AI

A “weird abomination” (yes, AI-related): Pickles and Cat

I am one of those who believes we are in a big ol’ AI bubble and that bubble is going to burst and leave a big mess that will probably leave tech CEOs unscathed, but result in more mass layoffs of workers. Such is our society as of now.

I understand and agree with those who object to AI companies hoovering up data without permission, then repackaging it in dubious and energy-sucking ways. Generally, AI is bad, and its positives are small. For me, it has been a silly diversion when I indulge in it, which is not often. For example, I have a NightCafe account (an AI image generation site) with over 3,000 unsued credits. You get 5 free credits per day. So yeah.

But I occasionally indulge and one of my interweb friends shared some silly songs he’d made using Suno. It was mildly amusing, but then he mentioned you can write your own lyrics, so I had to try it.

I brainstormed for several minutes (quite literally) and wrote a song called “Pickles and Cat.” I told Suno to make the song country and upbeat. It generated two versions. This is the first and “best” (IMO) and is likely the closest I’ll ever come to writing and performing music. I’m good with that. Garage Band is hard.

(I made the artwork in Canva, it was a labour of love.)

Pickles and Cat

I like my pickles and I like my cat
My cat likes pickles, well, how about that?

I put my pickles in jars
And I send 'em to Mars

Now the Martians have my pickles
Nothing else rhymes with pickles

And the Martians they ate them all up
I sent my cat but they wanted a pup
I told them no sir, I can't do that
Then they said OK, send the cat

Pickles and cat, my two favorite things
Green and orange, they make my bells ring

Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some
But not mine, I'm not sharing none

When my cat got to Mars he scratched a couch
It was a Martian, and the Martian yelled ouch

My cat ran away to a big rocket ship
Pressed all the buttons and went on a trip

Landed on a big space rock and scratched up the place
Now no one goes there, it's his own private space

Pickles and cat, my two favorite things
Green and orange, they make my bells ring

Pickles and cat, you should get yourself some
But not mine, I'm not sharing none

And for the completist, here’s the direct Suno link: Pickles and Cat by @interstellaralbums985 | Suno

Google’s attempt to enrich Google through “AI”

I feel like “AI” always needs to be in quotation marks, because while it is clearly artificial, there is no apparent intelligence involved. It’s all just an elaborate guessing game based on a giant pool of answers that could be accurate, inaccurate, made-up, sarcastic, or some enticing combination.

Google is now rolling out an “AI Overview” in its search results, a furthering of its efforts to keep everyone on its search page (to show them ads and make $$$), with the side effect of killing off the rest of the web as all other sites slowly starve for traffic, revenue and everything else.

It is easy to find examples of this overview being hilariously and sometimes dangerously wrong. Google appears to be fixing the most egregious examples, no doubt by coming across them in their own searches and then fixing the results manually (ie. with an actual human). If this is their plan, they are going to need a lot of humans.

Here’s just one story from Ars Technica and one screenshot (below) illustrating the whole big pile of nonsense. I really don’t think this is going to improve over time in any significant way. Since this is Google, I’ll go further and say AI Overview could eventually end up in their graveyard along with the hundreds of other things they’ve killed.

GIGO

This may or may not conclude AI Week on the blog.

Charlie Stross’s “We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus”

This is the text of a talk Charlie Stross gave today (November 10) at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart. He talks about how science fiction writers influenced many of today’s most powerful tech giants–in all the wrong ways. Entertaining and also a nice section of SF history, dating back to the late 19th century.

We’re sorry we created the Tormet Nexus

AI interprets my fuzzy college ID photo from 1990

Using the tool found here (story on it from Engadget here), I input my blurry college ID photo from 1990 (we barely had color photos back then) and here’s a before and after shot. While it clearly has trouble with glasses, I think the AI made my lips look sexier than reality, so I can’t really complain about the results.

Before: Blurry. After: Come hither.

I like that it didn’t know what to do with some of the artifacts, so it enhanced those as well. This stuff is probably going to be freaky good in a few more years.