The world is continuing to rush headlong into a new universe of Artificial Intelligence but apparently I died before the gold rush began.
At least that’s what WatchGPT an OpenAI based app for the Apple Watch thinks. I decided to give it a try and asked it a simple question: Who is Warner Crocker?
After explaining it wasn’t a search engine it spit out some “facts” including that I died on Christmas Day 2020. I must have missed that.
Although my demise sounds pretty factual I’m still hanging around as far as I know. And sure the years since December of 2020 were kinda sketchy due to the pandemic, so far I have avoided COVID and other life threatening adventures. The cast for my current gig seem to respond to me as if I’m alive and kicking. My family and friends still treat me like I’m walking around and causing trouble.
Granted most of these AI products let you know that they’re still in development. Still, I can imagine quite a few scenarios where folks input a query and get death notices that then get reported as facts in whatever vehicle they’re looking the fact up for.
Let’s list a few flights of fancy here:
A school paper on a contemporary figure.
Checking out info on someone you might want to date.
Running a check on a perspective employee or employer.
And to think, big companies are jumping into this pool feet first assuming they will be able to save money by cutting their workforce.
I’m wondering if my wife can use this to make an insurance claim?
There’s really no such thing as a day off when you’re directing a show. But today, Monday, is our day off. The actors do very much need down time to deal with the realities of life and also process a bit. And yeah, I’ll do a grocery run, throw some stuff in the laundry and some other personal stuff. But it’s also a breath when I prep for the week ahead. Sure is nice to be able to get away from all of those other screens and sit on the porch swing with just an iPad to do that.
Why are we calling this current fad/trend/gold rush into Artificial Intelligence “artificial?” Shouldn’t we be calling it Accumulated Intelligence?
From what I’m reading the output these new services are spitting out is more like a mash-up of what they’ve scraped and collected from around the Internet. You know. Stuff created by humans. Apparently the writings, the artwork, the photos, the music, the code, the thoughts, the you name it, have been collected and are being tumbled and jumbled up and presented as responses. So somebody can charge you for it or sell ads against it.
And knocking the moniker again here, that of course means it’s all been said and done before. There’s not much we can really credit to divine inspiration beyond the talent to discover, describe or display what already exists. Because that’s sorta kinda how we humans evolve (or are intelligently designed) anyway. We gain knowledge and intelligence through our experiences. And through those experiences we become who we are, think what we think, and create what we create based on the knowledge we accumulate.
I’m assuming that’s what the makers of artificial intelligence call real or natural intelligence. But it’s tough to sell ads against that.
Given that we humans are known for both brilliance and the not-so-brilliant in what we say, do, think, create and accumulate, you can say we as a species struggle a bit with the tensions brought about by natural intelligence. Certainly we seem to be hitting a speed bump on the brilliance part as the not-so-brilliant part continues to plow-ahead of late.
But again, this AI fad is taking what exists, shaking and baking, stirring the pot, and presenting it to us in a newly polished form we can get on our smartphones while waiting for the transit apps to give us wrong information about our train’s arrival time.
The very human response when someone learns something new or that an answer is wrong can certainly be “I didn’t know that.” What’s funny with these machine learners though is that in the early going they seem to be spitting out mistakes just like humans do. And taking the same kind of offense when called on it. So nothing new under the sun there.
And apparently these machines need to be governed by rules. Well, that’s only human too. We govern ourselves (well, some of us do) in order to try and remain civil and polite. And protect our profit margins. Again, only human.
So, I’m saying it’s early enough in this game that we should strip away the “artificial” in AI and change it to “accumulated.” Because sure as shooting at some point down the line some big error is going to be spit out by a machine that causes something bad to happen. And we’ll shift the blame to the machines. Just like we humans always do.
But I guess there’s one benefit to this “artificialness.” The machines can’t plead ignorance or “I don’t recall” when things get inconvenient or uncomfortable. At least until we start using “artificial lawyers.”
Is it real or is it Memorex? Remember those days? We’ve been treated to questions like those for some time now when it comes to music, film, and other means of arts and entertainment. And the pace of things seem to be quickening as the powers that be in these industries are jumping with both feet into the big tech Artificial Intelligence rush.
New technology is great when it can advance creativity. New technology is also bit scary when we don’t know exactly what it’s going to yield. But the one thing we do know is that if the bean counters think they can save a buck and make two by using a new innovation they’ll take that leap, regardless of the risks it might pose to the creative spirit.
I’ve been talking about Artificial Intelligence a bit here and obviously will continue to do so. It’s the thing of the moment. Which means some hope it’s the thing of the future. And it just might well be. But how that is going to impact the arts is going to be a tricky future to navigate. Perhaps after Google, Mircosoft and any other tech giants get their AI search engines up and running we can ask and find out. (Google calls theirs Bard. Seriously?)
We’ve already seen technology create magic in audio and film/TV. De-aging is a popular recent trend in film. Of course that follows the trends of CGI characters and CGI backgrounds and CGI just about everything else.
We’ve got computer generated narrations for eBooks competing with live readers. We’ve been enhancing audio tracks for decades, and in the most recent decade or two we’ve been enhancing live performers.
Yesterday there was a story in Vice about voice actors being asked to sign over the rights to their voices so their clients can use artificial intelligence to generate synthetic versions for future work, perhaps replacing the need for the artist for future work.
Each technology advance gets met with both praise and criticism. Some deserved. Some not so. I’m no luddite or traditonalist who eschews these advancements. But I think we’re heading into tricky ground in this next chapter of entertainment and creativity that parallels what we’re experiencing in real life.
There’s that old and recently accelerating propaganda truism (ha!) that teaches us it’s not about separating fact and fiction. In the Peacock network’s series The Undeclared War there’s a great sequence when a news editor sums it up while explaining the way it is to a younger new recruit:
“The point is to get people used to the idea that everything’s a lie. There is no truth. Once they accept that. Biggest liar wins.”
Who cares if a search result yields a false result? Who cares if Carrie Fisher is dead when she’s still appearing in Star Wars? Who cares if deep fake videos or audio can sabotage a politician or a company? Who cares if the audiobook you’re listening to is read by a human or a computer?
Set aside the labor issues and putting folks out of work. Those are real discussions that need to happen. But what if Tom Hanks, who is pretty darn excited by the de-aging process in film, or rather a digitally created Tom Hanks keeps starring in movies long after he’s gone. Hell, we could have Forrest Gump appearing with world leaders that haven’t been born yet twenty years after they’re dead.
We all had a good laugh at the manipulative creation of boy bands awhile back. Don’t think we won’t see and hear new bands created out of the whole cloth of digital bits and bytes. There’s no question in my mind that we’ll see an entire film created out of an AI prompt some day down the road.
There will be innovation. There will be excitement and celebration and there will be reactions. Some of which might actually be human.
There’s an excellent discussion about design vs practicality going on currently within the Apple community that gathers around the Mastodon water cooler. It was kicked off by Matt Birchler responding to a post from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber commenting on how far ahead third party iOS apps for Mastodon were than those on the Android platform. Birchler filled out his thoughts in a post called The Shocking Stage of Enthusiast Apps on Android.
John Gruber continued the thread on Daring Fireball with an excellent post called Making Our Hearts Sing. That in turn prompted Frederico Viticci to pen a post on MacStories called The Practicality of Art in Software. I’d highly recommend you read Matt, John, and Viticci’s posts.
Beyond a brief summary let me just say that I’m in profound agreement with each of the posts. There are differences in the arguments, but they all aim at the same larger point about Apple.
Yes, in my view Android apps for Mastodon pale in comparison to iOS apps. As backed up by my own experiences, I do feel the general design of Android apps also lack what Gruber calls “the artistic value in software and interface design” that he sees in iOS apps. AND, as Viticci says “As a computer maker or app developer, you have to strike that balance between the aspirational and the practical, the artistic and the functional.”
The two cents I’m about to add to the discussion isn’t in contrast to what these three have laid out. Like I said I’m in agreement with the points in each argument. Think of this as tangential to the discussion.
So here’s the tangent.
Design is key to any endeavor that’s creating a product. We can talk form following function, or practicality, or art for art’s sake. Doesn’t matter where you enter the discussion. It’s key. And the posts I’ve mentioned above do an excellent job of hitting those points.
Apple has captured, captivated, seduced and perhaps suckered many of us with its approach to the design of its products. In my opinion I think they’ve largely succeeded. If you “think different” then I won’t question your taste, but I’ll just acknowledge that we sail on two different oceans. That said, Apple is also masterful in the design of the marketing and rollout of products. In many ways the product and the marketing of the product are inseparable.
But I think Apple has designed itself into a predicament in the same way many tastemakers do. Once you embody an asthetic and it becomes not only your brand but your essence you create almost impossible semiotic expectations. You’re no longer designing just your next creation, you’re designing to meet the expectations you’ve created. It can be a trap when you follow that path OR if you deviate from it.
And that’s where the trap gets tricky. Be real with me here. When you see amazing and beautiful screenshots of a new app I’m sure you’re often as tempted as I am to push the Buy button before you even read and understand the description of what the app offers. Especially if the App is from a developer you’ve had good experiences with in the past. It’s no different than following any other artist in any other medium. Favorite singer, buy the next album. Favorite author, buy the next book.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying all app developers, Apple, or other artists are trying to pull one over on us. (I’m sure some are but that’s another topic for another day.) Using a combined appeal to our senses and our reservoir of good feelings from past experiences is what designing products is all about. The successful designers know just how to reach us and build a following. Some would call it maniuplation. They’re correct. The intent of most art is to maniuplate a response.
Take Weather apps for example. Goodness knows how many of those I tried just because those radar displays looked gorgeous in screenshots. The well worn cliché of not buying a book by its cover certainly applies to App marketing and we all know how clichés get started.
And then there are the artists and designers that break the mold. Try something new. Take a different, sometimes radical approach. That may work in the long view once a more full body of work can be viewed from a distance. But it’s risky in the immediate market of expectations, which is why its viewed as a departure. But strike gold and the risk can pay off.
Play to our attactions to the pretty. The shiny. The well designed. The well packaged. Play to our desires for something familiar while yearning for something new. Create tension with those competing desires and debut that “departure” inside a wrapping of the familiar and you get a double bang for the buck. And here’s where Frederico Viticci’s long, and well documented struggle with Stage Manager works so well as the prime example in this tangent.
Stage Manager is Apple’s attempt at a windowing solution for iPads and Macs. iPad users have been yearning for a windowing or multi-tasking solution for awhile. What they’ve been yearning for is something most are already familiar with from experiences with laptops and desktops. Surely this would be beautiful in a “think different” sort of way. But not too “think different” in the practical mechanics.
If you’re an iPad user I am reasonably sure you were awed by the demo of Stage Manager when you first saw it. It looked magical. It looked magical in that Apple way. It looked like the solution many iPad users have all been waiting for. I know it did for me. And it was rolled out in all the ways we’ve all become accustomed to.
But the practicality of Stage Manager on the iPad largely failed to live up to the promise of those expectations once users got their hands on it. Frankly, I find it more than a dissapointment. But the design from demo to packaging of the idea was certainly alluring and seductive enough to get us (me) in the door.
So to wrap this up and get back to the points about design asthetics, practicality vs pretty, and Mastodon Apps on competing platforms let me say this. I’ve downloaded and followed the development of many of the iOS Apps for Mastodon. I’m genuinely excited by what I see and feel. Although there are differences, some are starting to morph a bit into the same look and feel but the feature sets (currently) set them apart.
After giving a spin to some of the Android Mastodon apps I’ve been dissappointed in the smaller selection available and also the lack of strong design statements in those that do exist. And again, features sets give them distinction. I’m sure others feel differently and vive la differénce.
This difference though cements my thinking that the expectations and semiotic differences between Apple and Android design philosophies are baked in at this point in the game. Apple has created such a deeper dependency on design prowess. Android’s “come as you are” approach leaves more room for less when it comes to the art of visual design. Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with ether approach from a user perspective. Choose what you’re attracted to and have fun with your choice.
The larger and more precarious point with this tangent is that Apple’s rich design expectations, as powerful as they are, are also Apple’s Achilles heel. Great artists aren’t afraid to fail. Great product makers who use great art as a selling point need to tred more carefully to avoid the level of disappointment that can turn a legacy into a burden.
The tech word, the academic world, the business world and a few other worlds are having a moment over ChatGPT and other Artificial Intelligence innovations. For those not in the know, ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence product created by a company called OpenAI that allows users to input a query or a request. It’s trained on the bazillion words that exist on the Internet. And it can generate output that can be anything from an essay to a poem, computer code, a piece of digital art, typed text that can turn into script, something resembling an answer to a search query, to a play. Below is play I generated with the simple request: “write a short play about shepherds.” (click on the image below to enlarge it.)
Some are thrilled. (I’m sure the sheep in the story are not.) Some are concerned.
It’s illuminating quite a paradox. Educational institutions see benefits and also as a potential tool for students to cheat when it comes to writing assignments. Artists see this as potentially crowding them out of work and entire new ways for new artists to express themselves. In the journalism world we’ve already seen CNET start to use this form of AI to generate content (and get criticized for not disclosing it.) Buzzfeed says it’s going to be using it in some capacities to “personalize” some of its content.
I’m not quite sure about the PR spin on that one. Sounds like it might have been generated by a ChatGPT PR request instead of a thinking human. But then again, most PR speak is formulaic anyway.
It’s not just text either. There are now tools to generate AI digital art, music, computer code and who knows what else.
And yes, there are accuracy problems. And context problems. And plagarism problems. And…problems.
But AI is all the rage and it’s stoking rage from those that see this as a harbinger of doom vs those who see it as the future. There are some who think (and hope) this might mean the beginning of the end for Google’s search dominance. Microsoft has made a huge investment in ChatGPT prompting some to envision a more intelligent Clippy dancing across our desktops. The Chicago Tribune is wondering if ChatGPT can replace restaurant critics. Apparently Real Estate Agents are seeing dollar signs.
Maureen Dowd of the New York Times took things out for a spin and wordsmithed the description AI: Actually Insipid Until It’s Actively Insidious. (or at least her headline writer did.) That was after doing an interview with with an AI Shakespeare. Zounds!
A friend of mine, Sumocat, is generating fake Mastodon posts using a few of the tools and some iOS shortcuts to create fake Mastodon posts. (He labels them as such.)
So there’s fun and games and then there’s maybe not so fun and games.
The labor issue is a legitimate concern in the same way we’ve seen technology innovations create labor issues throughout history. (Anyone still selling printing presses?) Unfortunately no artificial or non-artificial intelligence has yet to figure out how to get companies to put some distance between announcements of large layoffs and new technology investments. Timing issues aside, the cold cruel economics of innovation always surface when something cool comes along.
I can’t and won’t judge whether or not this is a good or bad thing at this point. One never can tell how the day is going to turn out when it first dawns. But it’s a thing. And it’s a paradox.
Let me tell you a short story about my field, the theatre. Years ago electronic, synthesized and digital music technology advanced to the point where producers could replace entire orchestras with a digital track of the score. Instead of a conductor or music director all you needed to run the show was a sound engineer to push the go button and voila, the theatre filled with the booming sound of a full orchestra. Heck, you could even digitally enhance the singing during particularly strenuous dance numbers.
The change didn’t happen overnight. First orchestras started reducing their numbers as digital instrumentation meant that fewer players needed to be hired. Purists howled. Bean counters cheered. I don’t think any of that is news to anybody. But here’s the story part:
I directed a tracked musical for a dear friend and colleague. We were standing in the back of theatre watching the audience enjoy the show as it neared its final moments. He turned to me and asked what I thought of the music quality. I answered that I thought it was decent but not great and it didn’t allow the show to breathe properly. (The tracks he’d rented weren’t the best and this was in the early days of this trend.) He said that he didn’t think anyone would notice. And then he delivered the punchline: “But I hate it that I need to do this.”
The sad reality boils down to economics. It’s so much cheaper for a producer to rent tracks than to hire musicians to rehearse and play the score live. Licensing agencies are making a decent piece of change from that business.
Back in the day to engage an orchestra or a pit band or just a piano player, producers would rent the score from the licensing house. Hard copy scores would be distributed via mail or delivery service. Those scores would get used by musicians. By used I mean they also got marked up with notes, pages were dog-eared and worse. And then when the show concluded those markings had to be erased and folded pages straightened before sending them back to the licensing house.
That evolved into electronic distribution of scores, which simply transferred the cost of re-producing those scripts from the licensing agency to the producer.
The point I’m sure you’ve grasped behind this story is that innovation induces change all along any chain of production. Lives and professions are affected. Some lose out, others gain.
It seems almost inhumane to replace humans with the output of machines. But we’re well practiced at it and the almighty dollar eventually erases our memories of the tensions or dulls the pain these moments of human ingenuity create to replace humans.
But in our age of misinformation, when trusting what we see, hear, and read requires developing new skill sets because humans who have always been adept at creating misinformation have figured out how to really profit by doing so, the beginnings of using Artificial Intelligence to create “news” we see, hear, and read eerily feels like it has the potential to be too far a step over a line that maybe we shouldn’t cross.
Which ultimately is a paradox. AI is computer science. The essence of which is simply bits that are on and bits that are off. 1’s and 0’s. True. False. One would think that distinction reduced to that binary response could be helpful in sorting out fact from fiction.
It’s not. It’s not simply because it takes humans to create it. And it’s not because those humans are training these AI robots against all of the accuracies and inaccuracies, truths, lies, facts and fiction humans have created along the way.
It’s an endless paradox.
And here’s what ChatGPT has to say about that: (click to expand)
iOS and Mac developer Tapbots gladdened the hearts of many today with the iPhone and iPad release of Ivory, a new app for using the social network Mastodon.
There’s an intangible, permeating quality about Tapbots apps that trascends features and specs: craftsmanship. With Ivory, launching today on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, you can instantly appreciate that level of care and refinement that the Texas-based duo is well known for after more than a decade on the App Store. But there’s something else, too: for the first time in a few years, it feels like Mark and Paul are having fun again.
He covers the ins and outs of the features of the app well, so if you’re interested check out that review.
What I will spend a few mintues on is the rich journey the developers Paul and Mark have gifted all of us interested in the app and its development.
Tapbots is a premium app developer for Apple devices. Its Twitter client Tweetbot set many a standard along with the other great apps that have come out of that company. (I’ve used them all.) When things began going sideways with Twitter after Elon Musk’s purchase many became concerned about the longevity of the third-party Twitter apps that we used to access that social network. (Twitter’s own app has never been liked, only tolerated.)
Sure enough, Musk and his minions unceremoniously cut off access for Tapbots, IconFactory, and other 3rd-party app developers for his newly acquired plaything. When I say unceremonius-think kicked to the curb without so much as a fare thee well.
As Paul and Mark (and other developers for other apps) began working on apps to access Mastodon, they all created quite a bit of excitement along the way. But the Tapbots team not only treated us to a beautiful first beta version of the app, but with wonderful glimpses into some of their process along the way.
I can tell you that the journey was keenly followed, supported and encouraged. As will be the new Ivory app. I can speak for myself and only speculate for others, but their efforts in sharing the journey add an intangible yet very real extra-special value to the lovely finished product that exceeds anything I’ve ever felt or seen surrounding the release of a piece of sofware.
Let me just say this. Tapbots has long been a favorite developer of software for Apple devices. Paul and Mark capitalized on that hard won and much deserved loyalty and took what could have been a crushing blow and turned it into what I believe will be an extraordinary success story by letting their users participate along the way.
Any company, regardless of product, should take note.
Watching the silliness and seriousness of Twitter’s continuing continuance is both entertaining and distressing. The plot seems to unfold anew, but it’s actually old stories mashed up enough to make them feel new, or a least new adjacent. Pick your myth and if you’re screaming “spoiler alert” you need a little more mileage on you before you protest too much. Icarus irony abounds.
The latest chapter featuring the shutdown of API’s essentially killing off a number (but not all) of third party Twitter clients was certainly predictable. But the handling of it just feels cheap and cowardly.
For those not in the know, Twitter decided to pull the plug on some 3rd party apps that allowed far better Twitter experiences than Twitter ever pretended to offer in the past or promises in its new future. Ok, fine. Musk owns the company, he can do what he wants with it, and he needs cash to continue pouring into the burn pit he’s created and these apps (via Twitter’s own doing) don’t bring in the ad revenue Musk needs. Make a change.
But this change was made unannounced in the middle of the night, without notice to the developers of those apps or users. And as of the writing of this blog post Twitter has still not issued any comment regarding the situation. (Apparently they are working on “comms” about it according to one report from The Information (sorry, paywalled.)
What’s saddest about this situation is embedded in the history of Twitter. In fact, many might rightly claim they define the history of Twitter if not the service itself, given that the previous ownership never did anything resembling a good job at that little essential duty. The makers of Twitterific, the iconfactory, are credited with coining the label “tweet” for every post. This history of 3rd party apps defining the Twitter experience is rich, but also fraught with turmoil. (You can read a quick but thorough summary here.) I’d also recommend iconfactory founder Craig Hockenberry’s farewell post about this.
Bottom line, everyone knew this was coming. Hoped against hope it wouldn’t. Sort of like watching what everyone knows is a bad marriage distegrate before our eyes and then it goes bust. We’re already moving into the “it will be the best thing for everybody” phase. But in an interesting way.
Given that some 3rd-party Twitter app developers are also beta-testing apps for Mastodon and newer players are also doing the same thing I personally find this wacky moment to be encouraging and possibly hopeful. Speaking selfishly, in testing some of these new apps I’m seeing the best of the familar blended with fresh new ideas in ways I haven’t seen in any category of mobile app development in quite some time. It’s actually exciting in the same way that the early days of Twitter and Twitter apps was. Out of the ashes…?
And don’t overlook the new foundation those developments are building on. Mastodon and the larger Fediverse show interesting promise as social networking backbones. Yes, there’s the potential for peril there as well. But at this point in the story the tensions seem borne out of a desire not to repeat the same mistakes.
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has published a rumor that Apple is working on touchscreen Macs aiming at 2025. Already the socials are filling up with excitement, consternation and predictions. This rumor/news will launch a half-zillion blog posts and fill up hours of podcast time between now and whenever, if ever, Apple does this.
Apple, Inc is working on adding touch screens to its Mac computers, a move that would defy long-held company orthodoxy and embrace an approach that co-founder Steve Jobs once called “ergonomically terrible.”
Apple engineers are actively engaged in the project, indicating that the company is seriously considering producing touch-screen Macs for the first time, according to people familiar with the efforts. Still, a launch hasn’t been finalized and the plans could change.
Already those who don’t like iPads are are jumping on the doom wagon for that class of devices. There’s room for plenty of speculation on that, but if and when this comes to be I doubt very seriously we’ll see the iPad disappear. And while Gurman talks about this defying company orthodoxy I find it a little tough to swallow that Apple hasn’t had a touchscreen Mac or two floating around its design studios until now.
But I’m not going to play the prediction game on any of this. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the show regardless of what device you’re enjoying it on.
I thought I’d jot down a few tech predictions for 2023. So here we go.
There will be tech news in 2023. There will be grand promises and grander failures. It will be entertaining, a bit crazy, and ultimately meh as the latest in a round of bad bets come due or come closer to being so.
Apple will make a ton of money in 2023 even though some governments want to design products for them. Apple won’t have as easy a time of it as it has in recent years for a number of reasons including some self-inflicted wounds.
Artificial Intelligence will continue to be a dominant story until chat bots start writing most of the tech stories.
The Metaverse will further try to wriggle out of the pond with or without legs. With other companies jumping into the “let’s put an expensive, goofy-looking, headache inducing gizmo on your head” it will be one of the comic tech highlights of the next few years before this whole thing ends where it was always destined to: an enterprise play.
Cyrpto will continue to falter as the denizens of the latest refuge of scammers discover that they’ve sucked all the money they can from the available suckers. There certainly won’t be any Super Bowl commercials.
Streaming Entertainment will continue to figure out that they haven’t figured it out yet. Consolidation will begin in earnest, hopefully before the streamers cancel all of the shows.
Twitter. Who the hell knows. It’s owner sure doesn’t.
Mastodon and federated social networking will continue growing pains as it continues to grow and becomes less of a pain for new users to gain entry.
Humans. Humans will be the biggest tech story behind the stories that capture the headlines. The humans who create tech will continue to be in some form of tension with the humans who use it. Humans who do use tech will continue to look less and less for tech to solve their problems, understanding before tech creators that all tech solutions aren’t necessarily going to change the world. At least until the tech creators understand that they need humans to talk to humans to help them solve the problems with the products they create. Or until the robots show up.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 