The 144th Block: All hands on deck for AI chatbot
And why AI hands are still so weird
This week…
To the displeasure of their respective users, Netflix cracks down on password sharing, and Twitter removes free API access; but ChatGPT reigns supreme. I spent much of the week listening to Arundhati Roy’s speeches on YouTube.
Here’s a selection of top stories on my radar, a few personal recommendations, and the chart of the week.
Back at Google again, Sergey Brin just filed his first code request in years
Richard Nieva and Alex Konrad for Forbes:
As the battle in artificial intelligence technology heats up between Silicon Valley companies, Google cofounder Sergey Brin is getting hands-on again with software code, after years of day-to-day absence.
On Jan. 24, Brin appeared to file his first request in years for access to code, according to screenshots viewed by Forbes. Two sources said the request was related to LaMDA, Google’s natural language chatbot—a project initially announced in 2021, but which has recently garnered increased attention as Google tries to fend off rival OpenAI, which released the popular ChatGPT bot in November.
Brin filed a “CL,” short for “changelist,” to gain access to the data that trains LaMDA, one person who saw the request said. It was a two line change to a configuration file to add his username to the code, that person said. Several dozen engineers gave the request LGTM approval, short for “looks good to me.” Some of the approvals came from workers outside of that team, seemingly just eager to be able to say they gave code review approval to the company cofounder, that person added.
Something to fret about.
ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base
Krystal Hu for Reuters:
ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.
The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.
In comparison, TikTok took nine months, while Instagram took two and a half years to reach the same milestone.
Why are AI-generated hands so messed up
Pranav Dixit for Buzzfeed:
It’s a question that many people have asked.
To find out, I emailed Midjourney; Stability AI, which makes Stable Diffusion; and OpenAI, which created DALL-E 2. Only Stability AI responded to my questions.
“It’s generally understood that within AI datasets, human images display hands less visibly than they do faces,” a Stability AI spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “Hands also tend to be much smaller in the source images, as they are relatively rarely visible in large form.”
To understand more, I got in touch with Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an artist and an associate professor of AI and the arts at the University of Florida, who has been analyzing the aesthetics of AI art on her blog. “I am obsessed with this question!” Winger-Bearskin exclaimed on our video call.
Generative artificial intelligence that’s trained on billions of images scraped from the internet, Winger-Bearskin explained, does not really understand what a “hand” is, at least not in the way it connects anatomically to a human body.
“It’s just looking at how hands are represented” in the images that it has been trained on, she said. “Hands, in images, are quite nuanced,” she adds. “They’re usually holding on to something. Or sometimes, they’re holding on to another person.”
Keep your hands to yourself.
What I read, listen, and watch…
I’m reading how the details of the situation shape whether a sexual assault occurs by Betsy Levy Paluck and Ana Gantman for Psych.
I’m listening to CBC’s Front Burner on why Ozempic, a Type 2 diabetes prescription, is going viral as a weight loss drug.
I’m watching Arundhati Roy’s speech, ‘Come September,’ from more than two decades ago (still largely relevant).
Reviews, opinion pieces, and other stray links:
Harvard misinformation expert Joan Donovan forced to leave by Kennedy School dean, sources say by Miles J Herszenhorn for The Harvard Crimson.
Overstory Media’s bold experiment in local journalism hits the rocks by Zak Vescere for The Tyee.
Sludge content is consuming TikTok by Jackson Weaver for CBC.
Meet the man who got Kadabra banned from Pokémon for 20 years by John Walker for Kotaku.
Chart of the week
On Statista, Felix Richter uses survey results from Ipsos to show how respondents think AI will change our lives in the next three to five years.
And one more thing
Another one from Arundhati Roy, on non-violence:
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I asked people, including Gandhians, who preach non-violence to people but seldom to the state: Non-violence is a wonderful form of political theatre—very effective when you have an audience. And I’m not against it by any means. But I just wanted to ask you: If you’re a poor, indigenous, tribal person living four-days walk from the main road, the forest is flooded with soldiers who surround your villages, who burn them down, who steal the animals, who rape the women, which kind of non-violence are they supposed to practise? I mean, who is watching them there for them to perform a hunger strike? How can they go on a hunger strike when they’re already starving? How can they boycott goods when they don’t have any goods?
– Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy is so amazing. The west only celebrates her work of fiction and largely ignores her social activism because they just can't stand the truth!!