Emily Dreibelbis reports via PCMag: Etsy's reputation as a haven for small, independent creators has come into question as tools like Midjourney have made it easy to list art without disclosing that it's been AI-generated, and shoppers are not happy. "The fact that it's AI isn't listed anywhere," says one Reddit user who purchased a stock photo on Etsy that seemed suspiciously low cost with glowing reviews. "I was so mad at myself for not noticing it was AI before purchasing." [...] "Being avid user of Etsy, I really enjoy supporting small businesses and the talent that goes into their work," the buyer tells PCMag in a private message. "Shops such as we discussed selling massive amounts of AI-generated images take away from genuine sellers who put hours into perfecting their craft."

Etsy's seller policy does not mention artificial intelligence. The platform is still determining the place AI-generated works have on the site, a source tells PCMag. Complicating matters, some sellers take AI-generated images and modify them, adding a hint of human artistry. Etsy also has a policy regarding when sellers can claim an item is "handmade," but it also does not mention AI and appears virtually unenforceable. [...] Beyond the legalities, Etsy shoppers debate the ethical and economic implications. One argues it devalues the work, citing an ancient example of explorer Mansa Musa handing out fake gold during his travels, inflating the overall supply and tanking the market. If anyone can create art at the push of a button, what defines an artist's work? And what role does Etsy play in answering that question?

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from The Guardian: Akira Toriyama, the influential Japanese manga artist who created the Dragon Ball series, has died at the age of 68. He died on March 1 from an acute subdural haematoma. The news was confirmed by Bird Studio, the manga company that Toriyama founded in 1983.

"It's our deep regret that he still had several works in the middle of creation with great enthusiasm," the studio wrote in a statement. "Also, he would have many more things to achieve." The studio remembered his "unique world of creation". "He has left many manga titles and works of art to this world," the statement read. "Thanks to the support of so many people around the world, he has been able to continue his creative activities for over 45 years." [...]

Based on an earlier work titled Dragon Boy, Dragon Ball was serialized in 519 chapters in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995 and birthed a blockbuster franchise including an English-language comic book series, five distinct television adaptation -- with Dragon Ball Z the most familiar to western audiences -- and spin-offs, over 20 different films and a vast array of video games. The series -- a kung fu take on the shonen (or young adult) manga genre -- drew from Chinese and Hong Kong action films as well as Japanese folklore. It introduced audiences to the now-instantly familiar Son Goku -- a young martial arts trainee searching for seven magical orbs that will summon a mystical dragon -- as well as his ragtag gang of allies and enemies. You can learn more about Toriyama via the Dragon Ball Wiki.

The Associated Press, Washington Post, and New York Times, among others, have all reported on his passing.

Sony's PlayStation division is cutting jobs in the latest round of high-profile layoffs in the video game industry. From a report: By some estimations, 2024 has already seen more than 7,000 video game industry layoffs. Related to these moves, PlayStation is proposing to close its London games studio, which was most recently responsible for developing PlayStation VR games. Cuts are also coming to Sony's other studios, including Firesprite, Insomniac Games, Naughty Dog, and Guerrilla. PlayStation's technology, creative, and support teams are also affected by these measures. In a blog post, outgoing SIE CEO Jim Ryan said it was an "extremely hard decision" to make these cuts, which amount to 900 people or about 8% of PlayStation. Ryan is leaving in March.

jbmartin6 shares a report from Phys.Org: Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18%. [...] This paper studies how effective anti-piracy messages are as a deterrent, examining the change in TV and film piracy intentions among 962 adults compared with their past behavior. The three messages examined in the study were verbatim copies of three real-world anti-piracy campaigns. Two of the campaigns used threatening messages to try to combat piracy and the third was educational in tone.

One of the threatening messages was from crime reduction charity, Crimestoppers, which focused on the individual's risk of computer viruses, identity fraud, money and data theft and hacking. The other message was based on a campaign by the French government, which used a "three strike" process, whereby infringers were given two written warnings before their internet access was terminated. The educational message was taken from the campaign "Get It Right from a Genuine Site," which focuses on the cost to the economy and to the individual creative people, and signposts consumers away from piracy sites and towards legal platforms such as Spotify or Netflix.

The study found that one threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50%, but men increase their piracy behaviors. The educational messages had no effect on either men or women. "The research shows that anti-piracy messages can inadvertently increase piracy, which is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance," explained [lead author, Kate Whitman, from the University of Portsmouth's Centre for Cybercrime and Economic Crime]. "From an evolutionary psychology point of view, men have a stronger reaction to their freedom being threatened and therefore they do the opposite." Moreover, the study found that participants with the most favorable attitudes towards piracy demonstrated the most polarized changes in piracy intentions -- the threatening messages increased their piracy even more. The study has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics.

"I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that," adds Slashdot reader jbmartin6.

An anonymous reader shares a report: "The first one, I'll be honest, probably took seven or eight hours," says TJ Gardner. "But the subsequent ones -- Stroke the Beaver, for example -- would have taken about half an hour." Gardner is the creator of the "Stroke" video games, available to download from the PlayStation Store for $4 a pop. Each one features a different animal -- cats, dogs and hamsters, along with less cuddly creatures such as snakes and fish -- and they all follow the same blueprint.

When you start the game, an image of the animal appears against a plain blue background. In the top left-hand corner of the screen are the words "Strokes 0." You press X to stroke the animal. The animal flashes briefly. The number in the corner goes up by 1. After 25 strokes, you are rewarded with a bronze trophy. Keep going until you hit 2,000 strokes, and you will receive a platinum award. That's it. There is no animation; there are no sound effects. Just a picture of an animal under a Creative Commons licence from Wikipedia, and some lo-fi acoustic beats looping endlessly in the background. No running, no jumping, no guns, no baddies, no special moves or power-ups or puzzles. Are the Stroke games even video games at all? The Stroke games, launched in September 2022, have been downloaded more than 120,000 times, amassing nearly $350,000 in sales. Sony takes a 30% cut for hosting the game in the PlayStation Store, leaving Gardner with a pre-tax profit of about $240,000.

Tom Warren reports via The Verge: Microsoft is teasing the potential for unique Xbox hardware in the future and a powerful next-gen console. Four previously exclusive Xbox games are officially coming to the PS5 and Nintendo Switch soon, and Microsoft wants to reassure Xbox fans that it's still very much invested in the future of its platform and hardware. In an official Xbox podcast today, Xbox president Sarah Bond teased that Microsoft will deliver 'the largest technical leap' with the next-generation Xbox: "We've got more to come. There's some exciting stuff coming out in hardware that we're going to share this holiday. We're also invested in the next-generation roadmap. What we're really focused on there is delivering the largest technical leap you will have ever seen in a hardware generation, which makes it better for players and better for creators and the visions that they're building."

Speaking to The Verge, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer went a step further, teasing that the Xbox hardware teams are thinking about building different kinds of hardware. "I'm very proud of the work that the hardware team is doing, not only for this year, but also into the future," says Spencer. "[We're] really thinking about creating hardware that sells to gamers because of the unique aspects of the hardware. It's kind of an unleashing of the creative capability of our hardware team that I'm really excited about."

Perhaps that unique hardware is an Xbox handheld. "We see a lot of opportunity in different types of devices, and will share specifics on our future hardware plans as soon as we are ready," says Microsoft in an Xbox blog post today.

Apple researchers have unveiled a new AI tool called "Keyframer," (PDF) which harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) to animate static images through natural language prompts. From a report: This novel application, detailed in a new research paper published on arxiv.org, represents a giant leap in the integration of artificial intelligence into the creative process -- and it may also hint at what's to come in newer generations of Apple products such as the iPad Pro and Vision Pro. The research paper, titled "Keyframer: Empowering Animation Design using Large Language Models," explores uncharted territory in the application of LLMs to the animation industry, presenting unique challenges such as how to effectively describe motion in natural language.

Imagine this: You're an animator with an idea that you want to explore. You've got static images and a story to tell, but the thought of countless hours bending over an iPad to breathe life into your creations is, well, exhausting. Enter Keyframer. With just a few sentences, those images can begin to dance across the screen, as if they've read your mind. Or rather, as if Apple's large language models (LLMs) have. Keyframer is powered by a large language model (in the study, they use GPT-4) that can generate CSS animation code from a static SVG image and prompt. "Large language models have the potential to impact a wide range of creative domains, but the application of LLMs to animation is under-explored and presents novel challenges such as how users might effectively describe motion in natural language," the researchers explain.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Our goal," Amazon founder Jeff Bezos explained in a Feb. 2021 Instagram post announcing the location of a second tuition-free @BezosAcademy preschool in Tacoma, WA, "is to unlock the potential in kids to become creative leaders, original thinkers, and lifelong learners -- regardless of their zip code."

Three years later, a new Amazon SEC filing reveals how much zip codes can matter, even to Bezos, the third richest person in the world. GeekWire reports: "A new Amazon [SEC] filing, detailing Jeff Bezos' plan to sell a slice of his stake in the company, sheds fresh light on his move from Seattle to Miami -- and his ability to avoid Washington state's capital gains tax [ironically, earmarked to be funneled into early-childhood education programs and school construction] in the process. The filing reveals that the Amazon founder and executive chairman adopted a trading plan Nov. 8 to sell up to 50 million Amazon shares during a period ending in January 2025. It would be the first time he has sold Amazon stock since 2021. The plan was adopted less than a week after Bezos announced on Instagram, on Nov. 2, that he was leaving his longtime home of Seattle for sunnier skies in Miami. In his Instagram post, Bezos said he wanted to be closer to his parents and Blue Origin space venture in Florida. He did not mention taxes."

"Given Bezos' recent move out of Washington -- where he founded and built Amazon into a global behemoth -- he will also be saving around $600 million in tax expense if he ends up selling the maximum of 50 million shares under the plan, based on the company's current stock price. That's around $600 million in what would have otherwise been tax revenue for his former home state, as The Center Square reported Monday. The capital gains tax, passed in 2021, imposes a 7% tax on any gains of more than $250,000 from the sale of stocks and bonds, with some exceptions. It was challenged in court but ultimately ruled constitutional by the state Supreme Court last year. The tax brought in nearly $900 million in its first year of collection. Revenue goes toward early education and childcare programs, as well as school construction projects."

It's of course no secret that Bezos is no fan of taxes -- he explored founding Amazon on an Indian reservation near San Francisco to avoid taxes, ponied up $100,000 to defeat a proposed WA state income tax aimed at improving WA state public education (joined in the fight by Microsoft and Steve Ballmer), characterized as unconstitutional attempts to make Amazon collect and pay sales taxes, and came under fire by ProPublica for paying no income tax in some years.

The Orange County Register reports: The new Pixar Place Hotel next door to Disneyland and Disney California Adventure is designed to look like you've walked onto the Pixar Animation Studios campus in Emeryville with concept drawings, character maquettes and final designs sprinkled throughout the hotel. "For those of you who are into the creative process, I think you'll be really happy. This hotel really celebrates that," Pixar Chief Creative Officer Pete Docter said during the opening ceremony for the hotel. "You get to see rough drawings, color studies and animation sketches as the animators were working. It really feels like you're walking into Pixar in a way when you step in here."

The multimillion-dollar transformation of the former Paradise Pier Hotel into the new Pixar Place Hotel debuted on Tuesday, January 30 after three years in the making at the Disneyland resort in Anaheim. The front lobby of the hotel is intended to feel like a gallery of curated artwork and custom creations inspired by Pixar's famed studio in Northern California. The rear lobby takes visitors through the animated filmmaking process from hand-drawn sketches to wire-frame character designs. Red, yellow and blue bursts of primary colors serve as bold accents at the front desk in contrast to the muted colors of modern hotel designs.
More details from the Los Angeles Times: The showcase piece of the lobby is a large mobile, situated above the Pixar lamp and ball, with abstracted, stained glass-like figures from "The Incredibles," "Wall-E," "Finding Nemo" and more. They are flanked by colored panels, which react to the music played in the area, an effect that is of course better seen in the evening.

"Pixar is a balance of sophistication and whimsy that really is core to their values," said Kirstin Makela, an art director at Walt Disney Imagineering, the company's secretive arm devoted to theme park experiences. "They're a studio that's been at the cutting edge of what they do. They take it very seriously that their characters are represented in that high esteem that they deserve because they are works of art. "So it really is about creating a space that feels like a living art gallery that allows for the work to be elevated and feel celebrated, and allows for the work to get that dynamic pop of color and energy," Makela continued...

[I]ncluded in the rooms is the hardbound "The Art of Pixar" book, and various depictions of the Pixar lamp and ball, from an actual lamp on the desk to traces of the ball and the lamp in the bedding, carpeting and decorative pillows...

In a sampling of room rates throughout the year, I found nothing lower than $405 per night for a standard room, and about $100 more for high-traffic holiday months.

"According to one study, homeowners are three times more likely than renters to own an electric vehicle," writes the Washington Post. But others still have options: Drivers who park on the street have found novel ways to charge their vehicles, using extension cords running over the sidewalk or even into the branches of a nearby tree... [S]ome municipalities explicitly allow over-the-sidewalk charging as part of a broader strategy to cut transportation emissions... In some areas, homeowners can also hire an electrician to run power under the sidewalk to a curbside charging port. But homeowners should check local rules and permitting requirements for curbside charging. In some highly EV-friendly cities, local governments will cover the costs. In Seattle, a pilot program is installing faster curbside charging to residents who opt in to the program...

If home charging simply isn't an option, some drivers rely on public charging — either using workplace chargers or charging occasionally on DC fast chargers, which can bring an EV battery from 0 to 80 percent in around 20 minutes. The problem is that public charging is more expensive than charging at home — although in most places, still less expensive than gas... For drivers who have access to Tesla superchargers, public charging might still be a solid option — but for non-Tesla drivers, it's still a challenge. Many fast chargers can be broken for days or weeks on end, or can be crowded with other drivers. The popular charging app PlugShare can help EV owners find available charging ports, but relying on public fast charging can quickly become a pain for drivers used to quickly filling up on gas. In those situations, a plug-in hybrid or regular hybrid car might be a better option.
And beyond that, "experts say that there are a key few steps that renters or condo owners can take to access charging," according to the article: The first is looking up local "right-to-charge" laws — regulations that require homeowners' associations or landlords to allow residents to install Level 1 or Level 2 charging. Ten states have "right-to-charge" laws on the books. In California and Colorado, for example, renters or homeowners have the right to install charging at their private parking space or, in some cases, in a public area at their apartment building. Other states, including Florida, Hawaii and New Jersey, have similar but limited laws. Residents can also reach out to landlords or property owners directly and make the case for installing charging infrastructure. All of this "puts a fair amount of onus on the driver," said Ben Prochazka, the executive director of the Electrification Coalition. But, he added, many EV advocacy groups are working on changing building codes in cities and states so that all multifamily homes with parking have to be "EV-ready."
Ingrid Malmgren, policy director at the EV advocacy group Plug In America, tells the newspaper that "communities all over the country are coming up with creative solutions. And it's just going to get easier and easier."

It's the 50th anniversary of Devo, the geek-friendly, dystopia-themed band that combined synthesizers with showmanship, first founded in 1973.

As a new documentary about the group celebrates its Sundance world premiere, the Los Angeles Times explores how the band made innovative use of the technology of its time: With their yellow radiation suits, red "energy dome" hats and manic energy, part playful and part angry, the band Devo combined the futuristic glamour of new wave with atomic-age anxieties and post-'60s disillusionment.... Uniquely, the band developed a fully formed, intricate internal philosophy and mythology built around the idea that humans were "de-evolving" by becoming dumber and less sophisticated. The mascot of the band, known as "Booji Boy," was an infantile urchin in a rubber mask...

Was there an idea to document the band right from the very start? It's incredible that there's footage of the very first show in 1973.

GERALD CASALE: We were that delusional, yes. And we were trying to document ourselves when nobody was interested in doing that. And when it was quite expensive and clumsy to do it. You're dealing with Sony U-matic reel-to-reel recorders and big heavy cameras and a scarcity of equipment and very little interest. I mean, my God, if a Devo of now existed like we did, then clearly, there'd be a million cellphone videos.

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: [...] Bob was the first of us to direct a video, back when he was in high school. Bob and me, our dad, starting when we were like babies, like 1 year old, he'd bring out an 8-millimeter camera that didn't have sound, and so he shot hundreds and hundreds of these films through the years, just family stuff. So we always kind of liked that. And Jerry was doing films at Kent State with Chuck Statler before Chuck said, "Hey, let's do a film with a couple of the songs in it." So we were always audio-visual. We were always thinking in both worlds...

[DOCUMENTARY DIRECTOR] CHRIS SMITH: One of my favorite details in looking through the old footage is, there's an early show that was recorded in black-and-white, and they have such limited materials to work with, yet they do this thing where the light goes on and off on both sides of the stage. And to me it was so emblematic of where they were going because they were making something that you hadn't seen before that was super creative and visually distinctive and interesting out of something we all had to work with... You could see in that footage, the inventiveness that wasn't a result of means — it was something that was just created out of what they had to work with at that time.

MARK MOTHERSBAUGH: [...] Sonically, a lot of what we did was just related to the fact that Bob Mothersbaugh bought a four-track TEAC. So we had this machine that could record four little skinny channels on a quarter-inch tape. It was an amateur home-tape machine, but it made us think about our parts, because we thought, well, OK, you're only going to get to do the bass on one track, and the guitar on one track and the drums on one track and the synth. You're not going to do all these overdubs. We had to think about it, what was an essential part. So we'd work on the song till you could play it just in one pass. Everything essential. I think it really made the early stuff sound really strong because of that.
You really get a sense of that on their 1978 song "Mongoloid." But the 2023 documentary's director doesn't see his film as an ending bookmark for the band. "They're still touring. They're all still actively creatively pursuing many different things, as I hope that you would expect after seeing the film."

And speaking specifically about the documentary, Mark Mothersbaugh says Booji Boy "describes it as a halfway point to the year of 2073, where we'll celebrate the 100-year anniversary." Booji Boy also says the next 50 years will be more about action. "And it'll be about positive mutation. Mutate, don't stagnate."

OpenAI on Thursday announced its first partnership with a higher education institution. Starting in February, Arizona State University will have full access to ChatGPT Enterprise and plans to use it for coursework, tutoring, research and more. From a report: The partnership has been in the works for at least six months, when ASU chief information officer Lev Gonick first visited OpenAI's HQ, which was preceded by the university faculty and staff's earlier use of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools, Gonick told CNBC in an interview. ChatGPT Enterprise, which debuted in August, is ChatGPT's business tier and includes access to GPT-4 with no usage caps, performance that's up to two times faster than previous versions and API credits.

With the OpenAI partnership, ASU plans to build a personalized AI tutor for students, not only for certain courses but also for study topics. STEM subjects are a focus and are "the make-or-break subjects for a lot of higher education," Gonick said. The university will also use the tool in ASU's largest course, Freshman Composition, to offer students writing help. ASU also plans to use ChatGPT Enterprise to develop AI avatars as a "creative buddy" for studying certain subjects, like bots that can sing or write poetry about biology, for instance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Google DeepMind has created an AI system that can solve complex geometry problems. It's a significant step towards machines with more human-like reasoning skills, experts say. Geometry, and mathematics more broadly, have challenged AI researchers for some time. Compared with text-based AI models, there is significantly less training data for mathematics because it is symbol driven and domain specific, says Thang Wang, a coauthor of the research, which is published in Nature today. Solving mathematics problems requires logical reasoning, something that most current AI models aren't great at. This demand for reasoning is why mathematics serves as an important benchmark to gauge progress in AI intelligence, says Wang.

DeepMind's program, named AlphaGeometry, combines a language model with a type of AI called a symbolic engine, which uses symbols and logical rules to make deductions. Language models excel at recognizing patterns and predicting subsequent steps in a process. However, their reasoning lacks the rigor required for mathematical problem-solving. The symbolic engine, on the other hand, is based purely on formal logic and strict rules, which allows it to guide the language model toward rational decisions. These two approaches, responsible for creative thinking and logical reasoning respectively, work together to solve difficult mathematical problems. This closely mimics how humans work through geometry problems, combining their existing understanding with explorative experimentation.

DeepMind says it tested AlphaGeometry on 30 geometry problems at the same level of difficulty found at the International Mathematical Olympiad, a competition for top high school mathematics students. It completed 25 within the time limit. The previous state-of-the-art system, developed by the Chinese mathematician Wen-Tsun Wu in 1978, completed only 10. "This is a really impressive result," says Floris van Doorn, a mathematics professor at the University of Bonn, who was not involved in the research. "I expected this to still be multiple years away." DeepMind says this system demonstrates AI's ability to reason and discover new mathematical knowledge. "This is another example that reinforces how AI can help us advance science and better understand the underlying processes that determine how the world works," said Quoc V. Le, a scientist at Google DeepMind and one of the authors of the research, at a press conference.

Rich Stanton reports via PC Gamer: Ned Luke, the actor whose roles include GTA 5's Michael De Santa, has gone off on an AI company that released an unlicensed voice chatbot based on the character, and succeeded in having the offending bot nuked from the internet. AI company WAME had tweeted a link to its Michael chatbot on January 14 along with the text: "Any GTA fans around here? Now take your gaming experience to another level. Try having a realistic voice conversation with Michael De Santa, the protagonist of GTA 5, right now!"

Unfortunately for WAME, it quickly attracted the attention of Luke, who does not seem like the type of man to hold back. "This is fucking bullshit WAME," says Luke (though I am definitely hearing all this in Michael's voice). "Absolutely nothing cool about ripping people off with some lame computer estimation of my voice. Don't waste your time on this garbage." Luke also tagged Rockstar Games and the SAG-AFTRA union, since when the chatbot and tweets promoting it have been deleted. Fellow actors including Roger Clark weighed in with sympathy about how much this kind of stuff sucks, and our boy wasn't done by a long shot:

"I'm not worried about being replaced, Roger," says Luke. "I just hate these fuckers, and am pissed as fuck that our shitty union is so damn weak that this will soon be an issue on legit work, not just some lame douchebag tryna make $$ off of our voices." Luke is here referring to a recent SAG-AFTRA "ethical AI" agreement which has gone down with some of its members like a cup of cold sick. Musician Marilou A. Burnel (not affiliated with WAME) pops up to suggest that "creative people make remarkable things with AI, and the opposite is also true." "Not using my voice they don't," says Luke. WAME issued a statement expressing their "profound understanding and concern."

"This incident has highlighted the intricate interplay between the advancement of AI technology and the ethical and legal realms," says WAME. "WAME commits to protecting the rights of voice actors and creators while advancing ethical AI practices."

Last year Marc Andreessen's firm "argued that AI companies would go broke if they had to pay copyright royalties or licensing fees," notes a Los Angeles Times technology columnist.

But are these powerful companies doing even more to ensure they're not billed for their training data? Just this week, British media outlets reported that OpenAI has made the same case, seeking an exemption from copyright rules in England, claiming that the company simply couldn't operate without ingesting copyrighted materials.... The AI companies also argue what they're doing falls under the legal doctrine of fair use — probably the strongest argument they've got — because it's transformative. This argument helped Google win in court against the big book publishers when it was copying books into its massive Google Books database, and defeat claims that YouTube was profiting by allowing users to host and promulgate unlicensed material. Next, the AI companies argue that copyright-violating outputs like those uncovered by AI expert Gary Marcus, film industry veteran Reid Southern and the New York Times are rare or are bugs that are going to be patched.
But finally, William Fitzgerald, a partner at the Worker Agency and former member of the public policy team at Google, predicts Google will try to line up supportive groups to tell lawmakers artists support AI: Fitzgerald also sees Google's fingerprints on Creative Commons' embrace of the argument that AI art is fair use, as Google is a major funder of the organization. "It's worrisome to see Google deploy the same lobbying tactics they've developed over the years to ensure workers don't get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald said. And OpenAI is close behind. It is not only taking a similar approach to heading off copyright complaints as Google, but it's also hiring the same people: It hired Fred Von Lohmann, Google's former director of copyright policy, as its top copyright lawyer....

[Marcus says] "There's an obvious alternative here — OpenAI's saying that we need all this or we can't build AI — but they could pay for it!" We want a world with artists and with writers, after all, he adds, one that rewards artistic work — not one where all the money goes to the top because a handful of tech companies won a digital land grab. "It's up to workers everywhere to see this for what it is, get organized, educate lawmakers and fight to get paid fairly for their labor," Fitzgerald says.

"Because if they don't, Google and OpenAI will continue to profit from other people's labor and content for a long time to come."

This week on his podcast Bill Gates asked Sam Altman how his team is doing after his (temporary) ouster, Altman replies "a lot of people have remarked on the fact that the team has never felt more productive or more optimistic or better. So, I guess that's like a silver lining of all of this. In some sense, this was like a real moment of growing up for us, we are very motivated to become better, and sort of to become a company ready for the challenges in front of us."

The rest of their conversation was pre-ouster — but gave fascinating glimpses at the possible future of AI — including the prospect of very speedy improvements. Altman suggests it will be easier to understand how a creative work gets "encoded" in an AI than it would be in a human brain. "There has been some very good work on interpretability, and I think there will be more over time... The little bits we do understand have, as you'd expect, been very helpful in improving these things. We're all motivated to really understand them, scientific curiosity aside, but the scale of these is so vast...." BILL GATES: I'm pretty sure, within the next five years, we'll understand it. In terms of both training efficiency and accuracy, that understanding would let us do far better than we're able to do today.

SAM ALTMAN: A hundred percent. You see this in a lot of the history of technology where someone makes an empirical discovery. They have no idea what's going on, but it clearly works. Then, as the scientific understanding deepens, they can make it so much better.

BILL GATES: Yes, in physics, biology, it's sometimes just messing around, and it's like, whoa — how does this actually come together...? When you look at the next two years, what do you think some of the key milestones will be?

SAM ALTMAN: Multimodality will definitely be important.

BILL GATES: Which means speech in, speech out?

SAM ALTMAN: Speech in, speech out. Images. Eventually video. Clearly, people really want that.... [B]ut maybe the most important areas of progress will be around reasoning ability. Right now, GPT-4 can reason in only extremely limited ways. Also reliability. If you ask GPT-4 most questions 10,000 times, one of those 10,000 is probably pretty good, but it doesn't always know which one, and you'd like to get the best response of 10,000 each time, and so that increase in reliability will be important.

Customizability and personalization will also be very important. People want very different things out of GPT-4: different styles, different sets of assumptions. We'll make all that possible, and then also the ability to have it use your own data. The ability to know about you, your email, your calendar, how you like appointments booked, connected to other outside data sources, all of that. Those will be some of the most important areas of improvement.
Areas where Altman sees potential are healthcare, education, and especially computer programming. "If you make a programmer three times more effective, it's not just that they can do three times more stuff, it's that they can — at that higher level of abstraction, using more of their brainpower — they can now think of totally different things. It's like, going from punch cards to higher level languages didn't just let us program a little faster — it let us do these qualitatively new things. And we're really seeing that...

"I think it's worth always putting it in context of this technology that, at least for the next five or ten years, will be on a very steep improvement curve. These are the stupidest the models will ever be."

He predicts the fastest technology revolution "by far," worrying about "the speed with which society is going to have to adapt, and that the labor market will change." But soon he adds that "We started investing a little bit in robotics companies. On the physical hardware side, there's finally, for the first time that I've ever seen, really exciting new platforms being built there."

And at some point Altman tells Gates he's optimistic that AI could contribute to helping humans get along with each other.

PC and microchip companies struggling to get consumers to replace pandemic-era laptops offered a new feature to crowds this week at CES: AI. From a report: PC and chipmakers including AMD and Intel are betting that the so-called "neural processing units" now found in the latest chip designs will encourage consumers to once again pay for higher-end laptops. Adding additional AI capabilities could help take market share from Apple. "The conversations I'm having with customers are about 'how do I get my PC ready for what I think is coming in AI and going to be able to deliver,'" said Sam Burd, Dell Technologies' president of its PC business. Chipmakers built the NPU blocks because they can achieve a high level of performance for AI functions with relatively modest power needs. Today there are few applications that might take full advantage of the new capabilities, but more are coming, said David McAfee, corporate vice president and general manager of the client channel business at AMD.

Among the few applications that can take advantage of such chips is the creative suite of software produced by Adobe. Intel hosted an "open house" where a handful of PC vendors showed off their latest laptops with demos designed to put the new capabilities on display. Machines from the likes of Dell and Lenovo were arrayed inside one of the cavernous ballrooms at the Venetian Convention Center on Las Vegas Boulevard.

Michaela Zee reports via Variety: More than 15 years after his death, stand-up comedian George Carlin has been brought back to life in an artificial intelligence-generated special called "George Carlin: I'm Glad I'm Dead." The hour-long special, which dropped on Tuesday, comes from Dudesy, a comedy AI that hosts a podcast and YouTube show with "Mad TV" alum Will Sasso and podcaster Chad Kultgen.

"I just want to let you know very clearly that what you're about to hear is not George Carlin. It's my impersonation of George Carlin that I developed in the exact same way a human impressionist would," Dudesy said at the beginning of the special. "I listened to all of George Carlin's material and did my best to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today. So think of it like Andy Kaufman impersonating Elvis or like Will Ferrell impersonating George W. Bush."

In the stand-up special, the AI-generated impression of Carlin, who died in 2008 of heart failure, tackled prevalent topics like mass shootings, the American class system, streaming services, social media and AI itself. "There's one line of work that is most threatened by AI -- one job that is most likely to be completely erased because of artificial intelligence: stand-up comedy," AI-generated Carlin said. "I know what all the stand-up comics across the globe are saying right now: "I'm an artist and my art form is too creative, too nuanced, too subtle to be replicated by a machine. No computer program can tell a fart joke as good as me.'" Kelly Carlin, the late stand-up comedian's daughter, posted a statement in response to the special: "My dad spent a lifetime perfecting his craft from his very human life, brain and imagination. No machine will ever replace his genius. These AI generated products are clever attempts at trying to recreate a mind that will never exist again. Let's let the artist's work speak for itself. Humans are so afraid of the void that we can't let what has fallen into it stay there.

Here's an idea, how about we give some actual living human comedians a listen to? But if you want to listen to the genuine George Carlin, he has 14 specials that you can find anywhere."

Nvidia on Monday announced its new GeForce RTX 40 SUPER series GPUs, promising significant performance gains for gaming, creative workflows and artificial intelligence capabilities over previous models. The new lineup includes the GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER, RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and RTX 4070 SUPER GPUs. Nvidia said the chips deliver up to 52 shader teraflops, 121 ray tracing teraflops and 836 AI teraflops.

The top-of-the-line RTX 4080 SUPER model will go on sale starting Jan. 31 priced from $999, while the RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and RTX 4070 SUPER will hit shelves on Jan. 24 and Jan. 17 respectively, priced at $799 and $599. The company said the new GPUs can accelerate ray tracing visuals in games by up to 4 times with Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology. DLSS uses AI to boost frame rates in games while maintaining image quality.

Compared to its predecessor, the RTX 4080 SUPER is 1.4 times faster at 4K gaming than Nvidia's previous top gaming GPU, the RTX 3080 Ti, without DLSS enabled, Nvidia said. With DLSS Frame Generation switched on, the performance gap widens to 2 times as fast. The new GPU lineup also promises significant gains in AI workloads often used by creative professionals, such as video generation and image upscaling, Nvidia said.

The chief content officer for New York's public radio station WNYC predicts an "AI-fueled shift to niche community and authored excellence."

And ironically, it will be fueled by "Greedy publishers and malicious propagandists... flooding the web with fake or just mediocre AI-generated 'content'" which will "spotlight and boost the value of authored creativity." And it may help give birth to a new generation of independent media. Robots will make the internet more human.

First, it will speed up our migration off of big social platforms to niche communities where we can be better versions of ourselves. We're already exhausted by feeds that amplify our anxiety and algorithms that incentivize cruelty. AI will take the arms race of digital publishing shaped by algorithmic curation to its natural conclusion: big feed-based social platforms will become unending streams of noise. When we've left those sites for good, we'll miss the (mostly inaccurate) sense that we were seeing or participating in a grand, democratic town hall. But as we find places to convene where good faith participation is expected, abuse and harassment aren't, and quality is valued over quantity, we'll be happy to have traded a perception of scale influence for the experience of real connection.

Second, this flood of authorless "content" will help truly authored creativity shine in contrast... "Could a robot have done this?" will be a question we ask to push ourselves to be funnier, weirder, more vulnerable, and more creative. And for the funniest, the weirdest, the most vulnerable, and most creative: the gap between what they do and everything else will be huge. Finally, these AI-accelerated shifts will combine with the current moment in media economics to fuel a new era of independent media.
For a few years he's seen the rise of independent community-funded journalists, and "the list of thriving small enterprises is getting longer." He sees more growth in community-funding platforms (with subscription/membership features like on Substack and Patreon) which "continue to tilt the risk/reward math for audience-facing talent....

"And the amount of audience-facing, world-class talent that left institutional media in 2023 (by choice or otherwise) is unlike anything I've seen in more than 15 years in journalism... [I]f we're lucky, we'll see the creation of a new generation of independent media businesses whose work is as funny, weird, vulnerable and creative as its creators want it to be. And those businesses will be built on truly stable ground: a direct financial relationship with people who care.

"Thank the robots."