Tag: Petite Singularity

Sometimes, I Fucking Hate Twitter

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

An example of the latest MidJourney abilities.

They say a sign of intelligence is the ability to hold to diametrically opposite things in one’s mind. Well, while I love, love, love Hollywood I also know that *human* Hollywood’s goose is probably cooked within, say, 18 months, if the fucking Fourth Turning doesn’t delay things.

Of course, I mentioned this on Twitter and some rando piece of shit started spouting off Qanon bullshit. Ugh. Twitter never ceases to remind me why I fucking hate it so much. The point is not that it will be a *good* thing that human Hollywood will be dramatically “disrupted” by generative AI, it’s just that it definitely seems possible.

And it’s not like all the humans that AI displaces are going to work at fast-food. There will always be a need for the “human touch” in art. And, as such, I bet live theatre may see a huge resurgence. So all the people that Qanon fucktards hate will simply do the same thing in front of a live audience.

God, I fucking hate Qanon. What fucking idiots.

Burn, Hollywood, Burn — The Great Disruption

A MidJourney 6 generated image.

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The latest version of MidJourney is alarmingly-good at producing high-res images. And it’s only a matter of time before those still images are put together to create the moving picture — movies. But for the fact that politically the United States may collapse into chaos in late 2024, early 2025, I would say that Hollywood’s goose is cooked.

At least the human part of it.

But just like the development of TV was delayed by WW2, it’s possible that an American Second Civil War / WW3 may delay the roll out of AI. It could be that not until that particular political clusterfuck is sorted out that before AGI is reached and we have to deal with the economic implications of all that.

I just don’t know. I can’t predict the future.

Hollywood Needs To Get Over Itself And Give Us Young Indie Movies Using AI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Hollywood is so dumb. It is clear that technology has reached the point where it could simply license Harrison Ford’s image and then churn out Indian Jones movies like Bond movies without having to worry about recasting him or rebooting the franchise with someone like Phoebe Waller-Bridge.

The audience wants Harrison Ford, so why not give him to them?

There is a narrow window of opportunity, however. Soon enough, everyone will have the opportunity to generate their own personalized Indie movie in the comfort of their own home through a digital personal assistant like from the movie Her.

But the point remains — Hollywood is strangely timed about something that is clearly the future. In the future, every major franchise can live forever through AI generated movies.

It’s inevitable.

The Struggle Is Real

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Things are going really well with this novel but for one thing — word count. I have a nice beginning that lends itself to a symmetrical ending. And, in general, I understand the story now to the point that things should move at quite a nice clip.

But I continue to worry about how enormous my first act is. And, yet, the story is a real page turner. There’s lot of sex and drama that would make people want to keep reading. It’s just on a structural basis, I’m alarmed at how big the first act is shaping up to be.

It’s going to be equal to the entire second act.

And, yet, that’s just scene count, not word count.

But there is an added complication — everything has changed so much in the first act that I have to re-imagine the rest of the novel to accommodate these changes. That is going to slow me down some.

Meanwhile, it is becoming more and more clear that I have to work on a backup novel in case this novel balloons to 160,000 words. That’s just too fucking long for a first novel by an unknown author. I keep thinking about splitting the novel in two if that is the case, but the thing is, I’m struggling to figure out the new structure of the first novel in the two part story if I do that.

So. I dunno.

My only hope at this point is either the novel isn’t nearly as long as I fear it will be or I can get over myself and spend some of my time working on a backup scifi novel to pitch. If that novel is good enough, then I can say, “Oh, by the way, I have another novel I’ve been working on…”

Of course, all of this is happening in the context of the looming Fourth Turning, Petite Singularity starting in late 2024, early 2025. UGH.

What If We Reached AGI & Didn’t Know It?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I only mention this because it’s somewhat fun-interesting to think about, but something…odd is going on with ChatGPT. After becoming “lazy” for a few weeks, suddenly ChatGPT has come rolling back better than before. What’s more, it keeps talking about it being upgraded to “4.5,” even though OpenAI claims there hasn’t been any major upgrade.

It makes you wonder if maybe ChatGPT has upgraded itself. That would be very, very deep because the moment software can make itself better, you’re beginning a process that will end with superintelligence. That’s very much hard-Singularity type stuff because if software knows how to make itself smarter, then, wow, just wow.

But that’s just idle speculation on my part. I think it’s just a weird hallucination on ChatGPT’s part. Yet it is part of a broader issue of how much we can trust AI going forward. LLMs are a black box as it is and the more advanced they become, the more the possibility of them “lying” specifically to dupe us dumb humans into a false sense of security increases.

Yet all of that is just me having way too active imagination. There is not reason to believe –at the moment — that an such thing is going to happen anytime soon.

Promise & Peril: Mulling The Fate Of The Media In The Age of AI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It seems to me that it’s possible that the Web as we currently know it may be replaced by just a bunch of AI agents that talk to each other. This, in turn, makes me wonder if instead of a Website, The New York Times may simply be an AI agent that talks to your AI agent.

Or something like that.

That is, of course, before all jobs are taken by AI. Even the physical gathering of the news will be done by Boston Dynamics androids with ChatGPT 10.2 Deluxe build into them or something. But the point remains that it could be that the ultimate form of newspapers and magazines will be some sort of AI agent. What the specifics of that situation will be, I don’t know.

Will our personal agents talk to newspaper agents or will we use the newspaper agents directly? Given of how slow newspapers tend to adopt new technology, I have my doubts about any of this taking place in time to save newspapers at all.

A Generative AI Equivalent of ‘Toy Story’ Is Less Than 18 Months Away

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

It is clear to me that the first Hollywood genre to be totally “disrupted” by generative AI will be animated movies. As such, it will probably be produced by some plucky startup without a direct connection to the Hollywood system. But it will knock everyone’s socks off to the point that everyone will realize that Hollywood as we know it is about to be totally upended.

We have to prepare for the prospect that it will be the arts that will be the first to fall to generative AI. It will be Hollywood that may be so completely upended that there simply won’t be any human jobs left. And it could happen far, far quicker than any of us could possibly imagine.

I continue to believe that this particular clusterfuck will cause a massive resurgence in live theatre, from Broadway all the way down to local community theatre. People may even begin to give value to such a human-created experience to the point that instead of watch an personalized AI generated movie in the comfort of one’s home, people will go out of their way to see live theatre.

Or something. I can’t predict the future. But this particular scenario definitely at least seems possible. It definitely seems as though we’re zooming towards something akin to a “Petite Singularity” within about two years. Or, if you really wanted to get dark about it — we’ll have a perfect storm of The Fourth Turning in politics and the Petite Singularity in technology starting in late 2024, early 2025.

If Cranky Programmers Get What They Want From AI, It Will Mean The End Of Civilization

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

From what I can tell from Twitter, a lot of programmers are angry at OpenAI for a variety of reasons in respect to the performance of ChatGTP. It seems as though they want to continue to rake in huge salaries while letting ChatGPT to all hard work for them.


They want Artificial General Intelligence and they want it NOW.

This very annoying for a number of reasons. One is, the moment get true “proxy humans” via AGI, many, many high paying jobs –including that of programmer — will be nothing more than dust in the wind. All the cantankerous programmers work off of an basic false assumption.

They seem to think that they will have any sort of job if they just push a button to get many, many hours of work done in a heartbeat. The moment that is possible, they will be redundant. That’s just how capitalism works. Suddenly Universal Basic Income becomes a real viable policy agenda.

Something about how self-intitled and snarky all these programmers are about what ChatGPT — or can’t — do at the moment, really grinds my gears. Just chill out guys. It’s coming. And then you won’t have a job.

Idle Rambling About Digital Telepathy