#NEW AI’s

[destiel-news-network]

(Source)

[mysharona1987]

Gee, if only Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg had made a blockbuster movie about how this was a bad idea.

[8pxl]

PSA: Tumblr/Wordpress is preparing to start selling our user data to Midjourney and OpenAI.

you have to MANUALLY opt out of it as well.

to opt out on desktop, click your blog ➡️ blog settings ➡️ scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle.

to opt out on mobile, click your blog ➡️ scroll then click visibility ➡️ toggle opt out option.

if you’ve already opted out of showing up in google searches, it’s preselected for you. if you don’t have the option available, update your app or close your browser/refresh a few times. important to note you also have to opt out for each blog you own separately, so if you’d like to prevent AI scraping your blog i’d really recommend taking the time to opt out. (source)

[troythecatfish]

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[yusuke-of-valla]

WE LIVE IN A HELL WORLD

Snippets from the article by Karissa Bell:

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing thousands of performers, has struck a deal with an AI voice acting platform aimed at making it easier for actors to license their voice for use in video games. ...

the agreements cover the creation of so-called “digital voice replicas” and how they can be used by game studios and other companies. The deal has provisions for minimum rates, safe storage and transparency requirements, as well as “limitations on the amount of time that a performance replica can be employed without further payment and consent.”

Notably, the agreement does not cover whether actors’ replicas can be used to train large language models (LLMs), though Replica Studios CEO Shreyas Nivas said the company was interested in pursuing such an arrangement. “We have been talking to so many of the large AAA studios about this use case,” Nivas said. He added that LLMs are “out-of-scope of this agreement” but “they will hopefully [be] things that we will continue to work on and partner on.”

...Even so, some well-known voice actors were immediately skeptical of the news, as the BBC reports. In a press release, SAG-AFTRA said the agreement had been approved by "affected members of the union’s voiceover performer community." But on X, voice actors said they had not been given advance notice. "How has this agreement passed without notice or vote," wrote Veronica Taylor, who voiced Ash in Pokémon. "Encouraging/allowing AI replacement is a slippery slope downward." Roger Clark, who voiced Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2, also suggested he was not notified about the deal. "If I can pay for permission to have an AI rendering of an ‘A-list’ voice actor’s performance for a fraction of their rate I have next to no incentive to employ 90% of the lesser known ‘working’ actors that make up the majority of the industry," Clark wrote.

SAG-AFTRA’s deal with Replica only covers a sliver of the game industry. Separately, the union is also negotiating with several of the major game studios after authorizing a strike last fall. “I certainly hope that the video game companies will take this as an inspiration to help us move forward in that negotiation,” Crabtree said.

And here are some various reactions I've found about things people in/adjacent to this can do

And in OTHER AI games news, Valve is updating it's TOS to allow AI generated content on steam so long as devs promise they have the rights to use it, which you can read more about on Aftermath in this article by Luke Plunkett

[catchymemes]

[sentientfloatingeyeball]

Possibly the greatest NPR exchange ever recorded

[gingerswagfreckles]

After 146 days, the Writer's Strike has ended with a resounding success. Throughout constant attempts by the studios to threaten, gaslight, and otherwise divide the WGA, union members stood strong and kept fast in their demands. The result is a historic win guaranteeing not only pay increases and residual guarantees, but some of the first serious restrictions on the use of AI in a major industry.

This win is going to have a ripple effect not only throughout Hollywood but in all industries threatened by AI and wage reduction. Studio executives tried to insist that job replacement through AI is inevitable and wage increases for staff members is not financially viable. By refusing to give in for almost five long months, the writer's showed all of the US and frankly the world that that isn't true.

Organizing works. Unions work. Collective bargaining how we bring about a better future for ourselves and the next generation, and the WGA proved that today. Congratulations, Writer's Guild of America. #WGAstrong!!!

[lizardsfromspace]

Love that we've reached the stage where people will find out a work isn't AI and then go "well why does it look like AI? Why does it seem so AI-like?" Why do actual creative works look like the engine that is entirely powered by copying actual creative works? The world may never know

[sayruq]

A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [1] as a suspected militant [2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it? Lavender is Israel's system of "pre-crime" [3] - they use AI to guess who to kill in Gaza, and then bomb them when they're at home, along with their entire family. (Obscenely, they call this program "Where's Daddy"). One input to the AI is whether you're in a WhatsApp group with a suspected member of Hamas. There's a lot wrong with this - I'm in plenty of WhatsApp groups with strangers, neighbours, and in the carnage in Gaza you bet people are making groups to connect. But the part I want to focus on is whether they get this information from Meta. Meta has been promoting WhatsApp as a "private" social network, including "end-to-end" encryption of messages. Providing this data as input for Lavender undermines their claim that WhatsApp is a private messaging app. It is beyond obscene and makes Meta complicit in Israel's killings of "pre-crime" targets and their families, in violation of International Humanitarian Law and Meta's publicly stated commitment to human rights. No social network should be providing this sort of information about its users to countries engaging in "pre-crime".

[mysharona1987]

[mohammedsaqallah]

Hello

My name is Mohammed Saqallah, I am 23 years old. I used to work in a smartphone store in the customer service department 📱.

My brother Mahmoud (20 years old) and I dreamed of establishing a mobile repair shop together 🛠️💡. But the war stole our dreams and destroyed our home over our heads 🏚️💥.

One fateful night during the harsh war 🌌⚠️, our home turned to rubble after being bombed by the Israeli occupation 💣. We miraculously survived 🙏✨ after the civil defense 🚑 managed to rescue us from under the ruins. However, the devastation left behind is beyond description. Now, we are homeless 🏴‍☠️ with no source of income 💼, and the dreams we spent years building have turned into painful memories 💔.

My younger sisters now live in a constant state of fear 😢:

Hala (14 years old): Trembles at the sound of explosions 😨💥.

Lama (15 years old): Has lost the ability to sleep due to nightmares 🌙😔.

Haya (16 years old): Experiences panic attacks whenever she hears gunfire 🔊😣.

Hifa (17 years old): Lives in shock 😞, even though she was always my source of support and encouragement to pursue my dreams ❤️✨.

As for me, I lost my job and my source of income 💔💼. My brother Mahmoud, who dreamed of studying smartphone engineering 📚💡, could not enroll in university as he hoped 🎓. Even my parents 👩‍👦‍👦, who were our pillar of strength 🤲, are now struggling with the psychological and financial toll of this war 🥺💔.

Why Are We Asking for Help? 🤝💭

We are now seeking to leave Gaza in search of safety and a better future 🌍🕊️. The cost of coordination and leaving Gaza is enormous, as we need $5,000 for each family member, which includes me, Mahmoud, my parents, and my four sisters 💸���‍👩‍👧‍👦, totaling $40,000 💵.

Additionally, my brother Mahmoud needs $5,000 for his university education once we leave 📚🎓.

Total Needed: $45,000 💰💵

This amount would be a lifeline for us 🛟:

Safety: To leave Gaza and escape the daily fear that surrounds us 🕊️🌈.

Education: To help Mahmoud achieve his dream of studying smartphone engineering 📱📚✨.

Hope: To give us all a fresh start after losing everything 🌟🏠.

Any donation, no matter how small, will make a huge difference in our lives 🙏💖. You are the hope that can bring us back to life 🌟❤️. Thank you to everyone who extends a helping hand 🤝✨.

https://gofund.me/77caca00

[anarchywoofwoof]

A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week. Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. Police had been called to the Lower Haight residence at about 1 p.m. that day, after receiving a call asking officers to check on his well-being, a police spokesperson said. The medical examiner’s office has not released his cause of death, but police officials this week said there is “currently, no evidence of foul play.” Information he held was expected to play a key part in lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company. Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.

totally normal that a 26-year-old man dies of natural causes alone in his apartment in San Francisco with no witnesses or reason to suspect foul play. completely normal stuff that happens to whistleblowers all the time.

[reasonsforhope]

"A 9th grader from Snellville, Georgia, has won the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, after inventing a handheld device designed to detect pesticide residues on produce.

Sirish Subash set himself apart with his AI-based sensor to win the grand prize of $25,000 cash and the prestigious title of “America’s Top Young Scientist.”

Like most inventors, Sirish was intrigued with curiosity and a simple question. His mother always insisted that he wash the fruit before eating it, and the boy wondered if the preventative action actually did any good.

He learned that 70% of produce items contain pesticide residues that are linked to possible health problems like cancer and Alzheimer’s—and washing only removes part of the contamination.

“If we could detect them, we could avoid consuming them, and reduce the risk of those health issues.”

His device, called PestiSCAND, employs spectrophotometry, which involves measuring the light that is reflected off the surface of fruits and vegetables. In his experiments he tested over 12,000 samples of apples, spinach, strawberries, and tomatoes. Different materials reflect and absorb different wavelengths of light, and PestiSCAND can look for the specific wavelengths related to the pesticide residues.

After scanning the food, PestiSCAND uses an AI machine learning model to analyze the lightwaves to determine the presence of pesticides. With its sensor and processor, the prototype achieved a detection accuracy rate of greater than 85%, meeting the project’s objectives for effectiveness and speed.

Sirish plans to continue working on the prototype with a price-point goal of just $20 per device, and hopes to get it to market by the time he starts college." [Note: That's in 4 years.]

-via Good News Network, October 27, 2024