Humans Need Not Apply

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Tue Oct 20, 2020 3:12 am

Lela chess zero (Google deep mind)

Continues to astound chess masters and players worldwide

Everything we thought we knew about chess was wrong

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Tue Oct 20, 2020 3:15 am

Lela crushes the best chess engines, and continues to come up with winning moves in games that were thought to be well understood

They use known openings for the first moves, then let her do her thing

It doesn’t take long for new moves to show up, and stunning victories follow

It’s fucking truly mind blowing

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Tue Oct 20, 2020 7:19 am

Oh, and yeah, humans need not apply

A human has no chance of winning

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Wed Oct 21, 2020 2:22 am

https://i.imgur.com/Nig3Sxx.jpg

A portrait of Jesus "reconstructed" with some AI. Details here: https://twitter.com/ganbrood/status/130 ... 03/photo/1

:mrgreen:

Rob Lister · Post by **Rob Lister** » Sun Nov 22, 2020 9:36 am

There are now businesses that sell fake people. On the website Generated.Photos, you can buy a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000. If you just need a couple of fake people — for characters in a video game, or to make your company website appear more diverse — you can get their photos for free on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. Adjust their likeness as needed; make them old or young or the ethnicity of your choosing. If you want your fake person animated, a company called Rosebud.AI can do that and can even make them talk.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... faces.html

I recommend clicking the link. There's some cool html going on there.

ETA: all of there examples are beautiful people; there are no ugly ones. That might be a flaw

Oh, and

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Sun Nov 22, 2020 2:38 pm

Finally, my dream has come true

Anaxagoras · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Sun Nov 29, 2020 6:01 am

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Wed Dec 09, 2020 4:11 pm

https://files.explosm.net/comics/Kris/g ... g?t=50FD17

Anaxagoras · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Wed Dec 16, 2020 12:15 am

Virtual Influencers Make Real Money While Covid Locks Down Human Stars

What is a 'virtual influencer'? An AI-created persona used to advertise products on social media. The social media 'influencer' market is $15 billion and growing.

Virtual influencers were already gaining, well, influence long before Covid-19 struck.
Seraphine’s flowing pink hair and cat-themed Instagram posts had attracted thousands of fans when the news that she was created by Riot Games Inc. — the studio behind smash-hit esports game League of Legends — sent her account viral. Now her follower count is nearly 400,000 and she’s making appearances in Shanghai to promote her music, while most flesh-and-blood social-media stars are stuck at home. Despite not being real, she still sometimes wears a mask.

:)

At a time when interacting safely with other humans can no longer be taken for granted, the appetite for digital spokespeople is accelerating. Brands are expected to spend as much as $15 billion annually on influencer marketing by 2022, up from $8 billion last year, according to Business Insider Intelligence. A growing slice of that money belongs to virtual influencers, and traditional marketing is experiencing serious disruption.
“Virtual influencers, while fake, have real business potential,” says Christopher Travers, the founder of virtualhumans.org, a website that documents the industry. “They are cheaper to work with than humans in the long term, are 100% controllable, can appear in many places at once, and, most importantly, they never age or die.”

Seraphine — who on Oct. 13 was also revealed to be a playable character on League of Legends, which draws as many as 8 million concurrent daily users — is one of about 125 active virtual influencers, according to Travers. More than 50 of those debuted on social media in the 18 months to June 2020. On YouTube, virtual influencers number more than 5,000.
Digital avatars developed by creative agencies, the biggest influencers can attract brand partnerships and other lucrative deals. With 2.8 million social-media followers and a fee of about $8,500 per sponsored post, Lil Miquela — a “model” who’s done promotions for Calvin Klein, Prada and other fashion brands — is the industry’s highest earner, according to OnBuy, a U.K.-based online marketplace. OnBuy estimates Lil Miquela will make about $11.7 million for her creators this year. As Covid-19 leads to the cancellation of product launches and sponsored travel, some human influencers are seeing revenue streams dry up. Meanwhile Lil Miquela recently debuted a music video at this year’s online-only Lollapalooza festival.

I wonder if someday our artificial overlords will have avatars like these?

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Wed Dec 16, 2020 2:41 am

William Gibson predicted this, wrote about this, it's in his book Virtual Light

If you haven't read it (and I know you have not), you might enjoy the fuck out of it

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Wed Dec 16, 2020 2:42 am

It's part of a trilogy

Pyrrho · Post by **Pyrrho** » Tue Dec 29, 2020 9:19 pm

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Fri Jan 15, 2021 11:25 pm

Uh, oh, we're doomed (again): Calculations Show It'll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI

Excerpt:

"A super-intelligence poses a fundamentally different problem than those typically studied under the banner of 'robot ethics'," write the researchers.

"This is because a superintelligence is multi-faceted, and therefore potentially capable of mobilising a diversity of resources in order to achieve objectives that are potentially incomprehensible to humans, let alone controllable."

Spoiler:

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Sun Jan 17, 2021 12:38 am

Facial recognition reveals political party in troubling new research

Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person’s political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. The study, from a group that also showed that sexual preference can seemingly be inferred this way, candidly addresses and carefully avoids the pitfalls of “modern phrenology,” leading to the uncomfortable conclusion that our appearance may express more personal information that we think.

The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University’s Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person’s sexual preference could be predicted from facial data.

The study drew criticism not so much for its methods but for the very idea that something that’s notionally non-physical could be detected this way. But Kosinski’s work, as he explained then and afterwards, was done specifically to challenge those assumptions and was as surprising and disturbing to him as it was to others. The idea was not to build a kind of AI gaydar — quite the opposite, in fact. As the team wrote at the time, it was necessary to publish in order to warn others that such a thing may be built by people whose interests went beyond the academic:
We were really disturbed by these results and spent much time considering whether they should be made public at all. We did not want to enable the very risks that we are warning against. The ability to control when and to whom to reveal one’s sexual orientation is crucial not only for one’s well-being, but also for one’s safety.

We felt that there is an urgent need to make policymakers and LGBTQ communities aware of the risks that they are facing. We did not create a privacy-invading tool, but rather showed that basic and widely used methods pose serious privacy threats.
Similar warnings may be sounded here, for while political affiliation at least in the U.S. (and at least at present) is not as sensitive or personal an element as sexual preference, it is still sensitive and personal. A week hardly passes without reading of some political or religious “dissident” or another being arrested or killed. If oppressive regimes could obtain what passes for probable cause by saying “the algorithm flagged you as a possible extremist,” instead of for example intercepting messages, it makes this sort of practice that much easier and more scalable.

The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski’s paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site’s questionnaire.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/13/facia ... -research/

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:22 am

Jukebox

We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.

https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/

Go listen to some samples: it's at least good enough for mall or elevator music, incredible! (If it was done as they say…) Catching on it would presumably put hordes of musical grunts out of their jobs.

Anaxagoras · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:35 am

Witness wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 2:22 am
Jukebox

We’re introducing Jukebox, a neural net that generates music, including rudimentary singing, as raw audio in a variety of genres and artist styles. We’re releasing the model weights and code, along with a tool to explore the generated samples.
https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/

Go listen to some samples: it's at least good enough for mall or elevator music, incredible! (If it was done as they say…) Catching on it would presumably put hordes of musical grunts out of their jobs.

I noticed that both the County music one and the Heavy Metal have the lyric "I'll be there in your night; I'll be there when the condition's right". :notsure:

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:14 am

2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm

Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company’s chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it.

In recent years, farmers on flat farms have been using new tools for making farming better or easier. They’re using drones and robots to improve crop maintenance, while artificial intelligence is also on the rise, with over 1,600 startups and total investments reaching tens of billions of dollars. Plenty is one of those startups. However, flat farms still use a lot of water and land, while a Plenty vertical farm can produce the same quantity of fruits and vegetables as a 720-acre flat farm, but on only 2 acres!

https://www.intelligentliving.co/vertic ... flat-farm/

Surface, OK, but what about cost/benefit?

Longish video where they discuss the details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uXdnjXIGjI

Anaxagoras · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:12 am

I wonder if those claims are hyped. I am wary of claims that sound too good to be true. Don't forget Theranos.

Maybe this is the future though.

Anaxagoras · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Thu Feb 18, 2021 11:23 am

I've seen this guy's videos before and he's pretty good. This video was recommended immediately after I watched the one above.

ETA: he made a mistake in the video, which he corrected:

Hi Folks – as many of you have pointed out, I made a mistake when I said that Ultraviolet lights are used in vertical farms. In fact, it is not ultraviolet light - that would burn the plant. It's a mix of red and blue light, which is the part of the light spectrum that the plant absorbs. My apologies for this error.

That's good to know. UV light after all is a little bit dangerous, isn't it?

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Fri Feb 19, 2021 11:33 pm

https://i.imgur.com/35iIK3J.jpg

To the automation of crime recognition, forward!

xouper · Post by **xouper** » Sat Feb 20, 2021 10:48 am

In case anyone was wondering . . .

Motorist's face itch nets traffic fine
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1151203.shtml

The Jinan traffic department on Wednesday canceled the ticket, explaining that the traffic surveillance system automatically identifies a driver's motion and then takes a photo, mistaking the man's face scratching for talking on a phone while driving.

"Next time, remember to show your palm to the camera before you scratch," one Weibo user posted jokingly.

Pyrrho · Post by **Pyrrho** » Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:15 pm

Link:

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Sun Feb 21, 2021 1:46 am

Pyrrho wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 6:15 pm [The extraordinary power of a computer in 1962]

Rob Lister · Post by **Rob Lister** » Sun Feb 21, 2021 2:41 pm

That's one smart mutherfucker

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Sun Feb 21, 2021 3:53 pm

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Mon Feb 22, 2021 3:02 am

Article, if you care: https://artificialintelligence-news.com ... unch-soon/

Pyrrho · Post by **Pyrrho** » Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:58 am

Link:

I have an original in the basement that I have tried charging up from time to time and once it's charged, I press the button and it give me a "Weep-wow" kind of sound and goes dead again.

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Thu Feb 25, 2021 3:07 am

Pyrrho wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:58 am
Link:

It's things like this that make me doubt robots will ever take over anything

Pyrrho · Post by **Pyrrho** » Thu Feb 25, 2021 3:11 am

All they have to achieve is the function level of your typical middle manager. Those that don't reach that level can become CEOs.

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Fri Feb 26, 2021 8:02 pm

https://twitter.com/geoffpilkington/sta ... 10432?s=21

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Fri Feb 26, 2021 11:55 pm

Pyrrho wrote: ↑Thu Feb 25, 2021 2:58 am [Roomba]

https://i.imgur.com/D2fxcWG.jpg

Soon we'll get ambushed by the feral ones. :|

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Mon Mar 01, 2021 12:41 am

Facial Recognition Drones Will Use AI to Take the Perfect Picture of You

Facial recognition technology has been banned by multiple US cities, including Portland, Boston, and San Francisco. Besides the very real risk of the tech being biased against minorities, the technology also carries with it an uneasy sense that we’re creeping towards a surveillance state.

Despite these concerns, though, work to improve facial recognition tech is still forging ahead, with both private companies and governments looking to harness its potential for military, law enforcement, or profit-seeking applications.

One such company is an Israeli startup called AnyVision Interactive Technologies. AnyVision is looking to kick facial recognition up a notch by employing drones for image capture. A US patent application published earlier this month outlines the company’s system, which sounds like something straight out of a Black Mirror episode.

The drone captures an image of its “target person,” then analyzes the image to figure out how to get a better image; it adjusts its positioning in relation to the target, say by flying a bit lower or centering its angle. It then captures more images, and runs them through a machine learning model to get a “face classification” and a “classification probability score,” essentially trying to identify whether the person being photographed is in fact the person it’s looking for. If the probability score is too low, the system gets routed back to the first step, starting the image capture and refinement process all over again.

If the thought of a drone programmed to move itself around in whatever way necessary to capture the clearest possible picture of your face doesn’t freak you out, you must not have seen much dystopian sci-fi, nor cherish privacy as a basic right. Stationary cameras used for this purpose can at least be ducked under, turned away from, or quickly passed by; but a flying camera running on an algorithm that’s determined to identify its target is a different—and much more invasive—story.

The nightmare scenario is for technology like AnyVision’s to be employed by governments and law enforcement agencies. But the company says this is far from its intent; CEO Avi Golan told Fast Company that the picture-taking drones could be used for things like package delivery (to identify recipients and make sure the right person is getting the right package), or to help track employees for safety purposes in dangerous workplaces like mines. Golan added that there are “many opportunities in the civilian market” where AnyVision’s technology could be useful.

https://www.thislifemag.com/2021/02/fac ... se-ai.html

Anyvision

Anaxagoras · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Wed Mar 03, 2021 9:36 am

Witness wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:14 am
2-Acre Vertical Farm Run By AI And Robots Out-Produces 720-Acre Flat Farm

Article on vertical farming in Japan (and elsewhere):

Sustainable vertical farming offers food for thought in a changing world (The Mainichi)

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Wed Mar 03, 2021 4:39 pm

That is going to be great for growing weed

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Wed Mar 03, 2021 4:39 pm

And also answers how they will grow food on Mars

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Thu Mar 04, 2021 12:42 am

AI finds more than 1,200 gravitational lensing candidates

https://i.imgur.com/ASG63ir.jpg
A gravitational lens found in the DESI Legacy Surveys data. There are four sets of lensed images that correspond to four background galaxies, which appear as partial rings around an orange galaxy at the center and foreground. Credit: DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, Berkeley Lab, DOE, KPNO, CTIO, NOIRLab, NSF, AURA
A research team with participation by Berkeley Lab physicists has used artificial intelligence to identify more than 1,200 possible gravitational lenses—objects that can be powerful markers for the distribution of dark matter. The count, if all of the candidates turn out to be lenses, would more than double the number of known gravitational lenses.
...
All of the candidate lenses—discovered using a form of artificial intelligence known as deep residual neural networks—are considered to be of the strong variety, meaning they exhibit highly visible lensing effects. A study detailing the new lensing candidates has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is available at arXiv.org.

"I really thought it would be many years before anyone would find this many gravitational lenses," said David Schlegel, a senior physicist at Berkeley Lab who participated in this study. "It's just amazing to know that you're seeing, very clearly, space itself being warped by a massive object." Schlegel also participated in an earlier study that turned up 335 new strong lensing candidates.

Researchers used a sample of 632 observed lenses and lens candidates, and 21,000 non-lenses to train the deep neural networks used in the study. The sample set was obtained from two sky surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS) and Dark Energy Survey (DES). About one in 10,000 massive galaxies was expected to be a strong gravitational lensing candidate.

https://phys.org/news/2021-02-ai-gravit ... dates.html

Anaxagoras · Post by **Anaxagoras** » Thu Mar 04, 2021 1:12 am

robinson wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 4:39 pm And also answers how they will grow food on Mars

Yeah, you would certainly need this kind of technology to grow food on Mars, because the soil there wouldn't help plants to grow. It would probably just kill them.

Pyrrho · Post by **Pyrrho** » Tue Mar 09, 2021 10:48 pm

Link:

robinson · Post by **robinson** » Tue Mar 09, 2021 11:42 pm

I’m sure Biden will get right on this

Witness · Post by **Witness** » Wed Mar 10, 2021 2:27 am

AI generated faces (or so they say): https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/

Example:

https://i.imgur.com/UErl0Bm.jpg