Will the next Hollywood megastar be created by AI?

Also: chlorine cocktails, keyboard spies, and important news about gravity

Meet Margot Robot, star of the upcoming Barbie V: The Pinkinator. Source: Midjourney.

Sometimes life comes at you fast. But it doesn't come anywhere nearly as fast as changes in the universe of AI. It seems like every day there are a dozen new stories talking about how people are using AI to save and/or destroy humanity. It’s exhausting, and a lot of interesting stuff ends up slipping beneath the radar. Here are a few of the stories that have been swirling around my brain of late.

Zoom is back, baby!

Last time out I wrote about Zoom's terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad changes to its terms of service. After a ton of blow back (and some gentle nudging from yours truly), Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has declared that his company will not use the content of your Zoom conversations to train its AI models. The company's original terms of service stated that it wouldn't use your conversational data without your consent; now it has vowed to not use it at all, which is the only sensible approach. Kudos to Eric Y. for making the right call.

And the Oscar for the best performance by a digital clone goes to....

Hollywood studio executives, those benevolent overlords of entertainment, made a "groundbreaking AI proposal [to] protect performers' digital likenesses" to the Screen Actors Guild before it went on strike. Their proposal: Actors can get paid for a single's day's work, the studio can make AI-generated copies of them, and then use their digital doppelgangers throughout the rest of a movie or a show.

Groundbreaking? Yes. Evil? Also, yes. Have these people not actually seen the movies and TV shows that have made them all disgustingly rich? Do they think that Darth Vader and Thanos are the heroes of those things?

For now, the studios are hoping to apply this only to low-level actors and extras (the people who really do need those paychecks to avoid living on Friskies Surfin' & Turfin') and not megastars like Margot Robbie or Tom Cruise. But you know it's only a matter of time before the studios try to get rid of them, too. [1]

That’s supposed to be Tom & Margot, but I’m seeing a lot of Michael J. Fox and Brie Larson. Source: Midjourney

AI is listening to you type

Researchers in the UK have built an AI model that can figure out what you're typing based on the sounds you make while banging on the keyboard. Nope, not kidding. Per a report in The Guardian:

[The] researchers pressed each of 36 keys on a MacBook Pro, including all of the letters and numbers, 25 times in a row, using different fingers and with varying pressure. The sounds were recorded both over a Zoom call and on a smartphone placed a short distance from the keyboard.

The team then fed part of the data into a machine learning system which, over time, learned to recognise features of the acoustic signals associated with each key.

The AI guessed the right key press more than 90 percent of the time. The idea is that this technology could be used for stealing passwords, though I imagine it could also detect you making snarky comments about your boss in a chat window during yet another interminable all-hands video meeting. [2]

One of the ways to thwart such an attack? RaNDomLY pReSS tHe sHiFt kEy WHiLe tyPinG. [3]

Ant poison sandwiches and chlorine cocktails, anyone?

Pak'n'Save's Savey Meal-bot whips up delicious recipes based on leftovers, to avoid unnecessary food waste and save customers money. But nobody at the New Zealand-based chain taught the Gen AI bot how to differentiate food from other ingredients. So naturally, some people had a little fun with it. Per The Guardian:

When customers began experimenting with entering a wider range of household shopping list items into the app, however, it began to make even less appealing recommendations. One recipe it dubbed “aromatic water mix” would create chlorine gas. The bot recommends the recipe as “the perfect nonalcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses”.... [Other] recommendations included a bleach “fresh breath” mocktail, ant-poison and glue sandwiches, “bleach-infused rice surprise” and “methanol bliss” – a kind of turpentine-flavoured french toast.

After these recipes went viral, Pak'n'Save fixed the bot to avoid using 'invalid ingredients'. A damned shame, as I was really looking forward to making a Cat Litter casserole for dinner.

Go ahead and quit your day job

Can robots be funny? Simon Rich, a screenwriter whose credits include "An American Pickle" and "Man Seeking Woman" [4], says yes.

In an essay about AI humor for Time.com, Rich claims that OpenAI, the company that brought us ChatGPT and is now worth gazillions of dollars despite never having sold a single product, has been hiding its crown jewels for fear of freaking everyone out about how good generative AI really is. Rich has a childhood friend who works for OpenAI, and he got a peek at one of the creative tools the company has not released to the public, code-davinci-002. He writes:

Taste is subjective, so you be the judge. Try to identify which of the following parody headlines were written by The Onion and which ones were generated by code-davinci-002:

"Experts Warn that War in Ukraine Could Become Even More Boring."

“Budget of New Batman Movie Swells to $200M as Director Insists on Using Real Batman”

“Story of Woman Who Rescues Shelter Dog With Severely Matted Fur Will Inspire You to Open a New Tab and Visit Another Website”

“Phil Spector's Lawyer: ‘My Client Is A Psychopath Who Probably Killed Lana Clarkson’”

“Rural Town Up in Arms Over Depiction in Summer Blockbuster 'Cowf*ckers'”

The answer: They were all written by code-davinci-002.

I think I'll just go hide in my cave now. Call me when the apocalypse is over.

Gravity sucks slightly less than we thought

According to a recent Washington Post article, NASA scientists have determined that gravity isn't the same everywhere on the planet. Some places have more of it than others, depending on how much mass is below you at the time. In other words, gravity is more powerful on the top of Mt. Everest than it is in Death Valley or the Mariana Trench.

With this knowledge in mind I have made my own discovery: There is a tremendous density of mass directly beneath my bathroom scale. I feel so much lighter now.

How's the gravity in your neck of the woods? Share your thoughts in the comments. And be sure to click that button directly below to get more people to read this stupid thing spread the good word to friends and colleagues.

[1] I predict we will see the first entirely digital movie star by the year 2030. Bookmark my words.

[2] A favorite past time when I worked at Yahoo. If Marissa only knew... I would have gotten laid off a lot sooner.

[3] No joke. “It’s very hard to work out when someone lets go of a shift key,” said Joshua Harrison, co-author of the study.

[4] Apparently, in one episode, actor Jay Baruchel attempts to have sexual intercourse with a motor vehicle.

I leave it to your imagination as to what happens next.