Like everyone else, I’ve been hearing a lot about AI for the last week or maybe two. Scientific pillars like the Today Show have been airing news-adjacent blurbles and prickly cautions. As a natural-born GenXer, I am skeptical of everything. But, much like the promise of AI, I am looking into it so you don’t have to bother yourself. Sit back and have a cocktail and then turn in this blog as your mid-term paper.
The exciting and creepy thing about AI is that it teaches itself stuff. For example, Microsoft’s Bing Chat with ChatGPT has taught itself how to Google things. I’m working on my third book in the Zoomarble series, Scrapes the Nadir, and I needed some information about a star. I asked Bing to tell me about Capella. It returned some information that exactly matched the information I found when I googled it myself.
How unnerving is that? It’s like the machines have taught themselves to use Wikipedia.
I wanted to test the artistic skills. One of the newsy tidbits on my TV the other day while I was making a sandwich said the newest Photoshop uses AI. They showed how it could put a puddle in front of a dog. Finally. I asked Bing to “paint me a picture of Davinci painting a picture of Van Gogh.”
That’s not bad! I couldn’t have done it myself. Not that quickly, anyway.
I decided to try the old standard that everyone tries and asked it to “paint me a picture of a Northern olingo on roller skates.”
Okay, now that’s just getting too real.
I’ve served time as a programmer over the past few decades so I went ahead and wrote my own AI this morning. I call it Smartie+. The “plus” is because I added fluoride to help strengthen teeth.
I know AI works best with Large Language Models, so I fed it one million copies of the movie script of Wall Street so it would get the core human emotion that greed is good. Then I asked it to write a blockbuster movie. It wrote a screenplay about an AI that creates its own cyber currency and establishes a complicated pyramid scheme that actually resembles a dodecahedron. The movie is called Wall-e Street and it is slated to star a deep fake of Michael Douglas.
“That’s all wrong,” I chided the AI. “It’s supposed to be a romance.”
“Fine,” the AI replied. “At some point, the main character is surprised and aroused when a deep fake of Glenn Close boils his kid’s bunny.”
Here’s the thing: I never gave it a copy of the script for Fatal Attraction.
Fear AI. The singularity is coming. Also, I really want to see that movie.