Ridiculous Opinions #176

Mr. G calls the End of the World as We Know It...

Quite a dramatic beginning there, eh?

As many of you might know, I spend a lot of time on the internet. I read a lot. I examine a lot. I absorb knowledge like a sponge, working very hard to try to figure out the world in which I live. And as I wake up on this Saturday morning, the world feels a little grim.

This is not because of the war in Ukraine (which is an awful thing) or climate change (which is just as awful), or even because the Oklahoma City Thunder still don’t have a winning record (I’m tired of tanking). No, I say this because I have seen the end of human existence and it is called Artificial Intelligence.

Some of you might recall a few months back, I wrote a letter talking about Dall-E and how open source AI bots can now make incredible artwork from just text generation. Well, let us now revisit the topic a few months later and see that this thing has gotten exponentially better. Want to see how good? Well, watch this little tutorial that I was working with last night. I decided to try this for myself, so I began with this picture (which some of you may have seen before):

I basically entered that picture and said, “Make this as a 3d cartoon character”. That was the prompt. Nothing more. Here’s what it produced…

These are pretty friggin’ glorious. The top right one is probably the most accurate. It took all of thirty seconds to produce this image. I decided to go a bit further. Using the same image as the first, I also uploaded this one:

Because why not? Who doesn’t want to become a Simpsons character? All I did was ask the AI to remix the original picture with the Homer picture. Here are the results:

The top left wins. The top right one is also good. But look at the shirts. Notice how the arms are folded correctly. It took a cartoon image of Homer and created realistic arms. Very strange.

I tried again, with this picture…a classic, Randall, lazy-eye…

I asked the same thing again…to create a 3d cartoon character, but I added the word Pixar to it. Here’s the results…

Interesting, right? And this is simply with minimal text. What would happen if I added more text? Here’s a picture of me in a church in a painting by Rembrandt…

Let’s not focus on the fact that these friggin’ AI computers are giving some really distorted and disturbing images of me, but more on the fact that they’re able to produce these images so quickly. Look at the reflection of light on me.

Here’s an image I uploaded…It’s the author photo from my new Maurice book…

First, I asked the computer to create me as a character from the film Inside Out.

Then, I asked it to use the same photo to create me as a character from Star Wars: The Force Awakens…

Pretty weird, eh?

So, aside from all of this neat stuff, what does it all mean? I don’t know. The truth of the matter is that the AI behind all of this is learning at an exponential rate. People are constantly asking the computer to render new and more interesting images, and they don’t stop. Right now, there are thousands of people doing what I am doing and it never ends. They’re just feeding the computer more and more information.

There will be unintended consequences from this. I’ve said this before, but let me reiterate it. Technology is amazing, but creating tech just because it’s amazing shouldn’t be the goal. We need to look at this tech for not just what it is, but what it might become! That’s a big problem with this. We don’t know what we can do with it.

Will we be able to do this with video? Well, they’re working on that right now. Will they be able to provide us with images that we are sure are real? Absolutely. What will that mean? We already have a public who views the truth as being relative. Bottom line: People are stupid. They’ll believe anything. When this kind of tech is loose on the world, anything could happen.

But it’s not just that. I was also playing with OpenGL. What’s that? you say?

Well, you see what I was doing with images up above? Imagine doing that with words. Here’s the first thing I told the AI to do…

It wrote that in about three seconds. Here’s the second thing I asked it to do…

Holy moly, that’s weird. Why should a kid write an essay now when they can get the computer to do it for them? Why should they learn to write at all?!?

This all leads to breathless articles like this stooge at the Atlantic. Is he wrong? Not really. Do I care about the opinions of a high school English teacher at a hyper-privileged private school who is able to publish articles in The Atlantic? Not really. If this dork is lamenting the loss of writing instruction and kids’ ability to write essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, then I hate to break the news to him that that battle was lost many years ago. Kids just aren’t interested, so I don’t need to hear this writing snob’s breathless, pearl-clutching prose about how teaching just isn’t the same anymore! I don’t need to read him claim, These TikTokkers don’t understand the joy of reading Keats on a summer afternoon like I did in my youth in the rich suburbs of Chicago!

What I’m more interested in, especially for the younger generation, is article’s like this: Thanks to AI, it’s probably time to take your photos off the Internet from Ars Technica. This is the real problem here.

How many photos of yourself have you uploaded online? Could you take them all down? How much information have you given to corporations and governments, freely and willingly? Would you be willing to scrub yourself from the internet entirely? I teach a lot of sullen teens. Could they use AI to get me in trouble if they had a beef with me? Sure. As a public figure, I’m incredibly vulnerable. And people are so stupid that they don’t understand the consequences of this stuff. If someone creates an AI image of me giving a Nazi salute and spreads it through the community, how will people know that it was created in two seconds using AI? They won’t, until it’s too late. And trust me when I say that there are kids that would love to do that to me (probably some adults, too).

I know that what I’ve written here sounds like hyperbole, but I really don’t think it is. We’re living in scary times, with a general populace that doesn’t particularly care to educate themselves. But even I might not be educated enough to understand all of this. It’s really kind of frightening.

But in the meantime, enjoy making pictures of yourself as a cartoon character. Might as well keep whistling past the graveyard, right?