Chinchilla Squeaks - AI AI

Podcast version

Hear me ramble, hear me roar!

A weekly podcast from Chris Chinchilla covering technology, board and role play games, history, current affairs, and frankly whatever I feel like covering. Show notes can be found at - chrischinchilla.com/podcast

Cool Tech!

On November 4, just hours after Elon Musk fired half of the 7,500 employees previously working at Twitter, some people began to see small signs that something was wrong with everyone’s favorite hellsite. And they saw it through retweets.

Mozilla today released its annual “State of Mozilla” report and for the most part, the news here is positive.

Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant.

A conspiracy theory spreading online says the whole internet is now fake. It’s ridiculous, but possibly not that ridiculous? If you search the phrase i hate texting on Twitter and scroll down, you will start to notice a pattern.

Real as though the people we’re interacting with are people, and not just a computer program designed to mimic human interaction. How much of the internet is actually just bots, misinformation, disinformation, echo chambers, deep fakes, fake accounts and completely biased corporate algorithms?

Language

Large language models (LLMs) have a dirty secret: they require vast amounts of energy to train and run. What’s more, it’s still a bit of a mystery exactly how big these models’ carbon footprints really are.

For the past year, I’ve been experimenting with several AI art image generating systems: VQGAN+CLIP and Diffusion notebooks on Google Colab, Midjourney, a text-based image-generation system, built on top of Discord, and DALL·E, a web-based image creation tool from OpenAI.

What happens when we feed garbage to SD. Well, be the judge yourself. I have found a new hobby. Just type rubbish, get some images, enjoy :)

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here. Cartoonists have an excellent understanding of how stories are shaped in a concise way with an eye for design.

And Finally…

One of the images we came up with during our AI experiments