I’ve been collecting these stories too. It’s long but I really like this video from Aaron Blaise where he enthusiastically walks through the process of a purported “AI video” determining it’s really just rotoscoping with fancy filters
I brought this up to a booster on Twitter about a year ago, and he came back with 'oh, and automating the time-consuming effort of tracing and rotoscoping is worth nothing?' Which...wasn't software already good enough to do that 20 years ago?
Exactly. This isn’t too far from Snapchat tech. I guess I get wary about this because too many people are applying the “AI” label liberally and saying that decades old tech is actually the next billion dollar industry. At this point I feel the need to urge caution
All the tech companies that advertise with the publication where I work are calling everything they can "AI" now. Any automation of any process, any machine learning, any data analytics, any cybersecurity — it's all "AI" now.
Basic stuff that’s been in Photoshop for decades is now hyped up as “AI.” It’s basically become “It has code! The code does stuff! It must be… AI MAGIC!!1”
If marketing can slap a shiny “AI” label on anything for any reason or no reason, they will.
I think partly this is due to “algorithm” becoming a toxic and heavily-regulated term. By contrast governments the world over are letting the tech goons write their own AI regulations.
Okay but here me out -- what if the rotoscoping software... Was crap? Like it was constantly glitching and changing? Not in an intentional, artistic "Scanner Darkly" way but in a "the longer you look at it the worse it looks and we wish it didn't do that but 🤷♂️" way? What then?
I appreciate that he looks at it as an exciting new tool. It certainly isn’t “enter prompt and output movie.” The Corridor crew had to do primary photography for the whole short, including lighting and costumes. Then they had to create backgrounds and props, and manually composite the whole thing.
Yeah, Blaise has been around for a while and has seen a few new technologies come and go.
To paraphrase Will Terry: no artist is going to lose their job to a new tool. They’ll lose their job to someone who knows how to use that tool and markets their expertise.
I have a coworker who experimented with something similar—training an LLM on our icon library and seeing if it could generate new icons (spoiler: not yet!)
Of course, the immediate problem I see for that is that using only your own artwork doesn’t give a large enough database to generate new objects in your style. But maybe it’s enough to show it how to do flatting or shading?
I’d never heard of the “Dudesy” podcast until this Carlin AI but was immediately suspicious that Will Sasso somehow had access to an AI that companies like Microsoft are currently spending billions of dollars developing.
this has happened a little bit with cruise and (very much so) with those sidewalk robots but I would bet good money that a scandal around how much of the time waymo's cars are actually running autonomously will hit within the next couple years
Pretty sure Theranos (Elizabeth Holmes's fraudulent venture) did some conventional testing on blood samples and passed off the results as from their whiz-bang tech.
Same. The biggest problem with the writing was that it sounded just like someone took his old routines and swapped out older terms for newer ones.. turns out that was way closer to what actually happened than I thought.
So true, at the beginning of the video I capped you can see all the workers with their safety vests directing the pedestrians to and from their cars...
Collapse of white patriarchy. It’s one sucker after another. It’s like the rich bros are begging to be conned by entitled lazy bros who know how to keep a grin smeared across their maw and lie while stroking rich bro… ego. Things amped this much aren’t often the bleeding edge. It’s sales, not tech.
A few years ago I remember reading a blistering take on AI and the author suggested replacing “AI” with a person’s name, like “George.” Because it is a curtain with a guy behind it almost every time.
Here's an oldie but goodie. The mechanical "digesting duck" that supposedly turned food into poop. Of course, the poop turned out to be stored in a different compartment.
Also bad reporting: the video itself stated pretty clearly that he'd written it as a form of homage, and had used "AI" to make it sound like Carlin... still in bad taste, but a different story.
Both Diamond Age and Otherland had, as major plotvpoints, the idea humans would seamlessly take over for AI when it encountered situations beyond its limits.
Were I the CEO of a big tech-adjacent company, I'd be proudly advertising the shit out of not using AI. I've even got a million-dollar tagline thought up. CEOs, hit me up!
I remember a few "staff-less" Amazon Go stores in San Francisco about 5 years ago that were supposedly powered by AI to determine if you grabbed an item off the shelf and left with it, I always assumed they were actually powered by people watching cameras.
i made several thousand dollars transcribing audio on there many years ago when i didn't have a job, and i suspect that all of my labor doing that was just training data for voice assistants
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New hotness: tech guys inventing the mechanical Turk
https://bsky.app/profile/4thwallguide.bsky.social/post/3kjvbaqciys2g
It's always been Albert
If marketing can slap a shiny “AI” label on anything for any reason or no reason, they will.
To paraphrase Will Terry: no artist is going to lose their job to a new tool. They’ll lose their job to someone who knows how to use that tool and markets their expertise.
The threat of AI from managers (who will use it to generate shitty content) is going to take out more jobs than AI will.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk
And "professionals" on YouTube who swear on the blood of their dead ancestors, it can't possibly be CGI.
Baffles me every time.
Ty
https://futurism.com/the-byte/deepfake-cheerleader-video-nonsense
is hecking easy dogg
i'm a helper
Beautiful!
Of deviousness but …. 😀
(Turk as a Machine as a Service)
Dear god, what is anything anymore?