I don’t actually know if it’s considered a deepfake when it’s just a voice; but I’ve been using the hell out of Speechify, which basically deepfakes voices and pairs them with a text input.
…so… nursing school, we have an absolute fuck-ton of reading assignments. Staring at a page of text makes my brain melt, but thankfully nowadays everything’s digital, so I can copy entire chapters at a time, and paste them into Speechify. Now suddenly I have Snoop-dogg giving me a lecture on how to manage a patient as they’re coming out of general anesthesia. Gets me through the reading fucking fast, and it retains so, SO much better than just trying to cram a bunch of flavorless text.
Speechify also pays the people who’s voices they’re using rather than taking them from publicly available videos and recordings without permission.
That’s also the business model behind ad localization now, they’ll pay the actor once for appearing on set and then pay them royalties to keep AI editing the commercial to feature different products in different countries.
If they’re up front about it and if the actor agrees to it (as with Speechify), I don’t see a problem with that. SAG should also be involved to try and determine fair compensation.
I think the key here is you’re using it for yourself only.
I think it comes down more to understanding what the tech is potentially good at, and executing it in an ethical way. My personal use is one thing; but Speechify made an entire business out of it, and people aren’t calling for them to be burned to the ground.
As opposed to Google’s take of “OMG AI! RUB IT INTO EVERYONE’S NOSE, THEY’RE GONNA LOVE IT!” and just slapping it onto the internet, and then pretending to be surprised when people ask for a pizza recipe and it tells them to add Elmer’s Glue to it…
Two controlled inputs giving a predictable output; vs just letting it browse 4chan and see what happens. The tech industry definitely seems to lean toward the later, which is fucking tragic, but there are gems scattered throughout the otherwise pure pile of shit that LLMs are at the moment.
In my opinion using someone’s voice without their consent in a public way is unethical, but you doing it in private doesn’t hurt anyone.
Say that again, but think of a a fat old white dude jerking off to what he’s created, and you’ll figure out several ways it could hurt someone.
Wait that’s genius. I would listen to Snoop Dogg teaching me particle physics any day of the week.
The blanket term “AI” has set us back quite a lot I think.
The plant thing and the deepfakes/search engines/chatbots are two entirely different types of machine learning algorithm. One focussed on distinguishing between things, the other focussed on generating stuff.
But “AI” is the marketable term, and the only one most people know. And so here we are.
It’s particularly annoying because those are all AI. AI is the blanket term for the entire category of systems that are man made and exhibit some aspect of intelligence.
So the marketing term isn’t wrong, but referring to everything by it’s most general category is error prone and makes people who know or work with the differences particularly frustrated.
It’s easier to say “I made a little AI that learned how I like my tea”, but then people think of something that writes full sentences and tells me to put dogs in my tea. “I made a little machine learning based optimization engine that learned how I like my tea” conveys it much less well.You’re talking about types of machine learning algorithms. Is that a more precise term that should be used here instead of AI? And would the meme work better if it wss used. I’m asking, because I really don’t understand these things.
There are proper words for them, but they are ~technical jargon~. It is sufficient to know that they are different types of algorithm, only really similar in that both use machine learning.
And would the meme work better if it wss used
No because it is a meme, and if people had learned the proper words for things, we wouldn’t need a meme at all.
Both use machine learning algorithms that are modelled off the behaviour of neurons.
They are still different algorithms but they’re not that wildly different in the grand scale of the field of machine learning.
The stuff people don’t like is generative AI
AI is the new flavor, just like 2.0, SIM-everything, VIRTUAL-everything, CYBER -everything, were before. Eventually good use cases will emerge, and the junk will be replaced by the next buzzword.
Good use cases for AI already exist
And I’m saying this as a certified hater of GenAI
Machine Learning as an invention has already been used for good, useful things. It’s just that it never got caught up in hype like the modern wave of Generative Transformers (which is apparently the proper term for those overhyped chatbots and picture generators)
I suppose both plantnet and deep fakes have conv networks as part of their architectures though
Likely transformers now (I think SD3 uses a ViT for text encoding, and ViTs are currently one of the best model architectures for image classification).
I hate when streamers/gamers/etc refer to procedural generation as “ai generated”. It’s infuriating.
Oh man this one drives me up the wall too.
Someone literally with a straight face said how cool Minecraft has AI generated worlds and I wanted to flip a table.
I particularly “Love” that a bunch of like, procedural generation and search things that have existed for years are now calling themselves “AI” (without having changed in any way) because marketing.
I read a story on CBC the other day that was all about how an AI voice was taking over from hosts on off-hours at some local radio station, then deeper in the article it revealed that everything the “AI” reads was written by a human. So it was about someone using text-to-speech technology that has been around since at least the 70s the whole time. Hardly newsworthy in any way except for “IT’S AI!”
Mind you there -are- TTS tools that use machine learning (which is what advertisers call “AI” now) for more realistic voices. No idea if the radio was using those at all though.
Reminds me of how everything on a computer used to be a “program”, but now they’re all just “apps”
I will die on the hill of calling them computer programs.
Same. It’s like the one thing where I am a total boomer on
My pet theory is that Apple started to use that term because “App” can also be short for “Apple”.
I buy it
It just works
What’s a computer?
AI is what we make it. That being said, there has not been a proper filtering of input for AIs learning pool. Shotgun approach may be easiest and fastest but is not bestest
The creation, curation, and maintenence of training data is a big industry in and of itself that has been around for years. Likewise, feature engineering is an entire sub-discipline of data science and engineering unto itself. I think you might be making the mistake that chatgpt = AI.
I’ve learned that training a model to search your (companies) unmaintainable, unorganized, and continuously growing documentation storage is a godsend.
AI search is legitimately useful.
For something like Salesforce development, you’ve got the answer spread across their old framework docs, their new framework docs, their config settings reference page, and a couple stack overflow questions.
Copilot / Bing search has legitimately been incredibly helpful at synthesizing answers from those and providing sources so that I can verify, do more research, and ask follow up questions.
Do not use ai for plant identification if it actually matters what the plant is.
Just so ppl see this:
DO NOT EVER USE AI FOR PLANT IDENTIFICATION IN CASES WHERE THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES TO FAILURE.
For walking along and seeing what something is, that’s fine. No big deal if it tells you something’s a turkey oak when it’s actually a pin oak.
If you’re gonna eat it or think it might be toxic or poisonous to you, if you want to find out what your pet or livestock ate, if you in any way could suffer consequences from misidentification: do not rely on ai.
Forgo identification and eat the plant based on vibes like our ancestors.
I have a feeling I know where your username came from.
sorry couldn’t hear you over the CRUNCHING OF MY MEAL
Like I get what you’re saying but this is also hysterical to the point that people are going to ignore you.
Don’t use AI ever if there are consequences? Like I can’t use an AI image search to get rough ideas of what the plant might be as a jumping off point into more thorough research? Don’t rely solely on AI, sure, but it can be part of the process.
You could say the same about a plant identification book.
It’s not so much that AI for plant identification is bad, it’s that the higher the stakes, the more confident you need to be. Personally, I’m not going foraging for mushrooms with either an AI-based plant app or a book. Destroying Angel mushrooms look pretty similar to common edible mushrooms, and the key differences can disappear depending on the circumstances. If you accidentally eat a destroying angel mushroom, the symptoms might not appear for 5 to 24 hours, and by then it’s too late. Your liver and kidney are already destroyed.
But, I think you could design an app to be at least as good as a book. I don’t know if normal apps do this, but if I made a plant identification app, I’d have the app identify the plant, and then provide a checklist for the user to use to confirm it for themselves. If you did that, it would be just like having a friend just suggest checking out a certain page in a plant identification book.
If you’re using the book correctly, you couldn’t say the same thing. Using a flora book to identify a plant requires learning about morphology and by having that alone you’re already significantly closer to accurately identifying most things. If a dichotomous key tells you that the terminating leaflet is sessile vs. not sessile, and you’re actually looking at that on the physical plant, your quality of observation is so much better than just photographing a plant and throwing it up on inaturalist
Not to mention, the book is probably going to list look-alike plants, and mention if they are toxic. AI is just going to go “It’s this thing”.
You can easily say the same thing. Use the image identification to get a name of the plant and google it to read about checking if the sessile is leafy or no.
The problem with AI is that it’s garbage in, garbage out. There’s some AI generated books on Amazon now for mushroom identification and they contain some pretty serious errors. If you find a book written by an actual mycologist that has been well curated and referenced, that’s going to be an actually reliable resource.
Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture
The books on Amazon are vomited out of chat GPT. If there’s a university-curated and trained image recognition AI, that’s more likely to be reliable provided the input has been properly vetted and sanitized.
The difference between a reference guide intended for plant identification written and edited by experts in the field for the purposes of helping a person understand the plants around them and the ai is that one is expressly and intentionally created with its goal in mind and at multiple points had knowledgeable skilled people looking over its answer and the other is complex mad libs.
I get that it’s bad to gamble with your life when the stakes are high, but we’re talking about the difference between putting it on red and putting it on 36.
One has a much, much higher potential for catastrophe.
The difference is that plant identification is a classification problem, not an LLM.
Not all of AI is LLMs, most aren’t.
I think state machines are cool and groovy. I still don’t understand genetic algorithms but I wish I did.
15 years ago we were all saying “AI is just a series of IF statements” because of expert systems and y’all forgot
Genetic algorithms kinda suck as they use random variations and breeding to solve a problem which is much slower than using backpropagation with any decent reward modeler. It’s the difference between selective breeding and gene splicing in the real world.
Some customer support “bots” could be considered classification problems, no? At least in so far as which department does a call get routed to.
At least it’s routing you to a department instead of trying to help you solve the issue yourself by showing you different help pages you already looked at before trying to contact support.
If you actually looked at the help pages before contacting support, you are in the minority.
Could be. Classification is a type of problem. LLM is a type of model. You can use LLMs to solve classification problems. There’s a good chance that’s what’s happening here.
The most annoying thing since the rise of LLMs is that everyone thinks that all of AI is just LLMs
Classification machine learning models can also be neural networks, which is something that was called AI also
AI isn’t just about LLM. Modern AI libraries (pytorch, tensorflow etc.) can be used for being trained with all sorts of data.
Still waiting for an AI NPC that I can have a real-time conversation with in VR while slaying a dragon on some shit
“AI renaming image files for easier search”
You’re cool, though, you can stay
Alphafold? Beautiful. Perfect. No notes.
Nudeify type apps? Fuuuuck alllll the way off!
I still don’t see how AI-generated porn is any different from photoshopping someone’s face on to someone else’s naked body.
It’s less effort and typically more realistic (in the sense that it looks more real, not that it is)
But it’s unethical either way, don’t make non-consensual porn
We’re in that awkward part of AI where all the degenerates are using it in unethical ways, and it will take time for legislation and human culture to catch up. The early internet was a wild place too.
First time I’ve seen this meme template. Love it.
AI search is great.
The more “searchey”, and less “generativey”, the better. What goes against the direction every provider is going, but it’s still great.
I like using perplexity because the ads aren’t in your face and it’s pretty good at providing concise answers… And it doesn’t fuck with my news feed every time I look up some random thing
It’s really god to search things that you don’t know the name already.
I’m still hoping for good customer support AI. If I’m going to be connected to someone who barely speaks English and is required to follow a prewritten script, or worse plays prerecorded messages to fake being fluent, I might as well talk to an AI, especially if it means shorter hold times.
AI is a bad replacement for good customer service, but it could be an improvement over bad customer service.
Glad you posted this, b/c I now have a follow up to a previous comment where I shared this from Klarna (amongst other tidbits):
So Klarna automated L1 support, did a good job at it, and saved money. Apparently they could’ve done it early without LLMs and saved even more money.
Have you ever wanted L1 support? :)
Guess even if not it still could give reps more time to handle your queries if they’re not telling people to click “forgot my password” when they write in saying “hey I forgot my password”.
I just gave the chat bot that was put in place at the IT department where I work at a poke. It answered my question perfectly: “How do I print from my laptop to the library?” And it’s not like the chat bot is the only route for support, but it does divert a lot of routine questions from our help desk so they can focus on questions that require a human touch. That could be people where a chat bot is not a good format or it could be a non-routine question.
We need to strike back with an AI customer which alerts us if we could finally talk or chat again with a human if all automatic solutions are discussed.
I’ve just taken to randomly pressing buttons until it gives me a human.
I’ve had automated systems just straight up hang up on me when I ask for a customer service representative instead of actually linking me to one. Because it says it “couldn’t understand me”.
If i won the lottery, id invest in that.
Fuck YES
Maybe deepfakes could teach ppl to not upload faces on internet. I pray this day comes when it will ruin all the picture social media but the price could be too high
I actually like AI search, because it cuts through all the SEO bullshit. Although yes, I do recognize that search engines cause SEO spam.
