems to me the crux of the “AGI” debate is reasoning. To truly have a “mind in a box” you need for the “mind” in question to have human-level reasoning. So it not only can do some advanced thinking that a human might be able to, but it has the *reasoning* ability to know, hey, maybe not turn all the matter in the universe into paperclips.

Now, I will admit that I’ve been using Claude 3 and it’s been at times…spooky. It definitely SEEMS to have some sort of basic reasoning abilities. But I dunno. It could be that I’m reading into things something that is not there.

But I do wonder what happens when we get close enough to AGI that most code is written by…AGI. All those fucking smug tech bros who tell people me to “learn to code” are going to have to learn…how to write.

It will definitely be interesting to see what is going to happen with Universal Basic Income. If we reach AGI, or something close to it, and the entire profession of “coding” is wiped out, then, oh boy. You could see a bunch of well educated tech bros join the ranks of MAGA and then we have a fucking anti-tech fascist movement on our hands.

But it will be, in general, interesting to see how things work out.

Mulling The Nick Denton App Mentioned in Ben Smith’s ‘Traffic’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, Nick Denton is tinkering with some sort of social media platform that would incorporate private text chains, according to Ben Smith’s book “Traffic.” I find myself thinking about how you would pull such a thing off. I think it boils down to privacy settings.

What you do is, you set the default of the network to private and only if everyone on the private text chain agrees, do you change the setting of whatever content you want to share to the broader service. Otherwise, the interface would be like a fusion of a texting app and Twitter.

I think that would be a pretty cool app.

Too bad all the money of VCs is going to AI. Oh well. What could have been.

A Mistral AI Recruiter Searched For Me On LinkedIn

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m an absolute nobody at the moment. I have a lot of “high hopes” as the song goes, but, in general, lulz, I could walk off the face of the earth today and it would take a few weeks for anyone to notice or care.

With that in mind, any time even the smallest thing out of the ordinary happens, it fills me with some meaning to my life. So, when I saw that a recruiter Mistral AI searched for me recently on LinkedIn that made my day!

I can’t program, but I do have the right personality to “Red Team” an AI. I could push an AI to its limits by asking it a lot of very pointed questions. With humans, I can come across as a bit overbearing at times, but that specific annoying quality might be good with training an AI.

Or not.

What do I know.