The Black Mirror plot about AI that worries actors

(Just aw this,  made some points, but the overall ideas were too strange to  make the broader case. 

The Black Mirror plot about AI that worries actors

SAG strike 2023    By Shiona McCallum    BBC Technology reporter

Hollywood actors are striking for the first time in 43 years, bringing the American movie and television business to a halt, partly over fears about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI).

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) actors' union failed to reach an agreement in the US for better protections against AI for its members - and warned that "artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to creative professions" as it prepared to dig in over the issue.

Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the chief negotiator for the SAG-AFTRA union, criticised producers for their proposals over AI so far.

He said studios had asked for the ability to scan the faces of background artists for the payment of one day's work, and then be able to own and use their likeness "for the rest of eternity, in any project they want, with no consent and no compensation".

If that sounds like the plot of an episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror, that's because it is.

US media has been quick to point out that the recent series six episode "Joan Is Awful" sees Hollywood star Salma Hayek grapple with the discovery that her AI likeness can by used by a production company without her knowledge.... ' 

AI and Creativity

Have mentioned that here a number of time,  reviewing.    We worried that when building expertise systems, even considered a definition of creativity in a domain to balance its value.  

Can AI Demonstrate Creativity?   By Keith Kirkpatrick

Communications of the ACM, February 2023, Vol. 66 No. 2, Pages 21-23   10.1145/3575665

Creativity has been defined as the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work. While the source of the development of those ideas can be debated—does creativity spring from the heart, the brain, the soul, or one's experiences—it has been largely accepted that humans alone possess the capability to truly create.

The emergence of computers and artificial intelligence (AI) has led to systems that, fed a sufficient amount of training data, can mimic the output of a creative writer, artist, or musician, thereby encroaching on humans' monopoly on the creative process. Artificial intelligence techniques can be used to create new ideas in a few different ways, such as producing unique combinations of familiar ideas, creating new works based on the attributes of previous works, and by offering new ideas based on combinations of attributes and ideas that humans may not have thought of during the creation of a new work.

A notable example of the power of AI to generate a so-called "creative" work was demonstrated in 2016 when the IBM Watson AI platform was used to create a movie trailer for 20th Century Fox's horror film, Morgan. The first example of a trailer created solely by AI, Watson was used to analyze the visuals, sound, and composition of hundreds of existing horror film trailers, and then it selected scenes from the completed Morgan movie for editors to patch together into a trailer. The use of AI to comb through scenes to create a trailer in the style of other horror movies helped to reduce the amount of time editors needed to spend on the project from a week down to a single day.

How AI Can Mimic Creative Works

The process for using AI to generate creative content is largely based around the use of foundational models or generative adversarial networks. These approaches utilize deep neural networks designed to mimic the ways in which the human brain learns by creating associations between specific elements that can be combined to create a finished work.

These neural networks are fed millions or billions of examples of a particular output (which could include images, sound samples, or text passages), which they subject to a sophisticated type of pattern matching to "learn" specific attributes, patterns, or cues. For example, algorithms that are used to create artwork in the style of impressionist artists would be shown works from Monet, Renoir, Manet, Degas, Cezanne, and Matisse, generally considered to be masters in this style of artwork. The neural network examines the works as patterns of pixels, and can be trained to identify the specific patterns that define the impressionist style. This creates a framework of knowledge that can be used to create a new work based on the learned parameters and attributes. The more "layers" or "depth" the model has, the more complex the resulting patterns and correlations can be.

Large AI companies such as OpenAI (which describes itself on its website as "a research and deployment company" whose mission is "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity") have created applications such as DALL-E (referencing the artist Salvador Dali), which was announced in January 2021, and demonstrated that this approach could reproduce and recombine features from those existing images in new and aesthetically pleasing ways. The next version, DALL-E 2, released a year later, featured improvements to image quality and demonstrated that the system could reproduce different artistic styles.  ... ' 

Computer Scientist Says AI 'Artist' Deserves Its Own Copyrights

More on this ...  Art in particular mentioned here.  

Computer Scientist Says AI 'Artist' Deserves Its Own Copyrights

Reuters, Blake Brittain, January 11, 2023

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler has requested the Washington, DC, District Court to rule his Creativity Machine artificial intelligence (AI) system deserves copyrights for art it produces. Thaler asked the court to rescind a U.S. Copyright Office ruling decreeing that copyrightable creative works can only be human-made. His lawyer, Ryan Abbott of Brown Neri Smith & Khan, said the case has a "real financial importance" that may have been previously overlooked, and the protection of AI-created art would serve the goals of copyright law. Said Thaler in his court filing, "The fact that various courts have referred to creative activity in human-centric terms, based on the fact that creativity has traditionally been human-centric and romanticized, is very different than there being a legal requirement for human creativity."  ... ' 

AI Tools for Skill Improvement

 Chess and other game playing as a means to have access to tools to improve skills.  How does this translate to more general skills?

AI Helps Humans Level Up Chess players and programmers now have access to tools that can improve skills and unleash creativity   By Harry Goldstein  In IEEEiOrg

BACK IN THE mid-1970s, IEEESpectrum senior editor Phil Ross played one of the first chess programs capable of vanquishing humans. He capitulated quickly—too quickly, it turned out: Although the program that beat him was good at openings and the middle game, it was terrible at the end game. Fast forward 50 years and the highest-ranked chess players in the world are AIs, with humans trailing far behind.

As Ross points out in his online piece “ AI’s Grandmaster Status Overshadows Chess Scandal,” the recent brouhaha involving world champion Magnus Carlsen and up-and-comer Hans Niemann highlights how chess-playing AIs, referred to as “engines” by the cognoscenti, have overtaken humans in terms of raw game-playing accuracy. The scandal also shows how AIs are being used by players at all levels to get better faster, fostering a boom in the sport.

If you were born a few decades ago, your best shot at playing and learning from grandmasters was either to be lucky enough to know one or to somehow qualify for the high-level tournaments in which they participated. Nowadays, chess newbies can log in and play engines that far exceed their own abilities, learning strategies and moves in days or weeks that in the past might have taken months or years. Engines can also help neophytes and grandmasters alike analyze their own games to give them an edge against human opponents. 

In fact, if you burrow down the rabbit holes of chess YouTube or Twitch, you’ll find grandmasters giving move-by-move analyses of games that engines played against each other. These AI tools, along with the humans who use them, are readily accessible: You can play the cybernetic versions of super grandmasters, like the open-source, current top-ranked chess engine Stockfish 14.1, not to mention tens of millions of human opponents on sites like Chess.com, a global community of some 93 million players and a central player in the cheating controversy.

While it is certainly true that bad actors use AI to cheat at chess—potentially posing an existential threat to the game, as Carlsen has suggested—it is equally true that the chess world has openly embraced AI and has been thriving as a result. Similar risk/reward calculations will need to be made in other domains.  .... ' 

Artificial Creativity

A favorite topic,  like any method that provides a good set of solutions that can be useful. 

Artificial Creativity?    By O'Reilly, July 28, 2022

Image:Artist's palette features oil paints and is held by a robot.

Works of art really have two sources: the idea itself and the technique required to instantiate that idea.

There's a puzzling disconnect in the many articles being written about DALL-E 2, Imagen, and other increasingly powerful tools for generating images from textual descriptions. It is common to read articles that talk about AI having creativity, but that is not the case at all.

As with the discussion of sentience, authors are being misled by a very human will to believe. And in being misled, they are missing out on what is important.

From O'Reilly

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AI and Creativity

How strong are the links between AI and Creativity?

ACM OPINION

How Smarter AI Will Change Creativity

For years, it has been said that artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation poses a threat to people in repetitive, routine jobs, but that artists, writers, and programmers were safer. Foundation models challenge that assumption.

They also show how AI can be used as a software sidekick to enhance productivity. This machine intelligence does not resemble the human kind, but offers something entirely different. Handled well, it is more likely to complement humanity than usurp it.

From The Economist

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Towards Mind Mapping

 Have used mind mapping for a number of serious applications, both for documenting and building, but  it seems to be less mentioned of late.  Here Google talks its usefulness..

How mind mapping can help creators make better content

Nov 02, 2021, Sarah Han, Google Web Creators team

Creativity can be a messy process. Great ideas and inspiration don’t come easily on command, or in any organized way. And even when we’re in the creative zone, our brains can sometimes get too overloaded and overwhelmed to actually get anything done. That’s why some people use mind mapping, or visual brainstorming, to stay on top of their game.

Markus Müller-Simhofer, founder of the digital mind mapping app MindNode, saw major changes when he started visualizing his creative process. He recalls the first time he realized what a powerful tool mind mapping could be. While developing an app, Markus found that although he had tons of ideas, he wasn’t making any progress. “Out of this frustration, I started to look into techniques to sort my ideas and find focus. Mind mapping best fit how my brain works,” he says.

Mind mapping worked so well for Markus that he eventually scrapped his original app idea and started developing MindNode. “This was 14 years ago and today, I am still working on it — together with a team of 10 people.”

We recently chatted with Markus about how creators can use mind mapping to make better content.  .... ' 

Getting to the Moon via the Cloud

Very high performance supercomputing on the cloud is adding to the ability to research, design, simulate, test, manufacture, deliver.

Going to the Moon via the Cloud

The New York Times, Craig S. Smith, May 25, 2021

The wide availability of high-performance computing accessed through the cloud is fostering creativity worldwide, allowing the Firefly Aerospace startup, for example, to build a rocket for lunar flights using high-performance computing simulations. Although the latest supercomputers can run 1 quadrillion calculations per second, they are prohibitively expensive and have huge space and power needs; less powerful but more nimble networked computer clusters can nearly equal supercomputers' capabilities. Moreover, most cloud computing firms supply access to high-performance computing hardware with more versatility than supercomputers. High-performance cloud computing company Rescale estimates roughly 12% of such computing is currently cloud-based, but that number—approximately $5.3 billion—is expanding 25% annually. Cloud services are growing increasingly popular among research and development groups and applied science fields, amid spiking demand for computing resources.

Plane Paradox: More Creativity for Complex Automation

 Operating complex automated systems needs more training to be creative, rather than more training about very the details complex systems.  Or do we just need more training to deal with surprises in automated systems?   Wordering.  

The Plane Paradox: More Automation Should Mean More Training   in Wired

Today's highly automated planes create surprises pilots aren't familiar with. The humans in the cockpit need to be better prepared for the machine's quirks.

SHORTLY AFTER A Smartlynx Estonian Airbus 320 took off on February 28, 2018, all four of the aircraft’s flight control computers stopped working. Each performed precisely as designed, taking themselves offline after (incorrectly) sensing a fault. The problem, later discovered, was an actuator that had been serviced with oil that was too viscous. A design created to prevent a problem created a problem. Only the skill of the instructor pilot on board prevented a fatal crash.

Now, as the Boeing 737 MAX returns to the skies worldwide following a 21-month grounding, flight training and design are in the crosshairs. Ensuring a safe future of aviation ultimately requires an entirely new approach to automation design using methods based on system theory, but planes with that technology are 10 to 15 years off. For now we need to train pilots how to better respond to automation’s many inevitable quirks.   ..." 

Non Fungible Tokens and Resources Examined

Was struck by the very idea of a Non Fungible Toke (NFT)  and noticed this article in Andreessen Horowitz that points to lots of resources and announces upcoming coverage.   What would Da Vinci have made of NFTs? 

NFT Canon   by Sonal Chokshi, Chris Dixon, Denis Nazarov, Jesse Walden, and Linda Xie

The NFT Canon is a go-to resource for artists and creators, developers, corporations and institutions, communities and other organizations seeking to understand or do more with non-fungible tokens.

It’s a curated list of readings and resources on all things NFTs (inspired by the a16z Crypto Canon), and is organized from the big picture of what NFTs are and why they matter, to how to mint, collect, and do more with them — including various applications such as art, music, gaming, social tokens, and others. 

We will continue to update this as more people try out new things, share their work, or publish resources for learning about NFTs. If you have suggestions for quality pieces to add, let us know @a16z.  ... " 

Digitization of Creativity and the Maker Movement.

A considerable piece.    In particular note the connection to the 'Maker Movement',  an approach we were introduced to as early as the 80s.  Of course 3D printing has become a big component.   Software tools to to produce models.    And also elements of AI able to work with us to add design creativity?   

What Can the Maker Movement Teach Us About the Digitization of Creativity?   By Sascha FrSiesike, Frédéric Thiesse, George Kuk

Communications of the ACM, March 2021, Vol. 64 No. 3, Pages 42-45   10.1145/3447524

In recent years, the 'maker movement' has emerged as a social phenomenon driven by novel technological possibilities.1 With the help of inexpensive, yet highly versatile means of production (for example, CNC milling machines, 3D printers) and easy-to-use software tools, makers free themselves from their traditional role as passive consumers and evolve into innovators and producers. Although the act of physical production seems to be at the center of the movement, a large part of the creative work takes place in the online sphere. These digital activities and their outcomes provide a rich source of information that can be used to gain a more nuanced understanding of how the digitization affects the creative process itself.

Of all the production methods available to makers, 3D printing is probably the most versatile and requires only a limited understanding of the production process. Several 3D design software packages allow even lay people to turn their ideas into printable designs. This combination of flexibility and usability has led to an abundance of 3D object models over the past years, which are shared and jointly refined with the community on digital maker platforms. As part of a multi-year research project on the use of 3D printing by the maker community, we found that the use of these platforms in the creative process blurs the boundaries between the digital and the physical and ultimately changes the way ideas are expressed, curated, and eventually translated into physical reality. In particular, we saw how makers with entirely different backgrounds (for example, HW/SW developers, designers, business and social entrepreneurs) traverse across the startup world, software development, and open online communities, to combine concepts through a novel digitized creative process. ... ' 

Augmented AI for Creative Invention

Have we stopped getting return from  creative investment, and can AI change that? 

‘Augmented creativity’: How AI can accelerate human invention  By Adi Gaskell   in Venturebeat. 

In 2012, economist Robert Gordon published a controversial paper in which he argued that economic growth was largely over, due in no small part to our failure to maintain the engines of innovation in recent decades.

A study from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research supported his general thesis and argued that while we’re spending even more money on creativity and innovation, our returns are flatlining. And this investment is not only in dollars, as the research revealed roughly 20 times as many people work in R&D today as did in 1930.

So what gives? Why has creating things become so difficult?  Researchers from Northwestern University attempt to answer this in a paper that shows a growing percentage of today’s creation is what’s known as recombination. Indeed, 40% of all patents in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are not completely new works, but rather mishmashes of existing ideas bolted together.

Artificial help

Finding effective ways to combine existing ideas is by no means easy, not least because of the growing volume of published material being produced. During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, around 23,000 papers had been published on the virus, with that number doubling every 20 days.

The data science community at Kaggle pulled together to provide an AI-powered literature review in an effort to make sense of the deluge of new material. Data points were harvested from a subset of papers and grouped into 17 categories, with papers then listed for each category. It may not be the most polished approach, but that’s due to the time constraints imposed by the pandemic.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon developed an alternate method: an AI-based approach to mining the patent and research databases for ideas that could be combined to form interesting solutions to specific problems. Their system uses analogies to help connect work from two seemingly distinct areas, which they believe makes innovation faster and a lot cheaper.  ... " 

Augmented creativity

What we’re witnessing is the emergence of something called “augmented creativity,” in which humans use AI to help them understand the deluge of data. Early prototypes highlight the important role humans can, and should, play in making sense of the suggestions proposed by the AI.

OpenAI attempted to replicate this approach with the release of a music-making tool called Jukebox. While the achievement is significant from a technological perspective, the results are unlikely to threaten the livelihoods of human musicians.

Various projects have also attempted to produce new and enticing recipes by using AI to mine food composition databases and concoct interesting combinations. For instance, Google researcher Sara Robinson recently showcased her system that produced a cake-cookie hybrid. Accenture researchers prototyped a similar recipe creation tool at their Dock facility in Dublin, but with stomach-churning results.

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

Project, reexamining.   An idea long put aside.

MIT   Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

By Oscar Rosello   Project Contact:  Adam Haar Horowitz  Project Website  http://www.adamjhh.com/  

Inspiration:

Sleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a third of our lives are spent asleep. Current technological interfaces miss an opportunity to access the unique, imaginative, elastic cognition ongoing during dreams and semi-lucid states. In turn, each of us misses an opportunity to use interfaces to influence our own processes of memory consolidation, creative insight generation, gist extraction, and emotion regulation that are so deeply sleep-dependent. In this project, we explore ways to augment human creativity by extending, influencing, and capturing dreams in Stage 1 sleep. It is currently impossible to force ourselves to be creative because so much creative idea association and creative incubation happens in the absence of executive control and directed attention. Sleep offers an opportunity for prompting creative thought in the absence of directed attention, if only dreams can be controlled. ... 

During sleep onset, a window of opportunity arises in the form of hypnagogia, a semi-lucid sleep state where we all…  

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Dream Manipulation

Now here is some scary.   Or a means of entertainment?   Or creativity enhancement?   Note also the connection to other senses like smell.  (Once again I will mention that we did similar experiments long ago, in what was called sleep-learning then,  later largely debunked in that form, at the U of Pa Language Laboratory) 

An MIT Lab Is Building Devices to Hack Your Dreams

From improving your mood to focusing your creativity, scientists at MIT’s Dream Lab want to prove the power of dreams   ....   Including Pattie Maes      Article by Tessa Love   in OneZero

Introductory video:   https://youtu.be/ZBLejVwX85o  

MIT Tests 'Dream Incubation' Device That Manipulates The Content of People's Dreams  By Peter Dockrill   in ScienceAlert

Scientists have developed an experimental device and protocol for manipulating the content of people's dreams while they are sleeping, by making them recall specific cues that can trigger targeted dream themes and experiences.

While the boundless dream-building of Inception remains the stuff of science fiction for now, the new research shows that the evolving science of dream control is far more than fantasy – and that information processing during sleep is capable of being engineered from the outside.

In a new study, a team led by neuroscientist Adam Haar Horowitz from MIT describes how a wearable electronic device – called Dormio – enables what the researchers term 'targeted dream incubation' (TDI), during the fluid first stage of sleep where the sleeper experiences a borderland state of consciousness called hypnagogia.   ... " 

Focus Music

Amazon Alexa Music has been pushing what they call 'Focus Time Music'   With claims for 'perfect sound when you are studying, working, reading or writing '.   They just suggested the idea to me.  Something I have tried myself for years, with playlists, particular artists, etc.    For me its jazz.   Does it really work?  More than other methods.   Seems you could do some controlled  experiements,anyone know of any?  How about taking that to creativity?   Here is what they write about it. 

Considering the forms of Curiosity

Intriguing idea, is creativity just adding a goal to curiosity?

Automating the Search for New 'Curiosity' Algorithms
MIT News
Kim Martineau

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have used machine learning to identify new algorithms for encoding forms of curiosity. MIT's Ferran Alet said, "We were inspired to use [artificial intelligence] to find algorithms with curiosity strategies that can adapt to a range of environments." The researchers chose a set of basic modules to define their exploration algorithms, selecting about 36 high-level operations to guide the agent to perform tasks like remembering previous inputs, comparing current and past inputs, and using learning methods to change its own modules. The computer integrated up to seven operations at a time to generate computation graphs describing 52,000 algorithms. Two were entirely new, or apparently too obvious or counterintuitive to be of human design, and outperformed human-designed algorithms on a wide range of simulated tasks and environments.  .... " 

Crowdsourcing Creativity

Spent much time on broad the idea, like the direction of the process.

Crowdsourcing Plot Lines to Help the Creative Process

Penn State News
Jessica Hallman
March 13, 2020

Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) College of Information Sciences and Technology have launched a crowdsourced system that provides writers with story ideas from the online crowd to facilitate the creative process. The Heteroglossia system lets authors share sections of their story drafts using a text editor, and online workers are tasked with brainstorming plot ideas from the perspective of fictional characters they are assigned. Penn State's Ting-Hao (Kenneth) Huang said human workers currently power the system, but artificial intelligence could be incorporated into the platform in the future. "I believe if we learn how to help creative writing or creative processes in general, we can learn more about how to build systems that can be creative." 

Reinforcement Learning for the Real World

Conceptually reinforcement learning should work well, but in practice it can be problematical.  Like that it is being considered for business applications.  Which are about making decisions.   But you do also have to formulate that decision in context and over time to make it workable.

Reinforcement learning for the real world
Edward Jezierski on the science of bringing creativity and curiosity together in a learning system.
By Jenn Webb

Edward Jezierski interview via O'Reilly

Roger Magoulas recently sat down with Edward Jezierski, reinforcement learning AI principal program manager at Microsoft, to talk about reinforcement learning (RL). They discuss why RL’s role in AI is so important, challenges of applying RL in a business environment, and how to approach ethical and responsible use questions.

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

Reinforcement learning is different than simply trying to detect something in an image or extract something from a data set, Jezierski explains— it’s about making decisions. “That entails a whole set of concepts that are about exploring the unknown,” he says. “You have the notion of exploring versus exploiting, which is do the tried and true versus trying something new. You bring in high-level concepts like the notion of curiosity—how much should you buy as you try new things? The notion of creativity—how crazy are the things you’re willing to try out? Reinforcement learning is a science that studies how these things come together in a learning system. (00:18)   ... "

AI as Creative Partner

Another good thought, but still hard to do well. And how?    Should such a system generate and test possible new ideas?    Then we need to carefully test what a solution in context looks like.  You can start such a context with stated constraints.   You then will typically need a means to judge a solution, also in current and future context.  True general creativity is different from business creativity, but the two can be used to feed each other,with by linking them to human decision makers, or simulations of human and business needs.   Or judged crowdsourced opinion,  or trained on data sets, or played against with 'Digital Twin' models.   Can all be done,  do lots of tests.

AI Is A New Kind Of Creative Partner
Thomas Husson, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Brands and agencies have always placed creativity at the heart of advertising. But as digital channels proliferate, the cost, complexity, and demand for media’s measurability have driven the emphasis to marketing technology. For those reasons, CMOs are starting to apply artificial intelligence to digital media buying, campaign automation, or marketing mix optimization. Few brands, however, use AI as a partner in the creative process to help scale creative capability and capacity within data-driven marketing approaches.

Luc Julia, cocreator of Siri, believes artificial creativity does not exist yet. Indeed, let’s not confuse artistic creativity with business creativity. AI has helped write songs, mimic the styles of painters by creating a piece of art that sold for over $400,000, and inform creative decisions in filmmaking. Artistic creativity may be more about pattern and algorithm than we give it credit for, and very often, the patterns are hidden — that’s something AI can help discover. But let’s be clear: AI’s impact on creativity is not about machines taking over — it’s about infusing intelligent technology into the creative process to augment the human capacity to create and execute ideas with the benefit of saving time, solving capacity challenges, and enhancing the ability to find the best idea possible.  ... ." 

AI, Creativity and the Slime Mold

Quire an interesting piece out of Engadget, pointer to a new book I just received but have not read.  we got AI to show us possibilities, and even automatically evaluate them.   But never came up with a result out of the blue, what we could call creativity.

Hitting the Books: Teaching AI to sing slime mold serenades
Get ready for Mozart on a microchip.
By Andrew Tarantola, @terrortola in Engadget

Book:   The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity   by Arthur I. Miller  MIT Press 

Most of the time when we hear about AI, they're taking our jobs or putting us in jail or inflicting some other autonomic horror upon humans. But there's a second side to that AI coin. One in which machine learning algorithms show us skin suits the beauty of the natural form, even if it has been procedurally generated.

In this excerpt from The Artist in the Machine by Arthur I. Miller highlights the work of artist Eduardo Miranda. He's melded the minds of a slime mold and a CPU to create, well, music.

Eduardo Miranda and His Improvising Slime Mold   .... "