These People Do Not Exist

Author

Bobby Brazen
November 13, 2022

Here's your daily briefing:

So we've officially been sick for 5 days now but we did wake up this morning feeling slightly better than we did yesterday which means we should be on the up and up. 📈 Expect more long-form posts this week. 🙂

  • If you're getting sick (no pun intended) of hearing about Hugging Face without knowing precisely what it is or how to use it, you should join us in taking this course:

The suggested prerequisites:

Do you ever just get dizzy with excitement and gratitude to live during a time like ours where so many free resources for learning about the newest and most exciting fields exist so widely? Or is that just us? 🙏🏼

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  • Check out this thought-provoking Medium piece by Andrei Lyskov about how "advances in AI may lead to an internet dominated by bots controlled by a few individuals":

Beware The Generative AI Driven Internet

Advances in AI may lead to an internet dominated by bots controlled by a few individuals

https://andreilyskov.medium.com/beware-the-generative-ai-driven-internet-8886921f6001

What if I told you that everything on the internet is generated by AI? From the videos you watch to the text you read, none of it is real, all of it simulated. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? That our entire digital reality could be nothing more than an elaborate computer program. But what if it’s not just a theory? What if there is evidence to support this claim?

Andrei Lyskov

This piece reminded us of thispersondoesnotexist.com. If you've never visited the site, it's definitely worth checking out, if only to drive home the fact that we already live in a world where pretending to be someone we're not on the internet doesn't even require impersonating someone else, but instead can be done by creating a new "person" from scratch.

Some examples of Persons Who Do Not Exist:

  • Here's a nice Sund(ai) art thread to peruse over your evening tea:

  • Check out this demo video from Ready Player Me for creating a metaverse avatar with no cameras or apps:

  • Here's another entry in the ongoing and never-ending discussion about generative tools and the extent to which they threaten creative professionals:

Is generative AI really a threat to creative professionals?

Image-generators such as Dall-E 2 can produce pictures on any theme you wish for in seconds. Some creatives are alarmed but others are sceptical of the hype

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/12/when-ai-can-make-art-what-does-it-mean-for-creativity-dall-e-midjourney

Emerging applications right now are more prosaic including moodboards for design consulting, storyboards for films, and mock-ups for interior design, and Mark Beccue, an analyst at Omdia’s AI division, is sceptical about the $1tn figure. “What are the killer use cases here?” he says. “It doesn’t make sense. What problem are you solving with this?” An analyst from consulting firm Accenture says the tools could one day be used to create content to train machine learning algorithms, such as in self-driving vehicles, and speed up games creation. Whether it will amount to anything as lucrative as AI image generators and their backers propose remains to be seen.

And on that note, we leave you with this pile of generative art! Enjoy your Sunday.