Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and this week we are talking about A.I. AI is causing
a big stir in the world at the moment. AI can help us in many ways ... but is it advancing too
quickly and are we prepared for what's to come? Loss of jobs, manipulation of personal opinions,
the degradation of free elections in America. Superhuman machine intelligence is probably
the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity! AI is not new, in fact Google has been
using their AI to run the algorithm on YouTube since 2016. They've been using it to pick what
video to suggest to you next in order to keep you watching for longer. So why is it suddenly
getting lots of news and lots of Interest? Well that's because open AI one of the other
competitors to Google who has a big AI system decided to make some of it publicly available
so you've got lots of generative AI programs that are now in a form that we can access such as chat
gpt3 which last month had 60 million users per day which ranged from school students trying
to do their school assignments through to workers trying to use it and other people just having a go
with it. We used it a year ago now to generate a cake recipe which had questionable results!
As well as trying to write recipes it can also answer any question you type in and it can do
things you might not have thought of asking it to do like writing code. If I ask it to write the
code for a website that has one central rectangle that's orange and says do not press and on hover
change the color of that rectangle to red and change the text to say I said no and on click
make the rectangle disappear make the screen color flash between red and yellow and write
the word self-destruct in, and start a countdown timer that starts at 10 counts down to zero and
when it reaches zero make the screen go black and the timer disappear. It can code that faster than
I could say what I wanted the website to do. As well as code it can also do creative things
like I could ask it to write a rhyming poem about the life cycle of a frog ... in a tranquil pond
where ripples flow the life of a frog begins to grow from tiny eggs in a jelly-like mass
life emerges full of Hope and class. And there's not just text generators like chat GPT there's
also video to video AI generators where if you film a simple video you can then input it in
and it can output it in a completely different style. Now while that looks fairly impressive
at the moment it's still fairly low quality and very expensive to use it even just for
a few seconds of footage. But there's also AI voice generators which are in the news at the
moment for generating fake songs like the fake Drake song which sounds convincingly like him...
Released just a few days ago it's already hit 9 million views on Tik Tok. The fake
collaboration has now been removed from streaming sites. And on top of all of that
there are pictures programs like mid-journey use AI to take your text prompt and spit that
out as four different images and if you like one of them you can can click on that one and
it will upscale it and make it bigger for you. So it's looking like AI can do a lot
of things. So why are people so worried about it? Well there's quite a few things but let's
start with number one which is the copyright concern. Let me show you this way this is our
dog Molly this is a real video it is not AI generated ... Molly, hands up, bang!
She is very cute and she can do lots of tricks and the breed that she is is a coton de Tulear.
Lots of people have not heard of that breed of dog before but when I ask mid-journey to do a
pencil sketch of a coton de tulear this is what I get ... it's actually pretty accurate and then
if I ask for a very colorful splotchy watercolor painting of a coton de tulear chasing a Butterfly.
pretty cute right? But then you have to stop and think how does mid-journey even know what a cotton
de tulear looks like and how does it know what a pencil sketch should be and what a splotchy
watercolor is like well the answer is AI has to be trained it has to be trained on data sets with
lots and lots and lots of inputs so it's been trained on lots and lots of photos and lots and
lots of different artworks so that it knows when I ask for a pencil sketch what a pencil sketch
should be and when I asked for a coton de tulear, what that should look like but then the question
is whose photos were used and whose artworks were used to train it? At the moment there is
no transparency we can actually see what data set was used to train the AI so we don't actually know
but the issue becomes a little bit clearer if we start asking some more specific questions so if
I ask mid-journey to paint a cotton de tulear in the style of Andy Warhol ... then I get this which
clearly it knows what Andy warhol's style is and in order to know that it must have been trained
on his images. What about Roy Lichtenstein it seems to struggle quite a bit with the ben-day
dots it should have all the same size circles there but it clearly knows the artist's style.
What about if we try Van Gogh ... you can see those big bold brush strokes there that
are very typical of Van Gogh paintings. How about children's book illustrator Quentin Blake if you
don't recognize his name he's the one who did all the sketches in the Roald Dahl books and it seems
that AI has seen his drawings before. How about James Gurney he's known for his highly detailed
illustrations in the Dinotopia books with those warm reddish brown tones that look just like what
mid-journey put out. Or we can try Eric Karl the author and illustrator of The Very Hungry
Caterpillar with its distinctive bright color palette or we could try the unmistakable style
of Japanese artist Takishi Murakami. This is not just a concern for artists though mid-journey can
also produce photos I asked for this one in the style of photographer Alex Prager who is known for
photos that looked like they were taken on a movie set. Now because photos and artworks are very
visual it's easy for us to identify different styles in them but have you ever stopped to
consider the same question with Chat GPT ... whose written works were used to train it? Well if I ask
for a scene from a story about sisters written in the style of Enid Blyton this is what I get:
The scent of wildflowers enveloped them as they exchanged secrets with wide-eyed wonder.
Oh Amelia Lucy exclaimed her eyes sparkling like emeralds look at that charming little
creature. Now if I keep the request exactly the same but I just swap out the author's name from
the children's author Enid Blyton to a horror author Stephen King let's see what we get:
The sisters Sarah and Emily huddled together their faces etched with fear. Shadows danced on
the walls their flickering forms reminiscent of lurking monsters. And just for fun let's try Dr
Zeus: In a whimsical land where colors danced and laughter echoed lived two sisters named Bella and
Stella. With twirly curls and playful eyes they skipped through life with joy and surprise. This
raises a couple of questions one is is it okay to use other people's styles? Artists for centuries
have been learning from different techniques from different artists and borrowing different ideas
and developing their own style. AI just seems to be very good at it because it can remember
everything about it and spit it out very quickly. As far as copyright is concerned as long as your
work is transformative and it's not an exact copy of the original, that has always been okay
you can't actually copyright a style. So then the next question is should artists be compensated for
their works being used to train an AI model or at the very least should they be given the choice as
whether they they want their works to be used to train an AI model or not? To add another level of
complexity to that question though is a lot of AI models are trained on a certain data set but then
beyond that once training is finished they're given access to the internet and then they keep
learning from there so in that case writers and artists would not just have to argue that their
work shouldn't be able to be used to train the AI which is what the writers were asking for and the
writers strike, they would also need to ask for AI not to be given access to the internet so it then
can't just access their works after the AI model was already trained. So that's copyright moving on
to problem number two which is misinformation. If I show you this image that mid-journey
generated you can quickly spot the mistake ... the body is backwards and so is the head.
But how about this one it's so detailed and complex it's almost perfect but the fang of
the dog is not quite right and our eyes can notice that too and while we can quickly look at an image
like that and see what's wrong and point it out it can be a lot harder to do with written information
and text, especially if it's information about a topic that we're not very familiar with. So let's
ask it a question about something that we are familiar with we'll ask it a food science question
and we'll ask have there been any deaths from food colors? Yes there has been cases of deaths
associated with food colors although they are rare. The most infamous case is the 1937 Elixir
sulfonylamide tragedy which was caused by a toxic solvent diethylene glycol. That response sounds
scientific it sounds correct right? But did you pick up the mistake? Let me ask another question
for you is Alexa sulfonylamide a food color no Elixir sulfonylamide is not a food color.
Then why was it used as an example of a death from food colors? I apologize for any confusion
caused by my previous response I made an error. AI companies call this an hallucination if it
doesn't have an answer in its data set it will just confidently make stuff up even though it's
quite probably not going to be true it says it in a very convincing way. As well as AI itself
making mistakes there's also the potential for bad actors and people who just want to
make a profit from clickbait to ask it to write convincing articles about something that they
know is not true and just get it to generate lots and lots of misinformation and it can ask
for it in the style of a knowledgeable expert or in the style of a particular journalist and AI
will spit that out and not only will it spit it out it can write so fast that there's potential
for the internet just to be filled with so much misinformation that we don't know what we can
trust anymore. As Dr Hinton said he now regretted his work and is worried that AI technology will
flood the internet with misinformation. They can and will create persuasive lies
at a scale Humanity has never seen before. And as more and more companies like Buzzfeed
for example start to use AI to write articles for them, if AI is then having access to the internet
then AI is then being trained on AI and you can see how the errors can then start to magnify and
go out of control. And it's not just articles on the internet and things that are written
in that form it's also comments as you can see AI can have a conversation, so bad actors can
use mid-journey or a similar program to make a fake photo, make fake profiles and then start
commenting on social media with a huge amount of comments very quickly, all to try and lead opinion
and Lead what we believe everybody is thinking all in a particular direction. So that ability
to be very careful about what you're reading and who you trust and what sources you believe to be
true that is going to need to be magnified you're really going to have to be very careful about what
you believe and who you trust and questioning everything you read online on the internet,
even in comments you can't just assume it's a human it could be a thousand comments could all be
the one human that's programmed AI to do that for them. A third concern with AI is bias what data
the AI model was trained on is going to affect what it outputs as its answers for different
things. Now we have no transparency at the moment as to what data it was trained on so it's hard to
predict what those biases are going to be but one good example of this is Joy Buolamwini's
experience that she had when she was studying at University she was doing an art project so she
used an AI facial recognition software that she just purchased for the purpose of doing it but
the problem she was having was when her friends sat in front of the computer it picked up their
face she needed it to pick up their face so it could mimic facial expressions but when
she sat in front of the computer it didn't pick up her face as a face, not unless she put on a
white mask. She then contacted the company that she'd got the facial recognition software off and
they ran their own tests and confirmed the problem that she had picked up was an actual problem. They
then looked at the data set and found that there was a lot more males of pale skin whose faces
had been used to train the AI. There were some females with darker skin but not as many so it
was very accurate with men who had pale skin and inaccurate with women who had darker skin. So they
were able to then correct that model once that bias had been picked up. It is crucial to check
AI generated responses against multiple other reliable sources to mitigate potential biases
and errors. The next problem is jobs a report from U.S Investment Bank Goldman Sachs predicting that
artificial intelligence could erase 300 million jobs worldwide or about 10 percent of the global
workforce. Which jobs will be affected by AI? Well obviously graphic artists are worried when there's
things like mid-journey around as it stands at the moment mid-journey is fun to play with but if you
actually need to output a specific image that you have in mind it can be really frustrating to work
with. For example when I wanted an image of King George eating a snowball-shaped dessert for one of
the 200 year old videos it kept making King George look more and more like a snowball he got rounder
and rounder and his hair got whiter and whiter until eventually I got this. Mid-journey is also
hopeless with text it's hopeless with numbers if you wanted to say something specific you're not
going to get that output but let's fast forward a few years and say that all of that is fixed then
yes you would imagine it is definitely going to affect the jobs of graphic designers however there
is a little bit of hope ... the U.S copyright office has said that AI authored works and images
are not able to be copyrighted because they are not not made by a human. If that stands then no
large companies will use any AI generated artwork or graphic designs because they want exclusivity
and for that you need copyright and they also want to be able to monetize their visual assets by
merchandising and you can't do that if you don't own the copyright to it because other people could
just do the same thing with your images. So that would at least protect some graphic designers jobs
the issue is though how do you know if it was made by AI or not made by AI back in September
last year a comic book was granted copyright by the US copyright office that was illustrated by
mid-journey. It even said mid-journey on the cover and then once it made lots of news headlines as
the first ever AI book to be copyrighted, it then revoked the copyright protection it said we didn't
realize it was made by AI illustrations only the text and the layout can be copyrighted but
not the images. So they're relying on people being honest and saying whether they used AI or
they didn't use Ai and it'd be great if everybody in the world was honest but I just don't think it
works that way so I'm not quite sure how they're going to actually draw the line there. And then
there are other jobs like coders we already talked about and data analysts, AI is very good
at analyzing large amounts of data to come up with different predictions and conclusions and then
there's also things you might not have thought about like diagnostic radiographers. AI is being
trained to come up with the diagnosis based on different X-rays and scans and is getting to the
point where it can get the diagnosis as accurate as a human that's trained for years at University
to do the same job. The makers of AI all seem to agree that it is definitely going to affect jobs.
GPT4 will uh I think entirely automated away some jobs and it will create new ones that we
believe will be much better. That's of little comfort to those who feel like their jobs are
already starting to be replaced by AI. Apart from job losses and misinformation and bias
and copyright are there any other issues well that's the majority of it for the moment at the
level that AI is right now. Some people have been talking about AI super intelligence where AI is
basically smarter than humans in every possible area and it's not making any mistakes we're not
there yet that would be a whole another level of concerns that would have to be in a future video.
With thanks to my patrons for your amazing support that allows me to make these videos
for you make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday 😊