Tag Archives: AI

AI video

If you’ve seen my blog on social media or on my website (as opposed to in your mailbox), you’ve seen images I created in Dall•E 2. Like these, along with my requests that created them:

“A man walking in a forest path and hugging a tree in a pastel drawing”

“A Picasso drawing of a young man walking in a forest surrounded by clocks”

“A small man on a giant piece of paper trying to write with an oversized pen that is bigger than the person”

“A person standing at the intersection of a path that leads to a choice of a dark, loomy forest or a bright open field in a van Gogh style”

“A transparent head with a tree, an ocean wave, cogs, math symbols, a protractor, and science lab equipment inside the brain. ”

“A hand squeezing the film coming out of a reel of film with a movie projector in the background in a vector style”

“A vapourware drawing of a kid running with a kite in his hand. ”

“Headphones in the ear of a dark haired man, in a Kandinsky style ”

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I write a description and it gives me 4 options to choose from. I don’t always get exactly what I had in mind, but if it’s too far off from my expectation then I just refine my wording and try again.

Well now Meta AI has come up with Make-A-Video, which creates video clips from descriptions. The examples on the website download onto my phone as images rather than video clips, so you’ll need to visit there to see them.

This is exciting stuff in the field of video creation and soon it will also become so good that you won’t be able to distinguish it from a real video. The creativity that’s possible is exciting. I think this is just the tip of the iceberg and soon we’ll see all kinds of fascinating uses for this tool.

Artificial Intelligence is just getting better and better and in the field of creative arts this is going to really change the landscape of what is possible.

(Also, I recognize that there are some scary deep fake implications, but for now I’m just excited to see what people do creatively with this tool.)

Be careful what you ask for

Turns out that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not always very intelligent.

See: The danger of AI is weirder than you think | Janelle Shane

I’m reminded of the saying,

“Be careful what you ask for because you just might get it.”

Parents know about this: Ask a kid to clean their room and you get a disaster in the closet where everything gets shoved in, dirty laundry mixed with clean, etc.

Teachers know this:

If we are not providing the correct parameters to AI machines, the solutions these machines come up with will not necessarily meet the outcomes we intended.

While this can be humorous, it can also have serious consequences, like the examples shared in the Janelle Shane video above. We are still a long way from AI being truly intelligent. While computers are beating humans in strategy games, and although when AI gets as smart as us, computers will be instantly smarter, we are still tackling the really hard problem of putting the right information into more intelligent machines. The rules of a game are easier to define than the rules to hiring good people or interpreting unusual circumstances that a self-driving car will come across.

The challenge is that we don’t know our hidden biases, and our human biases that we are missing when we ask an AI to observe and learn. For instance, a dog, a cat, and a human all see a plate of food falling:

The dog sees access to delicious food.

The cat sees it fall and the crash of the plate sends it fearfully running away.

The human sees a waste of food and is angry for carelessly dropping it.

What would an AI see, especially if it hadn’t seen a plate accidentally drop before? How relevant is the plate? The food? The noise? The cutlery? The mess?

Is the food still edible? What is to be done with the broken plate? Can the cutlery be reused? How do you clean the mess left behind?

What we ask AI to do will become more and more complex, and our perspective of what we want and ask AI to do has inherent biases, based on how we view the world. What we ask for and what we actually want will be inherently different and that is something AI will take some time yet to figure out.