What You May Have Missed #33
Top 5 picks: What The Beatles can teach us about AI / MJ v5.2 / AI-assisted writing is close to becoming as standard as spell check / AI for Secret Invasion's intro / AI Is a Lot of Work
Top 5 Picks
What The Beatles can teach us about AI (Verity Harding on Bennett Institute for Public Policy): “There is a reason that Paul McCartney’s comments about his use of AI garnered so much more attention in 2023, when it passed most people by in 2021 and 2022. That reason is not a deeper understanding of the technology nor a more nuanced information landscape. It is a frenzy around any mention of AI, yes, and also perhaps a search for proof that it really is spinning out of control … The fevered reporting around the Beatles’ use of AI illustrates well the serious issue that a lack of public understanding of AI systems and capabilities affords a disproportionate voice to those who claim to be expert, even if that does not reliably relay to the wider populace what is actually realistic.”
Midjourney v5.2: “We're testing V5.2 today, it includes improved aesthetics, coherence, text understanding, sharper images, higher variation modes, zoom-out outpainting, and a new /shorten command for analyzing your prompt tokens.”
Nick St. Pierre: 8 side-by-side comparisons using the same prompts & seeds (v5.1 vs v5.2). More: Custom zoom “lets you re-prompt your zoom out, adjust the aspect ratio, and specify the exact level of zoom you want. Step-by-step walkthrough of the workflow.”
Borriss: 11 examples of the power of the zoom-out feature.
Benj Edwards on Ars Technica: “Stunning”—Midjourney update wows AI artists with camera-like feature. Nice level-headed conclusion: “For now, it's hard not to appreciate Midjourney's eye-opening technical advancements while still wondering if there is a more ethical path forward for this technology—one that pleases artists, both traditional and synthographer alike.”
Opinion: AI-assisted writing is close to becoming as standard as spell check. Here’s the catch (Jane Rosenzweig on LA Times). On Twitter: “Shortly after ChatGPT was released, a researcher for a big tech company told me I shouldn't worry about what this would mean for writing—that in 2 years, no one would take a writing class unless they wanted to be a writer. I think about that conversation every time I see that magic wand in Google's "help me write" feature. All these AI assistants promise the same thing: they'll free you from writing so you can do the "important" work. But often, writing is the important work.”
The intro of Secret Invasion by Marvel was AI generated and has sparked a wave of criticism. Karla Ortiz: “All of this bad press from Gizmodo, Deadline, The Guardian, Kotaku, Esquire, Washington Post, Wired, Ars Technica, Forbes (TWICE) and many other outlets could've been avoided If only those making decisions took a moment to research why this technology is a bad bet for any product in terms of safety, PR hell & moral and legal reasons.” The director said “he doesn’t ‘really understand’ how the artificial intelligence works.”
AI Is a Lot of Work (Josh Dzieza on The Verge): “Much of the public response to language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT has focused on all the jobs they appear poised to automate. But behind even the most impressive AI system are people—huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. Only the companies that can afford to buy this data can compete, and those that get it are highly motivated to keep it secret. The result is that, with few exceptions, little is known about the information shaping these systems’ behavior, and even less is known about the people doing the shaping.”