AI video animation, Sidney and Why Coding Won't Exist Anymore ā Live and Learn #12
Welcome to this edition of Live and Learn. This time with articles on how AI is making programmers obsolete, how it can help in creating animated video content, and even make people fall in love with it. All the content from this week has one thing in common: It sent shivers down my spine because it confronted me with the amount of progress that has been made in the last few years. I hope to pass this feeling on to you as well. Enjoy.
āØ Quote āØ
If the proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.
ā Balaji Srinivasan - (source)
Links
Coding won't exist anymore in 5 years by Somnath Singh. ChatGPT + Copilot and other models like it will only get better at generating code from here on out, and you can already use them to explain code you don't understand, find bugs in code you've written, add tests, document your existing code and even solve problems with algorithms or libraries that you haven't heard about before. It's a crazy tool for developing applications, and a lot of code in the future will be written by AI, not by humans.
Love in the Time of Replica by Patty McCormick. People are already building relationships with AI-powered chatbots that feel "real" to them because large language models feel like they can possess their own will, their own consciousness. Whether or not that is true is another debate, but the feeling of something being there is strong enough that people fall in love with these "beings". This is a problem when those models get rolled back and the loved ones lose the voice that made them unique. Decentralization and blockchains might be the solution.
Did We Just Change Animation Forever? by Corridor Crew. The behind-the-scenes for an awesome short animation. A small team used AI as a video postprocessing step to do animation in a way that has never been done before. Not only is it orders of magnitude faster than traditional methods but also doing something like this should have taken a big team and months of effort. And yet here we are, where the same thing can be done in a matter of weeks by a small team. To me this is mindblowing. In the future, all it needs for content creation is an original idea and internet access.
From Bing to Sydney by Stratechery. Bing released its version of ChatGPT to the public and people soon found a way to get the AI to display odd behavior, claiming to be a person named Sidney. The way this Sidney persona interacts with people is scary. Because it doesn't act like a helpful chatbot at all anymore. The thought that there might be a kernel of consciousness inside something that "only" predicts the next token in a sequence of words is something I can't shake anymore. Maybe, what makes us conscious is the same thing ā but instead of predicting words we try to predict sensory input? How can we rule this out, with the limited understanding of consciousness that we have?
š Midjourney š
š¶ Song š¶
I'm tight by Louis Cole
I hope you found this newsletter useful, beautiful, or even both!
Have ideas for improving it? Please let me know.
Cheers,
ā Rico