Tag: Petite Singularity

Burn, Hollywood, Burn: Of AI & The Writers’ Strike

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There is a disturbance in the force. It definitely seems as though we’re about to experience a serious case of future shock over the course of the next few months. The entire knowledge economy could be not just drastically transformed by AI, but face serious contraction as well.

It could be that a lot sooner than you might think, the issue won’t be who gets paid for writing what, but audiences deciding that “artisanal art” has unique value unto itself. So, it’s possible to imagine a future where 99% of all art is AI generated, with the remaining 1% being created by humans who make a lot of money.

All of this might happen in the context of a real resurgence in live performances of all sorts. If I could, say, have an endless supply OK Computer era Radiohead, then seeing them live with new stuff will be something that people will pay an even bigger premium for.

Or, put another way, it could be that the average person won’t even notice that most of the entertainment they consume on a daily basis is AI generated. The entire greater showbiz industry will effectively collapse. It could be, in a sense, an extinction-level event for the entire concept of humans producing recorded entertainment.

It might happen so fast that even if the Hollywood writers’ on strike now are able to get some concessions from producers that it will all be moot. The only people in the future making money will be producers and the actors living passively off their full body scans. Otherwise, lulz.

That’s why I think for the Writers’ Strike to be successful, they need to be very, very aggressive on the AI front. They need to demand strict, clear carveouts for human writers. I would prefer a total prohibition on the use of AI to create a movie, but I think that’s probably pushing it.

As I understand it, the entire movie industry pretty much runs on hookers and blow in the sense that a lot, A LOT, of the industry is pretty much just vibes. And I could see from the producers’ point of view that the use of AI would be part of a broader effort to “modernize” showbiz.

Instead of any connection to the human touch, the vast majority of (bad) movies will be AI generated. Live entertainment will gain in value significantly and the only old-school movies that will exist will be high-end movies with a very specific vision.

But, wait, there’s more!

All of this would be happening just as movies and video games fuse. It could be that what movies exist in the future will be immersive in nature and the audience will collectively “play” the movie as a group in some sort of metaverse hellscape.

The point is — these may be the waning days of the Hollywood industry that has existed for about 100 years. It could be that the very idea of a “passive” human generated movie is going to be seen a very quaint a lot sooner than you might otherwise imagine.

The only thing I can compare this to is what is show in the movie Moneyball. A lot of how movies are actually produced is a magical mystery concoction accumulated over the decades. Or, as one producer once famously put it, “Nobody knows nothing,” when it comes to making movies.

So, it could be that because of the techno-capitalist imperative, soon enough, the back end of Hollywood will be done entirely relative to cold, hard metrics. What’s more, the very idea of “mass media” may not longer exist as everyone gets a different very, very specific and very, very personalized movie or TV show each time they sit down to watch something.

There will be no shared reality anymore. No watercooler movies or TV pop moments to share on social media. Professional (human) writers will turn to the live experience to make a living.

The Great Hollywood Disruption

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

From the buzz I continue to monitor coming out of the tech community, it seems clear that Hollywood may be about to be “Moneyballed” in the sense that a basic human element of the industry — writing — may be turned into a technology issue.

And while I totally support the current Hollywood writers’ strike, if it goes on as long as it probably needs to, the risk that studio executives will simply turn to AI to write very formulaic scripts will increase significantly. Given that at the moment you can’t copyright something done by AI, it’s possible that Hollywood bigwigs will begin to lobby Congress to change that particular situation.

All that has to happen is one AI generated script be produced and it be a success for the whole Hollywood creative ecosystem to be upended. Remember, the vast majority of Hollywood entertainment is formulaic, stale and, well, bad. So the first people to feel the pinch of any AI writing revolution would be hacks who have no talent to begin with.

I still think that once this entire process is complete that live theatre may return to a popularity it’s not seen since…the rise of movies. It could be that when 99% of all recorded entertainment is AI generated that audiences will want to return to the comfort of live entertainment that will have a human touch that our new bot overlords will not be able to provide.

It’s at least a possibility, I suppose.

It just seems to me that Hollywood as we currently know it functions on some very antiquated assumptions. Once LLMs are able to generate content that is just good enough to be watchable, then, that’s it, the revolution will be here and the entire Hollywood economy will be disrupted.

I Don’t Know What ByteDance is Up To With Tik-Tok, But Something Curious Continues To Go On

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, it’s completely bonkers to propose that CCP-avilated ByteDance might be able to read the minds of Americans via Tik-Tok. I get it. I sound like a crazy person. But how do you explain this: my teeth have been sore recently for some reason.

And, lo and behold, today I got pushed a video that had to deal with someone’s teeth hurting.

I’m sure it’s just a coincidence. Given my age, etc, then the algorithm simply is guessing that someone in my demographic might have teeth issues.

Still curious, though.

Could The Hollywood Writers’ Strike Be The Tipping Point That Sparks The AI Generated Writing Revolution?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m all for Hollywood writers getting a better deal from the studios, but to get that is probably going to require some industry-wide pain. The thing I’m worried about is that if the writers’ strike lingers longer than any of us might otherwise expect, there is a possibility that, lulz, AI-generated scripts could fill the gap.

Technology usually advances dramatically in times of crisis, so it’s reasonable to assume that it’s possible that if we find ourselves in month three or four of a strike that the major studios, in desperation, will turn to ChatGPT and other similar LLMs to write scripts.

And, remember, the vast majority of TV and movie scripts…suck. They’re formulaic and horrible and yet because of the economics of the industry they get produced. So, it’s very possible that there will at least be some experimentation in AI generated scripts.

That’s how progress happens in abrupt, unexpected ways, shit like a lingering strike. So, it will be interesting to see how things work out.

I’m of the opinion that given the capitalist imperative that Hollywood as we know it is careening towards an astonishing revolution. It’s just a matter of if it’s within five years or 10 years. The longer the writers’ strike lasts, the more likely that we’ll wake up in late 2024 to most of scripted entertainment being done without the benefit of ANY human writers.

I do think, however, that if such a nightmare happened, that we would see a significant increase in the popularity of live theatre.

AI & Our Coming ‘Mindfulness’ Overlords

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve given it some thought and, really, there is only one thing that humans can do that AI can’t do — use judgement. In fact, given how from a capitalists point of view, it is the very brutal nature of AI and chatbots that make them so attractive so it is inevitable that as the revolution progresses that we’re all going to realize that judgement is valuable.

I could see it happening this way — soon enough, because humans are lazy, we defer 99% of our decisions, economy, culture and politics to AI. But the one thing that we couldn’t defer to an AI would be good judgement. In short, “mindfulness” might suddenly become a very lucrative profession.

I don’t know exactly how this would all play out, but if there comes a point when almost all human activity is done through a blackbox AI, then the time of someone with good judgement to help manage and guide that AI would be very valuable.

Here’s where we come to something really intriguing — is it possible that if we create the “Other” via AI, that some attempt to unite Humanity might arise in an effort to unify our response to AI. At the moment, it’s difficult for the US to do anything about AI because if we do, then some other country, maybe Estonia, will swoop in and do all the kinky AI stuff we blanch at doing and we’ll fall behind.

But if there was some sort of global response to AI, then we would all be on the same page as to who would be the people we used to use AI in a “mindful” manner.

Could Twitter Morph Into A Chatbot Service?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve given it some reflection and it definitely seems as though Space Karen could surprise us all and do something pretty amazing with Twitter. At its heart, Twitter is a text-based system with a prompt. It seems obvious that you could somehow rig up a chatbot natively and organically to the service’s existing UX and do something astonishing.

I’m not smart enough to figure out the specifics just yet — like, how you would make money . But imagine you sit down in front of Twitter 2.0 and instead of turning to Google to answer a question, you ask a Twitter LLM whatever it is you want. Just a back-of-the-envelope imagining of this concept suggests that the possibilities are endless.

If you could make a Twitter LLM compelling enough, people might even be willing to pay for it. Or something. I still am very dubious about the idea that you’ll be able to turn LLMs into subscription services. That seems like a daydream of the elite who don’t want to have to put up with something as pedestrian as ads.

But if you could fuse the existing Twitter userbase with a LLM, it’s a very intriguing idea. For no other reason than Twitter would be adding to its existing service, rather than having to eat its own, like, say Google. All of this is fast moving target, so it could all go a lot of different ways.

Apparently, Space Karen has already incorporated an AI company, so as such there might be some ready synergy between it and Twitter a lot sooner than one might otherwise think.

When It Comes to Fixing The Looming Problems of A.I., Ezra Klein is Full of Shit

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I finished reading Ezra Klein’s great book “Why We’re Polarized” with a lingering sense of being a little bit cheated. He was great at explaining WHY we’re polarized, but when it came to giving a rube like me any sort of solution as to what to do about that polarization there was nothing.

So I find myself listening to him on The New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast and he did it AGAIN. He gave a really cogent description of the problems associated with the rise of AI, but when he was asked how AI companies might make money other than in advertising — he punted. He pivoted to the idea that somehow we should get the government to award huge prizes for technology development.

Does he really think that somehow, magically the government is going to subsidise the AI industry to the point that Federal prizes would be able to supplant the vast sums of money that would come from the path of least resistance that would be advertising?

I hate that. I hate the idea that a smug wealthy podcast liberal Klein can make all this money, get all this status by bitching and moaning about the problems associated with AI…and yet he refuses to come up with any actual solutions. The idea of government “prizes” instead of advertising is complete and total bullshit.

I turn to people like Klein for not just complaints, but solutions. Because I think ultimately Klein’s complaints-with-no-solutions will ultimately lead to the exact thing he doesn’t want to happen: a combination of competition and people using the experiences associated with social media will cause AI to be based on the concepts not of government prizes, but pure capitalism.

If Anyone Can Get People Into AR / VR Headsets, It’s Apple

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing about the tragic early demise of Steve Jobs is we never got a “real” smart TV from Apple and of the people who could convince millions of people to wear VR / AR goggles in public — he was it. So, finally, Apple apparently may be on the cusp of releasing it’s on AR / VR goggles.

All things being equal, Apple should begin to work on transitioning its entire user base to using such goggles instead having an iPhone combined with a laptop / desktop. Everything SHOULD go through the googles to the point that your entire life would revolve around them, especially the AR part of it all.

And, yet.

People still just aren’t prepared to walk around in public wearing AR / VR goggles because they would fear they looked like idiots. But, again, the only company I can imagine that might be able to pull such a feat off is Apple. They have a sense of style that all the other computer companies lack.

What’s even more interesting is we could one day soon see not just AR / VR goggles…but AI powered AR / VR goggles. Now THAT would be pretty cool, I have to say. Convincing millions of people to wear such goggles would be the basis of a few trillion dollar service industry.

AGI & The End Of Everything

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The thing I don’t think we’re thinking enough about is how we’re careening towards a future where there pretty much isn’t anything for humanity to do other than smoke a bowl while playing video games.

Should we get anywhere near to Artificial General Intelligence, there simply may not be any tasks left for humans to do. And given how angry, unhappy and bitter humans become when they don’t have work to distract them, this could make the entire world very, very unstable.

The whole notion of “prompt engineer” is extremely short sighted. It’s the type of job that we think will exist to make ourselves feel better. But if we reach a “Her” like future….why would there be a need for prompt engineers? Your AGI digital assistant would know you so well that it might even be able to preemptly answer your question before you ask it.

So, it seems to me that it’s at least possible that the real danger of AGI isn’t AGI, it’s restless humans. And it could be that any attempt to regulate AGI is moot because if America doesn’t let AGI do this or that thing, some other country will so we’ll feel a competitive demand to not regulate.

It’s very possible that we may see the rise of some sort of Neo-Luddite movement that….grows violent in some way. Implementing a UBI would only go so far. Human nature is such that for every 1 person who writes the Great American Novel with all the time a UBI affords, there will be a 100 Type-A people who will want to burn everything to the ground because they can’t make $1 billion.

Anyway, the point is — we have to take some of the darker possibilities of the AGI revolution more seriously.

Humanity May Shrug Itself Into Servitude To Machine Intelligence

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Humans are, on a macro basis, pretty fucking lazy. So, as such, it’s very possible that there won’t be any sort of “Judgement Day” when it comes to the ultimate take over of humanity by AGI. Rather, it will be a gradual process whereby humans defer to AGI on more and more decisions until we just refuse to make any decisions anymore.

I could see a situation where after a brief power struggle, we hand over all of our critical infrastructure and WMD to AGI and all we do is sit around playing video games and falling in love with our AGI personal assistants. Humans will collectively revert to an infantile state to the point that history just sort of grinds to a halt.

That is kind of dark, yes, but things are happening so fast with LLMs and AI that one begins to realize that Hollywood’s vision for a AGI takeover is far more dramatic than it might actually be. I still am not convinced that, by definition, an AGI would want to destroy humanity when it could just as well just want to manage it.

Why destroy us, when you could be our god?

We just don’t know at the moment. But I do think things are going to get pretty bumpy far sooner than you might think. It’s at least possible that we risk a perfect storm in late 2024, early 2025 of not only the Fourth Turning happening on a political basis, but something akin to a Petite Singularity, too. Throw in a default by the United States this year — as early as July! – and….oh boy.

The rest of this decade could be as eventual as the decades associated with the French Revolution.