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I saw it again a few weeks ago Jurassic Park Probably the 10th time since the movie was released 30 years ago. (As an aside, this really applies. 10/10, no notes.)
Early in the plot, as the guests are discussing their impressions of the park, Jeff Goldblum's character (also a 10/10, just perfect) launches into a very prescient speech. Artificial intelligence that can take away all the dinosaur stuff and map it to modern debates.
“John, don't you see that what you're doing here is dangerous? The power of heredity is the most terrifying force this planet has ever seen, but you found your father's gun. Exercise it like a kid…you stand on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as possible, and before you even know what you have, you have it. We patented it, packaged it, stuck it in plastic lunch boxes, and now sell it.”
And then there's the sentence that later inspired a thousand memes. did it If they didn't stop and think, should”
Naturally, the group's skeptics are dismissed as Luddites, and the film continues. (Spoiler alert: The Luddites were right!)
There are many AI skeptics, not necessarily part of the fringe tinfoil hat crowd, who are begging Silicon Valley to take a break before unleashing AI on the world.
But technology companies, faced with the most powerful computing revolution in a generation, are running around like kids who just found their father's gun.
See here: Apple and Google — who certainly deserve a lot of credit for the innovations they bring to the world — have recently turned their attention to AI-powered features to help sell their latest tablets and smartphones. After all, injecting AI into your company's pitch deck is a surefire way to communicate to shareholders that your company is on the cutting edge, ensuring that your company actually develops proprietary technologies that will matter for years to come. It helps distract from the fact that you don't.
But in marketing these new devices, Apple and Google lost track of their strategy.
This week, Apple's new iPad ad made headlines for all the wrong reasons. The spot depicts a giant industrial hydraulic press slowly crushing a collection of objects representing the human creative experience. A piano, a record player blasting Sonny & Cher's 1972 hit “All I Ever Need Is You,” a can of paint, a book, a Space Invaders arcade console, and a trumpet. The music bounces as the machine switches on and destroys everything. Then, an important fact becomes clear. Apple's new iPad is the thinnest and most powerful yet, all thanks to its latest AI chip.
The outrage spread quickly and furiously online.
“This is the most honest metaphor for what tech companies do to artists, musicians, creators, writers, and filmmakers. They exploit them, take advantage of them, underpay them, and take everything away from them.” , and says it's all their making,'' said filmmaker Asif Kapadia. I wrote it to X.
“If you thought this iPad ad was weird, you should have seen the first shot of it featuring your favorite characters side by side.” made a joke actor and producer Luke Burnett;
Apple issued an unusual apology for the ad on Thursday, telling AdAge: I'm sorry for missing the point in this video. ”
Earlier this week, CEO Tim Cook said Apple's “tremendously powerful” M4 chip will power the company's new AI tools. In other words: Check it out, Wall Street! people They don't buy many of our things. Please wait until you add the bot.
Meanwhile, is anyone else being bombarded with Google's Pixel ads that show people enthusiastically using their smartphone's AI photo editing software to trick their online followers?
In these ads, a man who can't dunk a basketball by himself uses a trampoline to reach the rim, then edits the trampoline. An imperfect group selfie captures everyone's best angles, creating a composite image of a moment that never happened. A father playfully throws his child into the air and then edits the image, for reasons we still don't know, to make it appear as if the child has risen several inches higher into the air.
This is Google saying, “See what we can do for you!” Without any remorse for how pointless it is. It's distortion for distortion's sake at best. At worst, it's a distortion to condition the public to be cool with the idea of visual misinformation.
Smartphones and tablets were invented to improve our life experience and make it easier to leave the house and go to the beach or meet up with friends. It's a great camera and computer combination that fits right in your pocket.
In theory, AI could make our phones and tablets even more useful, allowing them to do all the boring tasks we don't want to do, like summarizing all new emails and filtering out junk. Acts as a virtual assistant. In the not-too-distant future, AI advocates say, we'll be able to simply tell Siri or Google, “Order your breakfast at a coffee shop near your office, and I'll pick it up in 10 minutes.” That's what they say. Bots do just that.
But we are not there yet. And so far, consumer applications of AI have been both overwhelming and dystopian.
Distorted images can be harmless social media fodder until they become propaganda spread by malicious parties.
Apple is expected to unveil its own ChatGPT-like tools that could revolutionize internet searches. But generative AI bots are prone to giving wrong answers and experiencing hallucinations, running out of human-generated data for the robot to learn from, and creating its own unique sources like a snake eating its own synthetic text. No one seems to know what happens when we start scraping together synthetic text. tail.
Jeff Goldblums of the AI debate (which includes industry pioneers) isn't necessarily saying we need to suffocate AI and pretend it never existed. Most of them are friendly neighborhood skeptics who walk around saying, “Hey, should we really do that?”
Obviously, we weren't invited to Apple or Google's marketing conferences.
