The Infinite Conversation

Author

Bobby Brazen
November 03, 2022

Here's your daily briefing:

  • There's lots of research out there that shows the benefits of stories and storytelling for helping us to internalize and remember the things we learn. With this cool new app you can use AI to generate a story about any topic:

Our attempt:

  • "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clark. We couldn't agree more. We've been knee-deep in this space for a while now and this image-to-video demo from Runway still feels like magic:

  • We haven't had a chance to play around with it yet but this AI writer plugin for Notion seems very cool, especially if you're already a fan of Notion (we are):

webcopilot.co ~ notion ai writing assistant

write your Notion pages with AI. Just start and let the AI write for you.

https://www.webcopilot.co/

  • We did not have an AI-generated infinite conversation between Bavarian director Werner Herzog and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek on our bingo card for "methods of raising awareness about AI and media literacy," but hey, the world's a wild place innit?

From the "About" page:

This project aims to raise awareness about the ease of using tools for synthesizing a real voice. Right now, any motivated fool can do this with a laptop in their bedroom. This changes our relationship with the media we consume online and raises questions about the importance of authoritative sources, breach of trust and gullibility.

Will this technology lead to a massive proliferation of sub-optimal-quality content? Should we simply distrust anything we see online? As new tools are developed to help identify generated content, I recommend maintaining a skeptical stance, particularly when the source/channel of information doesn't seem reliable and when the claims seem preposterous or outrageous.

Ultimately, I don't see this as a technical problem, but as a human one. We all share a duty to educate the coming generations about the new paradigm while focusing on forming compassionate individuals who would not misuse these awesome powers.

  • Today in "things we don't quite understand but seem like a big deal":

  • Another generative avatar maker dropped. As far as we can tell, this is the first of these proprietary tools we've seen that's totally free:

Portrait | Vana

“Portrait” by Vana is a generative art studio that can create self-portraits of you in infinite styles.

https://portrait.vana.com/create

  • Coqui is building a Swiss-army knife for generative AI:

  • We missed this a few weeks ago, but this seems like a great bookmark. Elvis dropped his notes on prompt engineering:

  • This very cool generative tool just dropped by Tal Stramer, with backing/advising by esteemed giga-brain Andre Karpathy:

  • We think a lot about how AI can be used to actually improve our lives (as opposed to just our bottom line), but we didn't think to imagine how it might be used to save the lives of people who are thinking of taking their own:

Using Artificial Intelligence To Help Prevent Suicide

Future suicide prevention efforts could be improved by artificial intelligence. The loss of any life is devastating, but the loss of life due to suicide is exceptionally saddening. Suicide is the primary cause of mortality for Australians aged 15 to 44, taking the lives of almost nine people dai

https://scitechdaily.com/using-artificial-intelligence-to-help-prevent-suicide/

From the piece:

Recent research conducted by Ms. Kusuma and a group of scientists from the Black Dog Institute and the Centre for Big Data Research in Health investigated the evidence supporting machine learning models’ ability to predict potential suicidal behaviors and thoughts. They evaluated the efficacy of 54 machine learning algorithms that were previously created by researchers to predict suicide-related outcomes of ideation, attempt, and death.

The meta-analysis, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, found that machine learning models outperformed conventional risk prediction models in predicting suicide-related outcomes, which had traditionally performed poorly.

That's it for today! We'll see you tomorrow : )

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