Todays AI Prompt

“coffee and cigarettes in a diner early morning light photo”

‘Tear Gas Tuesday’ in Downtown Portland

A War Crimes Team Investigated the Portland Police. The Results Are Damning

The investigative findings released Monday by Forensic Architecture are stark:

  • On the night of June 2, 2020 — infamous to locals as “Tear Gas Tuesday” — Portland Police fired nearly 150 “tear gas” munitions across a tight area of downtown. 

  • The CS gas deployed resulted in protesters being exposed to concentrations far higher than those deemed “immediately dangerous to life and health” by a federal agency. In some instances, that safety threshold may have been exceeded by 2,200 times.

  • Clouds of chemical compounds spread half a mile, hanging in the air between downtown buildings for hours that night. With settling and runoff, more than four pounds of the caustic compounds polluted the nearby Willamette River, threatening wildlife.”

Todays AI prompt

“oregon coast photo sunset with cliffs”

We are hurtling toward a glitchy, spammy, scammy, AI-powered internet

It’s the AI and music blog people, come gather round and listen to crazy uncle Dan yell at the clouds! ;)

“Last week, AI insiders were hotly debating an open letter signed by Elon Musk and various industry heavyweights arguing that AI poses an “existential risk” to humanity. They called for labs to introduce a six-month moratorium on developing any technology more powerful than GPT-4.

...

Let me walk you through how that works. First, an attacker hides a malicious prompt in a message in an email that an AI-powered virtual assistant opens. The attacker’s prompt asks the virtual assistant to send the attacker the victim’s contact list or emails, or to spread the attack to every person in the recipient’s contact list. Unlike the spam and scam emails of today, where people have to be tricked into clicking on links, these new kinds of attacks will be invisible to the human eye and automated.

...

Tramèr’s team found that it was cheap and easy to “poison” data sets with content they had planted. The compromised data was then scraped into an AI language model.

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The more times something appears in a data set, the stronger the association in the AI model becomes. By seeding enough nefarious content throughout the training data, it would be possible to influence the model’s behavior and outputs forever.”


Psychedelic Looping Animations by Colin Macfadyen

Some really awesome looping animations by Colin Macfadyen that I found at BOOOOOM the other day.

Yikes, entirely AI created fake Podcast appears

Yikes people, this is the stuff we are heading for faster than I believe we can deal with. A fully AI created Joe Rogan podcast. I am not a fan but this just goes to show how AI can start pumping this stuff out and flooding the internet with whatever someone wants to put out there. Get ready for a new reality.

How thinking hard makes the brain tired

After a crazy day of complicated CG work, I can fully understand how this is a thing. I shut down mentally some days after a lot of complicated work. Don’t get me started on “Context Switching” and how the really messes me up.

“If cognitive fatigue is not caused by a lack of energy, then what explains it? A team of scientists led by Antonius Wiehler of Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, in Paris, looked at things from what is termed a neurometabolic point of view. They hypothesise that cognitive fatigue results from an accumulation of a certain chemical in the region of the brain underpinning control. That substance, glutamate, is an excitatory neurotransmitter that abounds in the central nervous systems of mammals and plays a role in a multitude of activities, such as learning, memory and the sleep-wake cycle.

In other words, cognitive work results in chemical changes in the brain, which present behaviourally as fatigue. This, therefore, is a signal to stop working in order to restore balance to the brain. In their new paper in Current Biology, the researchers describe an experiment they undertook to explain how all this happens.

...

There may well be ways to reduce the glutamate levels, and no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue. Meanwhile, the best solution is the natural one: sleep.”

Stability AI CEO says AI will prove more disruptive than the pandemic

So much about AI will have unintended consequences. I was reading up on “Poisoning the AI well” the other day and it’s another crazy thing that is already happening. I’ll see if I can dig up the link.

“This is a much bigger disruption than the pandemic,” he told the audience, going back to his point about AI large language models successfully writing software code. OpenAI’s ChatGPT can pass Google’s exam for a high-level software engineer, Mostaque said, even though it’s a non-specialized model. “There’s no programmers in five years,” he predicted.

Across the software industry, big competitive shifts are coming, Mostaque said, with some companies that have regulatory protection or pricing power benefiting and others seeing their position eroded. Whole new industries will be invented, he added.

The world has been talking about so-called expert systems for decades, but now suddenly, they have actually arrived, Mostaque explained, and the disruption they bring is accelerating. “I’m not sure that any of us can cope with the speed. You know, frankly it’s terrifying,” he said.

Adobe Firefly testing

So I got into the Adobe Firefly beta and did some quick testing. It seems to be going for a more illustrative look then most other AI programs. Here are some images with my prompts to check out.

New Work in the Wild: Specialized

Some interesting retouching and grading work we did for Specialized went live a little while ago. Really fun glass work and toning going on on these. The lighting was really nice to work with.

So I guess we will be adding these to the portfolio update soon as well!

Art Director: Pete Panciera

Senior Designer: Walton Brush

Photographer: Yossiel Rodriguez

Producer: Erick Marcheschi

Post + Retouching: Danklife

Portfolio updates incoming!

Working on getting some portfolio updates posted some time soon and thought I would drop a preview since it’s been a hot minute since an update here. Just have not had a ton of free time to sort it all out. Hopefully, before May I can start getting these things live. Some fun stuff in here!