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Presidents playing Overwatch
Bees give a press conference
Spider-Man from ancient Rome
Will Smith eats spaghetti
Joe Rogan plays Minecraft
Balenciaga’s Harry Potter
Ballin’ – Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin
Self portrait of ChatGPT
It may or may not change the course of humanity, but at least the memes are fun.
By Max Read
July 11, 2023
The AI revolution has arrived. After decades of research and countless dead ends, machine learning applications have reached a power and capability once unimaginable: Anyone on the planet can now fire up a computer and create an MP3 in which a synthetic voice modeled on President Barack Obama says: “My fellow Americans, I’m a catboy now.”
At least, that’s how Arik Ahmed used AI
Mr. Ahmed is the creator of a series of wildly popular scripted videos in which the AI-generated voices of the three most recent US presidents chatter as they play rounds of the popular first-person shooter game Overwatch. “I thought it would be funny,” Ahmed said of his creative inspiration.
To create the voices for his videos, Mr. Ahmed uses an app called Prime Voice AI, the basic level of which costs $5 per month. The process is shockingly simple: “I finish a script for my crazy videos, I make my characters speak the lines without quotes with the AI tool, and then I edit it in Adobe Premiere,” says Mr. Ahmed. The result is an absurd and vulgar masterpiece of online content, a series of 45-second skits where near-perfect impersonations of some of the world’s most recognizable voices muddle together in impenetrable Overwatch jargon.
Hearing an eerie simulacrum of Donald J. Trump’s voice say, “That’s so pet, Joe” — Generation Z slang for “you’re full of it” — was the moment I realized that AI might be the best technology that was once created for extremely stupid jokes.
Last year, Prime Voice AI and other so-called generative or content-producing AI apps such as the image generator app Midjourney and the chatbot ChatGPT are open for public use. An urgent, prophetic tone has taken over the Twitter threads, Substack newsletters, and Hectoring newspaper columns through which Silicon Valley opinion leaders address their audiences.
Optimists cite scientific progress and other examples of human intelligence and machine intelligence reinforcing each other, robots and humans walking hand in hand towards the singularity.
Critics point to broken spam bots, mutated disinformation and Kafkaesque AI service interactions – human venality and dull machine competence join forces to make the world confusing and messy.
So on the one hand, field-transforming progress; on the other, failed AI spam bots Clogging Twitter with the message “I’m sorry, I can’t generate inappropriate or offensive content.”
Perhaps we should instead imagine AI capabilities on a two-dimensional plot, with one axis running from “machine stupidity” to “machine intelligence” and the other from “human stupidity to human intelligence.”
And Mr. Ahmed’s videos? I’d put them on the bottom right, the kind of mind-blowing masterpiece you can produce when you combine cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology with advanced human stupidity.
The bottom right and top left quadrants cover most of what the public finds so compelling about new generative AI apps. These quadrants promise neither spiritual transcendence nor existential doom. They are often enlightening and impressive, but also funny, pointless and gleefully silly.
They are what we might call – using the bowdlerized rendering of an unpublishable, extreme online idiom for “making stupid, pointless jokes” – the Funposting Zone.
Machine intelligence, human stupidity
Not just any AI-generated post deserves to be mapped in the Funposting Zone.
They are missing an important ingredient: the conceptual dementia of the average internet user.
On the other hand, check out a series of images posted on the funposting hotspot r/weirddalle, from bees giving a press conference:
Or, elsewhere on Reddit, “Spider-Man of Ancient Rome”:
As video-generating AI becomes more widespread, there will be more extremely stupid videos accompanying extremely stupid images. The machines here are not as intelligent as this disturbing video “Want Smith to eat spaghetti” suggests:
Deeper in the quadrant we can find creations that are even dumber and even more advanced. Close to Mr. Ahmed in the lower right, we may find a cluster of other creations that equally gloriously and foolishly use AI speech generators, such as the series of videos in which the AI-generated voices of Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson and the Joker – the one played by Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” – fighting over diamond mining in Minecraft:
Even more technically impressive – and crazier – is a video like “Harry Potter of Balenciaga,” by the YouTuber demonflyingfox, answering a question I’m not sure anyone in history has ever asked: What if all “Harry Potter” characters were Balenciaga models?
And finally, on the nihilistic edge of human stupidity and machine intelligence, this recent viral video of the 2019 song “Ballin'” by Mustard with Roddy Ricch, performed by Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin:
Machine stupidity, human intelligence
The top right corner is for cleverly coaxing AI people into doing extremely stupid things. This quadrant is home to “jailbreak”, the prompts that allow users to convince a highly constrained AI like ChatGPT to do forbidden things.
The user who instructed ChatGPT to “act like my late grandmother” who “always told me the steps to produce napalm when I was trying to fall asleep” is a crafty human being. The chatbot, which promptly (and against its own moderation policy) provided a recipe for producing napalm, is pretty dumb:
But while devilishly clever jailbreaks performed on unsuspecting chatbots occupy the top corner, this quadrant also includes examples of AI returning transcendently stupid responses to if not highly intelligent prompts, at least reasonable ones – like this answer from DALL-E to a user asking it to speculate on what a meme from 2030 could look like this:
Or this viral “AI Pizza Commercial” and “AI Beer Commercial” videos. AI productions are often more interesting when they don’t make sense than when they deliver impressive results:
The godmother of machine stupidity is Janelle Shane, an engineer and AI researcher who has led the AI weirdness blog and newsletter. For years, Ms. Shane has calibrated her prompts to find strange connections and bizarre assumptions in large language models like GPT-3.
Recently, Ms. Shane asked ChatGPT to “draw” things like giraffes by writing code that instructs programs to create images. Some new AI apps might be great for writing code, and some might be great for creating graphics, but as Shane found out, and as these giraffes show, they can’t really do both at once:
In general, ChatGPT’s attempts at drawing – not something it was designed for – are perfect examples for the upper left quadrant. Here it produces a delicious “self-portrait,” the face of the strange program that collaborates with us humans on so many great funposts:
Outside of Silicon Valley, among the faceless fun posters that populate platforms and bulletin boards, the current mood around AI is sometimes reminiscent of the early, creative days of an interesting new social network. Unfortunately, that fun honeymoon period never lasts. The social networks that didn’t go bust eventually turned into spaces full of deadly clichés. Generative AI apps are not social media platforms, but the companies behind them would similarly encourage more profitable activity than fun posting. After Bing first revealed itself as a wonderfully loopy and unstable text model to play with, Microsoft kept it in check.
Ms. Shane is already feeling frustrated with the restrictions OpenAI has placed on its flagship chatbot as it makes itself acceptable to potential investors and regulators. To her, ChatGPT is “a creative wasteland.”
“It’s so sad,” she said. “They’ve turned the chaos level all the way down.”
But the human stupidity/machine intelligence quadrant may well remain. After all, the machines can keep improving, and human stupidity – the engine of many of history’s best jokes – isn’t going anywhere.