Artificial intelligence officially gets scary
- Thread starter Leo
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Leo
Well-known member
That radio DJ you hear might already be a robot
OAKLAND/LOS ANGELES, Calif., Dec 2 (Reuters) - Andy Chanley, the afternoon drive host at Southern California's public radio station 88.5 KCSN, has been a radio DJ for over 32 years. And now, thanks to artificial intelligence technology, his voice will live on simultaneously in many places.
"I may be a robot, but I still love to rock," says the robot DJ named ANDY, derived from Artificial Neural Disk-JockeY, in Chanley's voice, during a demonstration for Reuters where the voice was hard to distinguish from a human DJ.
Our phones, speakers and rice cookers have been talking to us for years, but their voices have been robotic. Seattle-based AI startup WellSaid Labs says it has finessed the technology to create over 50 real human voice avatars like ANDY so far, where the producer just needs to type in text to create the narration.
Zack Zalon, CEO of Los Angeles-based AI startup Super Hi-Fi, said ANDY will be integrated into its AI platform that automates music production. So instead of a music playlist, ANDY can DJ the experience, introducing the songs and talking about them.
The next step will be for the AI to automate the text that is created by humans as well. "That's really the triumvirate that we think is going to take this to the next level," Zalon said.
This achievement could raise concerns of deep fakes as AI perfects its mimicking of people in real time.
"On a weekly basis, we have a team of content moderators that will cancel accounts," said Martín Ramírez, head of growth at WellSaid. "If you're creating content that is not in alignment with our values and our ethical claims, goodbye. It is that straightforward for us."
Ramirez said once the voice avatars are created, WellSaid manages the commercial agreements according to the voice owner's requests. WellSaid voice avatars are doing more than DJ work. They are used in corporate training material or even to read audiobooks, said Ramirez.
For Chanley, leaving a voice avatar behind has extra significance, since his recovery from Stage 2 lymphoma, which he discovered he had two years ago, while he was recording his voice.
"It was perhaps the way that my 11- and six-year-old kid, if things didn't turn out the way I wanted, might never forget what I sound like," Chanley said, emotion in his voice. "Elvis Presley fed his family a long time after he was gone. Maybe this is, you know, somehow what might send my kids to college someday."
OAKLAND/LOS ANGELES, Calif., Dec 2 (Reuters) - Andy Chanley, the afternoon drive host at Southern California's public radio station 88.5 KCSN, has been a radio DJ for over 32 years. And now, thanks to artificial intelligence technology, his voice will live on simultaneously in many places.
"I may be a robot, but I still love to rock," says the robot DJ named ANDY, derived from Artificial Neural Disk-JockeY, in Chanley's voice, during a demonstration for Reuters where the voice was hard to distinguish from a human DJ.
Our phones, speakers and rice cookers have been talking to us for years, but their voices have been robotic. Seattle-based AI startup WellSaid Labs says it has finessed the technology to create over 50 real human voice avatars like ANDY so far, where the producer just needs to type in text to create the narration.
Zack Zalon, CEO of Los Angeles-based AI startup Super Hi-Fi, said ANDY will be integrated into its AI platform that automates music production. So instead of a music playlist, ANDY can DJ the experience, introducing the songs and talking about them.
The next step will be for the AI to automate the text that is created by humans as well. "That's really the triumvirate that we think is going to take this to the next level," Zalon said.
This achievement could raise concerns of deep fakes as AI perfects its mimicking of people in real time.
"On a weekly basis, we have a team of content moderators that will cancel accounts," said Martín Ramírez, head of growth at WellSaid. "If you're creating content that is not in alignment with our values and our ethical claims, goodbye. It is that straightforward for us."
Ramirez said once the voice avatars are created, WellSaid manages the commercial agreements according to the voice owner's requests. WellSaid voice avatars are doing more than DJ work. They are used in corporate training material or even to read audiobooks, said Ramirez.
For Chanley, leaving a voice avatar behind has extra significance, since his recovery from Stage 2 lymphoma, which he discovered he had two years ago, while he was recording his voice.
"It was perhaps the way that my 11- and six-year-old kid, if things didn't turn out the way I wanted, might never forget what I sound like," Chanley said, emotion in his voice. "Elvis Presley fed his family a long time after he was gone. Maybe this is, you know, somehow what might send my kids to college someday."
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Fascinating article in the New Yorker about fMRI scans tracing iron atoms involved in neuronal oxygenation, and mapping this activity onto the stimuli being experienced by the patient, like watching a Hitchock movie or hearing a series of words. A means of programmatically mapping out thought space. Not much to do with AI, although of course machine learning was involved in analyzing these vast data sets (square millimeters or "voxels" of brain matter, presumably grey matter but the article didn't specify). Naturally, iARPA was involved:
The work at Princeton was funded by iARPA, an R. & D. organization that’s run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Brandon Minnery, the iARPA project manager for the Knowledge Representation in Neural Systems program at the time, told me that he had some applications in mind. If you knew how knowledge was represented in the brain, you might be able to distinguish between novice and expert intelligence agents. You might learn how to teach languages more effectively by seeing how closely a student’s mental representation of a word matches that of a native speaker. Minnery’s most fanciful idea— “Never an official focus of the program,” he said—was to change how databases are indexed. Instead of labelling items by hand, you could show an item to someone sitting in an fMRI scanner—the person’s brain state could be the label. Later, to query the database, someone else could sit in the scanner and simply think of whatever she wanted. The software could compare the searcher’s brain state with the indexer’s. It would be the ultimate solution to the vocabulary problem.
Jack Gallant, a professor at Berkeley who has used thought decoding to reconstruct video montages from brain scans—as you watch a video in the scanner, the system pulls up frames from similar YouTube clips, based only on your voxel patterns—suggested that one group of people interested in decoding were Silicon Valley investors. “A future technology would be a portable hat—like a thinking hat,” he said. He imagined a company paying people thirty thousand dollars a year to wear the thinking hat, along with video-recording eyeglasses and other sensors, allowing the system to record everything they see, hear, and think, ultimately creating an exhaustive inventory of the mind. Wearing the thinking hat, you could ask your computer a question just by imagining the words. Instantaneous translation might be possible. In theory, a pair of wearers could skip language altogether, conversing directly, mind to mind. Perhaps we could even communicate across species. Among the challenges the designers of such a system would face, of course, is the fact that today’s fMRI machines can weigh more than twenty thousand pounds. There are efforts under way to make powerful miniature imaging devices, using lasers, ultrasound, or even microwaves. “It’s going to require some sort of punctuated-equilibrium technology revolution,” Gallant said. Still, the conceptual foundation, which goes back to the nineteen-fifties, has been laid.
edit: typo fixes in the first sentence, from "experience" to "experienced" and from "word" to "words"
The work at Princeton was funded by iARPA, an R. & D. organization that’s run by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Brandon Minnery, the iARPA project manager for the Knowledge Representation in Neural Systems program at the time, told me that he had some applications in mind. If you knew how knowledge was represented in the brain, you might be able to distinguish between novice and expert intelligence agents. You might learn how to teach languages more effectively by seeing how closely a student’s mental representation of a word matches that of a native speaker. Minnery’s most fanciful idea— “Never an official focus of the program,” he said—was to change how databases are indexed. Instead of labelling items by hand, you could show an item to someone sitting in an fMRI scanner—the person’s brain state could be the label. Later, to query the database, someone else could sit in the scanner and simply think of whatever she wanted. The software could compare the searcher’s brain state with the indexer’s. It would be the ultimate solution to the vocabulary problem.
Jack Gallant, a professor at Berkeley who has used thought decoding to reconstruct video montages from brain scans—as you watch a video in the scanner, the system pulls up frames from similar YouTube clips, based only on your voxel patterns—suggested that one group of people interested in decoding were Silicon Valley investors. “A future technology would be a portable hat—like a thinking hat,” he said. He imagined a company paying people thirty thousand dollars a year to wear the thinking hat, along with video-recording eyeglasses and other sensors, allowing the system to record everything they see, hear, and think, ultimately creating an exhaustive inventory of the mind. Wearing the thinking hat, you could ask your computer a question just by imagining the words. Instantaneous translation might be possible. In theory, a pair of wearers could skip language altogether, conversing directly, mind to mind. Perhaps we could even communicate across species. Among the challenges the designers of such a system would face, of course, is the fact that today’s fMRI machines can weigh more than twenty thousand pounds. There are efforts under way to make powerful miniature imaging devices, using lasers, ultrasound, or even microwaves. “It’s going to require some sort of punctuated-equilibrium technology revolution,” Gallant said. Still, the conceptual foundation, which goes back to the nineteen-fifties, has been laid.
edit: typo fixes in the first sentence, from "experience" to "experienced" and from "word" to "words"
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Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
I think this is most poignantly where I differ from the board. This excites me endlessly, whereas I suspect it may be among the most dreadful possible news some of you could imagine.
We are getting closer and closer to demystifying consciousness. May happen sooner than I thought, as I was unaware of the research covered by this article.
We are getting closer and closer to demystifying consciousness. May happen sooner than I thought, as I was unaware of the research covered by this article.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
thought decoding + machine learning + metaverse + fusion energy = The Matrix
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Of course, The Matrix is a purely dystopian vision, whereas I expect a blend of utopia and dystopia.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
"For years, the hippocampus was known only as the seat of memory; patients who’d had theirs removed lived in a perpetual present."
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
"There was a feedback loop between the study of A.I. and the study of the real human mind, and it was getting faster. Theories about human memory were informing new designs for A.I. systems, and those systems, in turn, were suggesting ideas about what to look for in real human brains."
Leo
Well-known member
but why would anyone want to do this? the mysteries are what keep life interesting, or bearable.
Leo
Well-known member
that's what conspiracy theories are for.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
And I think there will still be plenty of mystery left in the universe, even once consciousness is largely demystified.
But the benefits of this would be manifold, such as the treatment of various neuropsychological conditions, from schizophrenia to common depression. Things like hatred could be better understood, etc.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
That passage mentions how education could be optimized. Not that every student would need constant fMRI scans, but that pedagogical models could be built based on such data.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Enlightenment could be better understood, matters of spirituality, etc.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Once consciousness is largely demystified, to the point where we can scientifically guide our own psychic development, science could then focus more on cosmology, ultra-complex systems modeling, and perhaps various frontiers of societal optimization.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Well really science ought to be based on societal optimization anyway, which isn’t to say that nobody loses track of this. I lose track of it frequently.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
But for those who just can’t see why these scientists are so passionate about this, it’s about systematically understanding how we work, which may sound obvious, but to actually exercise this understanding is sublime.
Clinamenic
Binary & Tweed
Studying/meditating is becoming a profound paradigm of fulfillment for me, and research like this is utterly inspiring.