AIart an answer and a problem
Artificial intelligence is being used to design magazine covers and provide pictures for internet newsletters. What could possibly go wrong, John Naughton ,ofthe asks.
IObserver,
T all started with the headline over an entry in Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter in The Atlantic: ‘‘Where Does Alex Jones Go From Here?’’
This is an interesting question because Jones is an internet troll so extreme that he makes
Donald Trump look like Spinoza. For many years, he has parlayed a radio talkshow and a website into a comfortable multimilliondollar business peddling nonsense, conspiracy theories, falsehoods and weird merchandise to a huge tribe of adherents.
And until August 4 he had got away with it. On that day, though, he lost a defamation case brought against him by parents of children who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre — a tragedy that he had consistently ridiculed as a staged hoax; a Texas jury decided that he should pay nearly $US50 million ($NZ80.73 million) in damages for publishing this sadistic nonsense.
Warzel’s newsletter consisted of an interview with someone who had worked for the Jones media empire in its heyday and, as such, was interesting. But what really caught my eye was the striking illustration that headed the piece. It showed a cartoonish image of a dishevelled Jones in some kind of cavern surrounded by papers, banknotes, prescriptions and other kinds of documents.
Rather good, I thought, and then inspected the caption to see who the artist was. The answer: ‘‘AI art by Midjourney’’.
Ah! Midjourney is a research lab and also the name of its programme that creates images from textual descriptions using a machinelearning system similar to OpenAI’s DallE system. So someone on The Atlantic had simply typed ‘‘Alex Jones inside an American office under fluorescent lights’’ into a text box and — bingo! — the illustration that had caught my attention was one of the images it had generated.
You could, say, ask for a portrait of Shrek in the style of the Mona Lisa or Jane Austen as an astronaut
It turns out that The Atlantic is not the only established publication in which the Midjourney tool’s work has appeared. The normally staid Economist, for example, deployed it recently to produce its June 11 cover. This is significant because it illustrates how rapidly digital technologies can make the transition from leading edge to commodification. And as they do so, new fears and hopes rapidly emerge.
DallE (the name is a geeky combination of the Pixar character WallE and Salvador Dali) was derived from OpenAI’s pioneering GPT language models, which can generate vaguely plausible English text. DallE basically swaps pixels for text and was trained on
400 million pairs of images with text captions that were ‘‘scraped’’ from the internet. (The carbon footprint of the computation involved in this process is unconscionable, but that’s for another day.)
When GPT3 appeared, it sparked a new instalment of the ‘‘augmentation v replacement’’ debate. Was the technology just the thin edge of a sinister wedge? GPT3 could be used to ‘‘write’’ boring but useful text — stock market reports, say — but it could also generate noxious and apparently credible disinformation that would slip through the moderation systems of social media platforms. It could be used to augment the capacities of busy and overworked journalists or to dispense with them entirely.
In the event, though, some of the steam has gone out of the GPT3 controversy (though not out of the question of the environmental costs of such extravagant computing).
However much sceptics and critics might ridicule human hacks, the crooked timber of humanity will continue to outwit mere machines for the foreseeable future. Journalism schools can relax.
DallE might turn out to be a less straightforward case, though. As with GPT3, its appearance generated intense interest, perhaps because while most people can write text, many of us cannot draw to save our lives. So having a tool that could enable us to overcome this disability would be quite a boon. You could, say, ask for a portrait of Shrek in the style of the Mona Lisa or Jane Austen as an astronaut and again it would do its best. So one can view it as a welcome augmentation of human capability.
But there is also the ‘‘replacement’’ question. It turns out that it was Warzel himself who had used Midjourney’s bot to create an illustration rather than getting one from a copyrighted image bank or commissioning an artist to create an image. Big mistake: an artist spotted the caption and tweeted their shock that a national magazine such as The Atlantic was using a computer programme to illustrate stories instead of paying an artist to do that work, thereby giving other publications the idea of doing the same.
Before you could say ‘‘AI’’,
Warzel found himself playing the villain in a viral tweet storm. Which was painful for him, but perhaps also a salutary warning that publishers who give work to machines rather than creative artists deserve everything they get. — Guardian News and Media
TODAY is Thursday, August 25, the 237th day of 2022. There are 128 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1718 — French immigrants to the United States found the city of New Orleans in Louisiana.
1916 — After being found guilty of desertion, 28yearold Private Frank Hughes is killed by a firing squad in Hallencourt, northern France. He is the first New Zealand soldier executed during World War 1.
1920 — Euan Dickson flies from Christchurch to Wellington in an Avro 504K, making the first crossing of Cook Strait in an aircraft.
1940 — The British Air Force bombs Berlin for the first time in an overnight raid in World War 2.
1941 — British and Soviet troops invade Iran following the Shah’s refusal to reduce the number of resident Germans.
1942 — The Duke of Kent, the youngest brother of King George VI, dies in a plane crash during a World War 2 mission to Iceland.
1948 — A tornado hits Frankton
Junction, Hamilton, destroying about 150 homes and killing three people.
1950 — US president Harry Truman orders the army to seize control of the nation’s railroads to avert a strike.
1961 — President Janio Quadros of Brazil, citing unidentified ‘‘occult forces’’, resigns unexpectedly after seven months in office and goes into exile in Australia.
1964 — Kenneth Kaunda becomes president designate of Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia.
1965 — A massive avalanche roars down from a glacier in the Swiss Alps, burying 108 people at a hydroelectric construction project.
1978 — Chinese and Vietnamese forces clash in the Friendship Pass, on the border between the two countries.
1980 —The Otago Daily Times begins publishing without separate regional editions.
1986 — New Zealand bowler Derek Stirling is put to the sword in the third cricket test, at the Oval, by England’s Ian Botham, who belts him for 24 runs in one over to equal the then test record held by West Indian Andy Roberts. Ironically, Roberts scored his runs off Botham five years earlier.
1993 — A concretemixer truck collides with the side of a southbound Southerner passenger express. The truck’s mixer bowl bounces off the carriages, ripping two open. Three people are killed and seven more seriously injured.
1997 — Egon Krenz, the East German communist leader who threw open the Berlin Wall eight years earlier, is convicted of manslaughter for the shooting deaths of citizens who tried to flee to the West during the Cold War.
1998 — Malaysia’s highest court jails opposition leader Lim Guan Eng for sedition over his criticism of the Government’s handling of allegations of statutory rape against a former state chief minister.
2000 — The Zimbabwe Government names another 509 whiteowned farms it plans to confiscate for redistribution to landless blacks, bringing to 1542 the number it has targeted under a hastened landseizure programme.
2001 — MetteMarit Tjessem Hoiby, a single mother and former waitress, marries Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon in Oslo, Norway.
2004 — South African police arrest Mark Thatcher, the son of Margaret Thatcher, on suspicion of involvement in a coup plot in Equatorial Guinea. Thatcher later pleads guilty and avoids jail in a deal with prosecutors.
2020 — The first day of a series of daily cyberattacks on the New Zealand Stock Exchange begins forcing it to cease trading early each day the attacks occur.