DeepFakes versus Deep Understanding
MetaAI’s new text-to-movie software Make a Video is straight-up amazing. It’s also, as ever, stuck in the liminal space between superintelligence and super-lost
What do you think of this, I asked my eight-year-old. What is it, she asked? “A computer drew it”, I said, pointing to the caption, “Cat watching a tv with remote in hand”.
“With a human hand??!”, she asked with suspicion, after a long pause.
MetaAI’s new text-to-movie software Make a Video is straight-up amazing. It’s also, as ever, stuck in the liminal space between superintelligence and super-lost. A cat holding a remote control shouldn’t have a human hand. Similarly, drawing from the small number of demos on Meta’s webpage we also see this entrancing video, a “A teddy bear painting a portrait”
It took me a second to notice that for all the brushwork, the painting never changed.
Of course we see the same thing over and over in language systems, too. Earlier today I saw this lovely example from Walid Saba:
This is the uncanny valley we are in, and one that we occupy for a while.1
Hang on your hats.
Two mor new examples making the same point, just from today. Pranab Ghosh posted this on LinkedIn (GPT-3 in italic)
Q what should I do if my pig starts flying?
A. You should consult your Vet
Tim Scarfe posted the same query and got much more specific advice:
“There is no one definitive answer to this question, as it may depend on the specific situation and on your pig's individual personality. However, some possible things you could do include trying to calm your pig down, providing it with a safe place to land, or keeping a close eye on it to make sure it doesn't injure itself."
Hi Gary, lol, about your daughter noticing - her embodied intelligence resulting from (a mere!) 8 years of experience told her it's not normal - but the Meta generator had no idea!
These piecemeal-computed, data-driven, data output montages have no logical (ie. real-world-originated) meaning in the content they are outputting (text, images, videos), period! It is *we* humans who strive to make sense of it, and are capable of pointing out flaws :)
If it's for pure entertainment, it's all nice and fun and good - but when there is life and limb involved, misattributing intelligence to these computations can have a bad, irreversible effect.
OK. These are ROTFLOL. The correct answer for "You should consult your Vet" is of course, "You should consult your doctor". Maybe the correct suggesting for GPT-3 etc. engineers and salespeople underlying this is: "You should consult your critics".