Posted on 01/17/2023 10:29:40 AM PST by FarCenter
On the website Infinite Conversation, the German filmmaker Werner Herzog and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek are having a public chat about anything and everything. Their discussion is compelling, in part, because these intellectuals have distinctive accents when speaking English, not to mention a tendency toward eccentric word choices. But they have something else in common: both voices are deepfakes, and the text they speak in those distinctive accents is being generated by artificial intelligence.
I built this conversation as a warning. Improvements in what’s called machine learning have made deepfakes—incredibly realistic but fake images, videos or speech—too easy to create, and their quality too good. At the same time, language-generating AI can quickly and inexpensively churn out large quantities of text. Together, these technologies can do more than stage an infinite conversation. They have the capacity to drown us in an ocean of disinformation.
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In order to emphasize this technology’s capacity to produce large quantities of disinformation, I settled on the idea of a never-ending conversation. I only needed a large language model—fine-tuned on texts written by each of the two participants—and a simple program to control the back-and-forth of the conversation, so that its flow would feel natural and believable.
At their very core, language models predict the next word in a sequence, given a series of words already present. By fine-tuning a language model, it is possible to replicate the style and concepts that a specific person is likely to speak about, provided that you have abundant conversation transcripts for that individual. I decided to use one of the leading commercial language models available. That’s when it dawned on me that it’s already possible to generate a fake dialogue, including its synthetic voice form, in less time than it takes to listen to it. This provided me with an obvious name for the project: Infinite Conversation. After a couple of months of work, I published it online last October. The Infinite Conversation will also be displayed, starting February 11, at the Misalignment Museum art installation in San Francisco.
Once all the pieces fell into place, I marveled at something that hadn’t occurred to me when I started the project. Like their real-life personas, my chatbot versions of Herzog and Žižek converse often around topics of philosophy and aesthetics. Because of the esoteric nature of these topics, the listener can temporarily ignore the occasional nonsense that the model generates. For example, AI Žižek’s view of Alfred Hitchcock alternates between seeing the famous director as a genius and as a cynical manipulator; in another inconsistency, the real Herzog notoriously hates chickens, but his AI imitator sometimes speaks about the fowl compassionately. Because actual postmodern philosophy can read as muddled, a problem Žižek himself noted, the lack of clarity in the Infinite Conversation can be interpreted as profound ambiguity rather than impossible contradictions.
This probably contributed to the overall success of the project. Several hundred of the Infinite Conversation’s visitors have listened for over an hour, and in some cases people have tuned in for much longer. As I mention on the website, my hope for visitors of the Infinite Conversation is that they not dwell too seriously on what is being said by the chatbots, but gain awareness of this technology and its consequences; if this AI-generated chatter seems plausible, imagine the realistic-sounding speeches that could be used to tarnish the reputations of politicians, scam business leaders or simply distract people with misinformation that sounds like human-reported news.
This isn't my cup of tea. It's more up the alley of Dieter and Sprockets
Euro-pretensionist. Boring.
Curt and paste is not simply a text issue for word processing and the like, but before there was our digital world, cutting and stitching together recordings from snippets into a longer "event," there was always a tell.
For those many to do not know Werner Herzog, the fake may seem convincing. I worked with him for many weeks, and heard the fake within two sentences. So the pretense that "fake" will be successful when it fools enough people is as clever as asserting that snake oil sales is valid if enough people are fooled.
Miceli's "crisis of misinformation" has always been with us, in the form of liars to politics, but then the two blend into the same, do they not.
Whether Turing's test or Searle's "Chinese room," fake is fake is fake, and being fooled is being fooled is being fooled. "Caveat emptor" is a Latin phrase, telling by its etymology and history how long this very good advice has been around.
This is also why "caveat venditor" is part of most, but sadly not all, of law. That the current mRNA scandal is supported in part by the protection from product liability is an example of why "deep fakes" and politics are as they have always been, the second oldest profession. Unlike Scientific American which is fast becoming among the first oldest professionals.
Caveat emptor. AI is not intelligent in the long run. But then neither are so many humans.
When I listen to an audiobook then the words are those of the author. If we run a program that chooses various passages from the book is it now an artificial intelligence? No, its still the author...no matter how sophisticated the selection becomes.
I used to enjoy “Eliza” in the very early 80’s. The public first.
Klaus Kinski was far worse than a mere sociopath. If that is all her was he would have been in no was different than most entertainment people. His daughter Natassia presents him as a violent physically abusive tyrant who repeatedly raped her younger and cuter sister. There is so much that is twisted and degenerate and perverted in post ww2 cinema and the Kinski’s are exhibit 1.
This was more or less predicted in the 1981 movie “Looker” statin Albert Finney and the beautiful Susan Dey. You might not catch the point made of the non existent politician being presented in only a short take, but it is there. The main point was them digitizing models then killing them.
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