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AIs are now re-writing history

robertelliottsmith.com

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Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#21

Post by yk »

whitten wrote: post #15

I appreciate the artistic license of saying the "AIs" are doing this, but this isn't an AI issue at all. This is a particular single purpose program "Smile!" which is producing results by combining pictures together to produce a picture the author never took with a camera. He could have blamed Snidely Whiplash, or the greek god Zeus with just as much verity.

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#22

Post by shakethemonkey »

yk wrote: post #21
whitten wrote: post #15

I appreciate the artistic license of saying the "AIs" are doing this, but this isn't an AI issue at all. This is a particular single purpose program "Smile!" which is producing results by combining pictures together to produce a picture the author never took with a camera. He could have blamed Snidely Whiplash, or the greek god Zeus with just as much verity.

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#23

Post by [deleted] »

yk wrote: post #21
whitten wrote: post #15

I appreciate the artistic license of saying the "AIs" are doing this, but this isn't an AI issue at all. This is a particular single purpose program "Smile!" which is producing results by combining pictures together to produce a picture the author never took with a camera. He could have blamed Snidely Whiplash, or the greek god Zeus with just as much verity.

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

[deleted]

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#24

Post by ccvannorman »

masklinn wrote: post #11
ivanche wrote: post #3

Some time ago I conducted a simple (albeit impossible in practice, for now at least) thought experiment. Let's say that average size of a JPEG image is 5 MB. Now, some machine could generate all possible valid JPEG files sized 5 MB. In some of those images there would be events which never happen, and never could (for example Usain Bolt running in 1896 Athens Olympic Games etc.) Of course, sheer number of such images…

I'm not sure you realise the scales involved. 5MB (40Mb) is enough to create 1e12626113 different files, that's a number with 12.5 million digits For reference, the number of atoms in the visible universe is ~1e80 (1e78 to 1e82), you'd generate 1e12626033 images per atom (doesn't look any different does it? Well it's got 80 zeroes chopped off). For a second reference, assuming you're a standard-size hooman you have 1…

:-]

I thought of a similar thing for an mp3; a computer would produce every possible "song"..but even at an incredibly low resolution of 100 kilobytes for a 3 minute song, you're looking at 2^800,000 possibilities. (1e240000).

Another cool one is possible games of Go, ~1e768. This is one reason top computers still can't touch top humans at winning the game.

Big numbers are fun. :-]

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#25

Post by waterlesscloud »

shakethemonkey wrote: post #22
yk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.

It's pretty likely that the techniques being used fall under the term AI as used by people in the field. Actually, I'd be quite surprised if that wasn't the case.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#26

Post by AndrewKemendo »

freehunter wrote: post #17
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #12

This is really cool! I agree with the author a bit, however I think his concern stems from the fact that it was largely because he did not know it was going to happen. I also think that Doctorow's dismissal of his concerns as "trivial on the scale" is silly and somewhat arrogant. Automated alteration of a picture to the point of making a new picture non-discernible from an original is a real different thing. In this…

How do you not know it will happen? I haven't used AutoAwesome since just after it was released, but at least back then it was an opt-in. Google didn't just automatically overwrite your pictures, you selected which ones you wanted to make AutoAwesome. Has that changed?

I should note that I don't have any special information about AutoAwesome, so my knowledge is based on the blog post.

The author seemed to be surprised which makes me think it was unplanned, but I might have just been reading into it.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#27

Post by yk »

shakethemonkey wrote: post #22
yk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.

Well, I am afraid that we are discussing semantics. The functions performed by the software, like facial recognition, are classical AI problems. Granted the software is certainly not any kind of general intelligence, and probably not even cutting edge AI, but it does still perform pattern recognition in unstructured data etc.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#28

Post by TeMPOraL »

shakethemonkey wrote: post #22
yk wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

It's AI in the sense that a pocket calculator from 1980 is AI. It doesn't know what it's doing, can only perform a limited range of calculations under tight constraints, has no awareness of whether or not the result is meaningful, and unless the authors went seriously overboard developing the suite, cannot learn from what it has done to improve the process.

Twenty years ago what your phone is doing now was called AI. Now you call it "search engine" and "voice recognition". In the mind of people from outside the field, "AI" means "things computers can't do". The moment they are able to do something, it stops being called "AI" and becomes mundane.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#29

Post by xnull »

masklinn wrote: post #11
ivanche wrote: post #3

Some time ago I conducted a simple (albeit impossible in practice, for now at least) thought experiment. Let's say that average size of a JPEG image is 5 MB. Now, some machine could generate all possible valid JPEG files sized 5 MB. In some of those images there would be events which never happen, and never could (for example Usain Bolt running in 1896 Athens Olympic Games etc.) Of course, sheer number of such images…

I'm not sure you realise the scales involved. 5MB (40Mb) is enough to create 1e12626113 different files, that's a number with 12.5 million digits For reference, the number of atoms in the visible universe is ~1e80 (1e78 to 1e82), you'd generate 1e12626033 images per atom (doesn't look any different does it? Well it's got 80 zeroes chopped off). For a second reference, assuming you're a standard-size hooman you have 1…

100% correct.

But what if we imagine/allow/invent the series of algorithms that 'pluck' a good picture of Usain Bolt from the set of 5MB files without inspecting too many (let's say O(log) or O(log log))?

That's only ~c25/~c5 bits of entropy to sort through, even less if the algorithm were to work in some sort of sparsity domain.

Re: AIs are now re-writing history

#30

Post by chc »

yk wrote: post #21
whitten wrote: post #15

I appreciate the artistic license of saying the "AIs" are doing this, but this isn't an AI issue at all. This is a particular single purpose program "Smile!" which is producing results by combining pictures together to produce a picture the author never took with a camera. He could have blamed Snidely Whiplash, or the greek god Zeus with just as much verity.

To generate this effect a program has to identify, that the photos are almost identical, that there are smiling people in them and then find a way to stitch the two photos together. I think that qualifies as AI.

It does, but in the article, the author is clearly using a grander sense of "AI" where computers are making autonomous decisions without our knowledge rather than just a clever heuristic. This is not that AI.
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