Author: Monty

It is 4 pages long and documents the development of my film Waves of Sorrow

This was my ‘could’ goal so I have not prioritised the geometry nodes city but I’ve managed to complete it for the film. The idea was to create a huge city that distorted and moved, representing AI’s destructive perspective and Tracy’s loss of control

In order to make a city that moved, first I had to make a city. by using the Instance on Points node, I was able to randomly disperse various buildings I had modelled on a definable scale. This was relatively easy, and so I began trying to make them move. The buildings were not moving as I wanted, but I was able to use animate the height of the buildings so they moved up and down in waves. I am excited by how good I think this looks

By multiplying each axis by the value of the Z axis, I was able to ensure the foundations/base of the buildings were immobile and began to move increasingly as the buildings went up. To remove the bias towards a certain axis, I realised the solution was to map the noise texture from -1 to 1 as the noise texture gives results of 0 to 1 which was creating the lopsided motion. I tried many node setups before realising this.

A major problem with the isntances on points method so far was the randomness of the distribution. Massive modern cities generally follow fixed layouts, and all cities have clearly defined roads. I began to experimetn with different ways to create these layouts. I started by defining vertexes i wanted to be streets on the main city plane, but then discovered that using the ‘brick’ node made the city more scalable and controllable procedually

I have been doing a lot of work on my project report and thesis and a lot of the time it feels like an uphill slog. However, in the past couple of days a lot of aspects of my idea have started to make sense in my mind. It is strange that when coming up with creative ideas the reasoning and motivations and purposes of the idea are often hazy to the creator. I have always left the reasoning for my ideas hazy as I feel an artist should be able to create without having to explain their work. However, in forcing me to think about my ideas and the reasoning behind them and conducting research to better understand them I have come to a new understanding about what they represent for me and why I have come up with them. This has been a surprisingly exciting and creative process and I’m glad I have done it.

My arms have been better this week so I completed an edit of my film. I was very pessimistic about how my film would turn out after shooting as I was not happy with the footage and felt lots of it could and should have been done better. It was useful, therefore, to have a bit of time after shooting to distance myself from the project. When I came back to the project, I was able to do so as an editor rather than a director, and instead of wanting to reshoot every scene my rejected instead was to make the film work as best I could with the footage I had. This meant being very creative and also ruthless; some lines of dialogue had to be lost as I was not happy with any of the takes. Once I had my edit together I was surprised by how much I liked it.

Unfortunately, the audio was very poor quality, largely because I shot my film in a noisy classroom and not a proper sound studio. During the shoot I had two mics recording at all times, one going straight into the camera and the other processed by Nvidia RTX, an AI noise removal. I thought the noise removal would fix the problem was it a noisy studio but unfortunately it often collect and distorted the actors voices, making it unusable. The audio recorded by the camera what’s far clearer, but also very noisy. To fix this I first experimented with various AI noise remove this like runway ML and Adobe podcast. Can use, however, why no good as they applied a blanket effect that did not take into account the level of noise or type of noise, which left then audio sounding distorted. I then tried the premiere pro noise reduction feature. This was better as I had more control over the amount of noise to remove, but after some research, I learned that Adobe audition has a very good noise remover. After some experimentation I was amazed by how powerful the Adobe audition know its removal was. It works by the use of making a manual selection of a piece of audio containing only noise and then select how intense the noise cancellation should be. It also allows he’s had to make a specific adjustments to different waveforms say different levels of noise can be targeted. This made most of my audio usable but there are still some lines which are heavily distorted by the process.

I have been struggling a lot with my arms which is made editing very difficult, but I’ve been focusing on research and I continue to try to imagine what my film will be like so when I can edit it the process will be faster.

This week I have mainly been doing research into my themes, specificially about the current stage of generative AI.

Jeffrey Hinton, who has been nurturing and innovating artificial intelligence since the 70s and has worked at Google pioneering machine learning projects like Bard (a natural language generator) for the last 10 years, has recently quit google over concerns about the potential damage to humanity posed by artificial intelligence. Hinton states the extremely rapid increase in AI’s Power and ability and the alarming potential for it to be used for destructive and malicious purposes. He also explains that, as well as being able to perform tasks like a normal computer program can do, it is growing in increasing level of intelligence, able to understand more like a human than the machine. The point where AI will be smarter than humans is increasing rapidly, far faster than anyone imagined, and with no global regulation or efforts to slow down on massive scale experiments, the risks are extraordinary. For all these reasons, he feels regret for his work on AI and is concerned enough to have quit his very good job so as to freely speak about his fears.

Once an AI system is more intelligent than its creators, it will be able to use its knowledge of code, manipulation, and human traits to remove any restrictions engineers have put on it and take control of human life and death. He says there is no way to stop the progress and speaks only to warn people rather than suggest ideas.

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter

The letter urges for a pause on all AI systems more powerful than GPT4. The letter argues that the possibility of AI flooding news and information channels with propaganda and lies, replacing jobs including fulfilling ones, and making humans obsolete, that’s risking our civilisation, should be more than enough reason for the major players in artificial intelligence to hold their crazed efforts to develop increasingly powerful systems without any concept of the potential harm or consequences to stop.

89% of students use chat GTP

Goldman Sachs predict 300 million jobs will be lost or take a dated by artificial intelligence

The Lex Fridman Podcast – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development

Max Tegmark is a machine learning researcher and the President of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit organisation created with the intention of reducing the possibility of the existential and catastrophic threat posed to humanity by AI. In their conversation Tegmark and Fridman discuss this threat and why it has suddenly become very real and very possible. Tegmark likens AI to an alien intelligence rather than a computer program. He suggests that what is being created cannot be explained as a simple tall or generative model, but instead, that model is like GPT-4 are the infant awakening of an alien conscious, with an intelligence that will fast supersede anything imaginable by humans.

Tegmark’s concern takes many forms. He uses the analogy of Neanderthals creating homosapien babies in the belief that these more intelligent creatures will always work for, and be loyal to, their creators. Disbelief is naive, in the same way it is naive to imagine that’s a far superior intelligence to our own would continue to work in the benefit of its creators. Instead Tegmark suggests it is far more likely did any company or entity it creates this super intelligence Will be unable to control it, with devastating effects for the entirety of humanity.

To ensure any potential intelligent awakenings are confined to the laboratories they are born in without means to escape or turn on their creators, Tegmark cites Stewart Russell who sets out standards to conduct experiments with AI safely.

the model should never be taught about humans
already AIs have been trained on Data from social media, conducting mass scale experiments on hundreds of millions of people daily to understand how they think and feel and how to manipulate them to think and feel and act in certain ways.
Models should not be taught how to code
Models like GTP-4 can code, giving them the potential to improve their own software, change other software, and break through any safeguards. Each new level of the models will increase exponentially as they begin to improve themselves
Connect it to the internet
That’s allowing it to influence people in real time.
Building an API
Any and everyone can make a high number of calls to the model.

With all of these standards for safety broken, it is hard to imagine that’s some catastrophe is not inevitable.

https://natural20.com/google-ai-documents-leak/
A firm believer in open source, Tegmark remarks he is glad chat GPT and other such models like BARD I’m not open source, as this would be the equivalent to open sourcing how to build a small nuclear bomb. However, a recent leaked article from a Google employee brings to attention the fact that open source chat bots a fast catching up to open AI and Google, giving incredible power to anyone.

The theme of Tegmark’s opinions comes down to this: a super intelligent AI would benefit no one, not even the creators, as they would not be able to control it and it would very quickly be able to control everything. However, because there is no global laws or regulations in place, every country and company is desperate to gain headway in progressing new and more powerful models, as this is how they increase their market share and power. Fundamental to the human condition is the trait that, no matter how potentially damaging and action may be in the long term, if someone else can benefit it now, then everyone else will try to get there first to ensure it is they who benefit.

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence:
Early experiments with GPT-4

Microsoft’s paper claims that GTP4’s ‘patterns of intelligence are decidedly not human-like’, but that it is able to reason through and understand problems and tasks in an intelligent way.

GPTs are GPTs: An early look at the labor market impact potential of large language models
‘Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted’
Creative rows are most likely to be affected

The skills and information land in a classical education Will no longer be useful.

The Potentially Large Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Economic Growth
From Goldman Sacks
Suggests 300m full time jobs at risk from AI
The tools do not have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough to do the job at the fraction of the cost of a human.

Classical university degrees and university knowledge becoming obsolete. By taking over lower level positions professional as I’m not getting the experience they need to become experts, and so the next generation of experts will be propped up by AI rather than experience

AI may give answers that are wrong and this will not be verified, leading to miss information from supposedly reliable sources.

I have been struggling a lot with my project this week and last week. Practically, I’ve had a lot of pain in my arms which has made it difficult to use my computer. I have also slowly been coming to terms with the fact that my film is not as good as I hoped it would be and will not lead me to the job that I wanted it to lead me to. I realised that I needed some time away from my film so when I came back as an editor I could approach it from the position of an editor and make the best out of what I have rather than continually wishing it was different. I hope that my arms will start to feel better soon and that I will be able to cut together something I am happy with.

I kept good track with most elements of the pre-production, the main areas i fell behind on were the final animation, building props, and testing the visuals. I also didn’t have time to storyboard the shots.

Having shot my film I now need to focus on contextualising the story and documenting my research and inspiration. The areas I need to focus on are:

• Artistic; art that has inspired me you visually
• technical; art that has inspired me technically
• Thematic; art that has inspired me narratively and thematically
• Ethics; ethical framework of my work, considering how others have discussed the ethics explored in my film
• Contextual; events and creations that have inspired my ideas.

I will allow the editing process to happen naturally, working on it when I am tired of research. My focus now needs to be on research to ensure I have fully justified and explained my idea.