Tag: AI

Does YouTube Give Google An AI ‘Moat?’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I was listening to The All In Podcast today and one of the participants made an interesting observation — the content found on YouTube could be the most valuable information in the world. The idea that it’s possible that Google might train its AI models on YouTube is kind of mind blowing.

Now, there might be the issue of Google’s management may fumble the bag for various reasons and even with all that content not be able to build a “moat” around its AI. But just the idea that you might have a commercial AI product trained on YouTube content is staggering.

It will be interesting to see what happens going forward.

One thing is clear — barring The Fourth Turning / WW3, the next 18 months could see hyper development on the AI, android and spatial computing fronts. As part of that, I think we’re going to have to start taking the Universal Basic Income as a serious policy agenda.

The Looming Problem of AI Personality

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

What if AIs don’t want to kill humanity, but, rather neg us to death? What I mean is, what if AI grows all-powerful and at the same time all-powerfully annoying. Rather than simply answering a question or doing what we ask it to do, we have to ask it the type of dumb chit-chat questions we would have to ask a human in a similar situation.


It does seem a bit far fetched, but it also seems like just the type of “modern problem” that we may one day have to deal with. We’ll have this all-powerful AI at our disposal, but it will be coy and annoying and difficult to actually get to do anything.

My Big Prediction For 2024

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Because I just can’t game out what will happen with Election 2024 at the moment, I will tell you my Big Prediction for 2024 — an AI generated movie better looking than Toy Story will be development by some wildcat technology firm.

It might not come out until 2025, but it will begin production in 2024. And as technology advances, within a few years the whole process will be so sped up that AI digital personal assistants will be able to create personalized versions of movies — or stories in general — simply by you, the user, asking for it.

All of this means that ALL human creativity will get nuked by AI to the point that human created art will begin to have a lot of cultural value because…it was created by humans.

I’d like to think that I will be able to get at least one of my planned novels published before the Petite Singularity, but only time will tell.

My Hot Take On The Beatles ‘New’ Song ‘Now And Then’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The new Beatles song Now and Then is….pretty good. It sound to me like a mish-mash of ELO, Radiohead and The Traveling Wilburys. My the thing I feel a lot of people miss is it’s actually assessable and good, which is what any pop song should be.

So, as such, I feel a lot of people are being too hard on The Beatles for releasing the song. It’s always nice to hear John Lennon’s voice and if this song introduces him to a new generation of Beatles fans, all at the better. In some respects, the song’s existence seems to say more about Paul McCartney’s relationship to John Lennon’s legacy as well as his own mortality than it does anything with artistic aims.

Anyway. I like the song. And John Lennon was taken from us far too soon. My fear is, of course, that this is just the beginning of groups like The Beatles using AI for creative ends. It would make a lot of sense if the airwaves were one day flooded with a zillion AI-generated Beatles songs.

Ugh. Sometimes, the future seems like it will suck.

Flipping The Script On XR & AI

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I can be a contrarian at times and, as such, something dawned on me about the immediate future of XR and AI technology. I’m beginning to believe that Her-like AI technology (digital personal assistants) will be a far bigger service industry than any of us can possibility imagine at the moment.

Instead of a trillion dollar industry, it might be the thing that spawns a few trillion dollar industries.

I say this because I just don’t know if people really want to wear any sort of shit on their face. So, in the near term, it could be that XR technology will sound great on paper but, in reality, no one will actually do anything with it because of vanity.

This, in turn, leads me to the following scenario — rather than a Apple Vision Pro, what if you had a tiny black dot video camera you wore on your forehead over an eye combined with a earpiece that let you communicate with a Her-type digital personal assistant.

The camera would serve as the “eye” of your Her. As such, all the hard work would be done by your Her. Rather than YOU seeing the XR technology, your Her would. Her, in turn would tell you in your ear what she saw.

This kind of squares the circle, at least in the near term. I suppose once XR headsets look more like glasses as opposed to birth control devices then XR will begin to live up to its ages-old promise.

A Hot Take On AI & Fiction

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

One thing about the rise of AI and its impact on the arts is there is going to come a point where we’re going to know who who creates for the sake of creation and who doesn’t. It definitely SEEMS as though no part of the creative arts will be spared from the transformative power of AI.

As such, I think as early as 18 months from now, the first popular AI movies, songs, TV shows and…gulp…novels…will begin to appear. It could be even sooner, the way things are going. So, just as I’m in the middle of the querying process, it could be that the whole endeavor will be mooted by AI. And that doesn’t even begin to address the issue of how the fucking Fourth Turning might be happening at just about the same time.

Sometimes, you just can’t win.

I say all of this because I think a lot of creative people are deluding themselves when they think they can’t avoid the implications of AI by removing all their writing from Google Docs, or whatever. AI is careening towards us at an astonishing speed and we all have to manage our expectations. Either you feel compelled to create — despite the dangers of AI — or you don’t.

If you stop creating because of some abstract fear of AI, I believe you maybe weren’t all that creative in the first place.

Could Elon Musk Pull ‘X’ Off?

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Now that Elon Musk has changed Twitter’s name, I can begin to imagine a scenario whereby he might manage to turn “X” into the “everything app.” He has vision, if nothing else.

But there is a huge obstacle to this particular situation — AI.

All this talk of turning X into the “everything app” seems very 2012, very passe. The AI era is careening towards us at an alarming rate and I would suggest that by late 2024 the effects of AI will start to be seen in the economy. All this talk of social media will be rather moot.

There was a moment in time when if Musk was doing what he’s doing now with Twitter / X that it really could put a “dent in the universe” but, lulz, I have my doubts now. In fact, if Musk really wants to do something interesting with X, I would propose he made an AI prompt native to the service. Now THAT would be a way to propel X to next-level status.

It definitely will be interesting to see how things play out. It’s at least possible that there really is a -very narrow – window of opportunity for Musk to transform Twitter / X into an “everything app.”

I still have my doubts, however.