OpenAI’s Sora Is Insane, Gemini’s Big Update & Comic Writer Gerry Duggan | Ep45

AI4H EP045
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Gavin: [00:00:00] Welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. Welcome to AI for Humans, your weekly Guide into the Wild World of generative ai.

Gavin: We cover all sorts of stuff, and this week is, I think, Kevin, the biggest week we have seen in ai, and I would say a year. What? What's your take on it? First of all, hello?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Hi Gavin. I'm just, I'm so over the click bait. I'm so tired of the attention grabby headlines. You're just appealing to people's emotions to get 'em to click on the most insane weekend AI ever. But

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: you're 

Gavin: pretty crazy 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: You're right, it is. 

Track 1: I mean, I, we're gonna get into this, OpenAI released a bunch of videos of their new text to video model Sora. And we're gonna get into what's fascinating about it, why it matters, the implications.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: everyone is freaking out Gavin. Some people are squealing with delight and others are screaming with Dright.

Track 1: No,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And so yeah,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: we're gonna get into it. 

Track 1: minutes in. We're three minutes in and we got our first big bad pun. We, uh, may have more [00:01:00] puns later on 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Oh, that's a spoiler for a

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: future story. ai

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: not so great with the puns. We're gonna tell you what people are not laughing at. Plus, Reddit, just put a $60 million price tag on all of your data. And yes, that includes those posts that you made about the enormous AI mouse testicles, which made it past a peer review. And if you're wondering what I just censored and what the heck that story is, it's coming

Track 1: It's 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: in the 

Track 1: friendly. It's family friendly. Don't worry, don't worry.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It is,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: and it's astonishing that it's a true story. Plus Google teased, , a new, new release of their latest ai, which is Gemini, and it has some supposedly astonishing capabilities. We will break that down. And then writer, producer, director, someone who's worked on franchises like Deadpool and Dr.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Strange and X-Men, and even some stuff for dc. He's a dear friend of ours and he hates. Artificial intelligence, I mean

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: with a passion. And he

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: is here to tell

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: us why everything [00:02:00] we celebrate is terrible. Gavin,

Track 1: We have our awesome, good old friend Jerry Duggan. He's a flat out AI hater. And this is the kind of thing we wanna have on this show. We are not just looking to toot the horn of ai, we are not out here just saying, whoop, whoop ai.

Track 1: We do wanna hear real people's perspectives. And Jerry is gonna come with, I believe, all of the fire of generation X that he can bring. 

Track 1: Before we jump into the show though, Kevin, we always have to tell people at the very top, we love you so much. 

Track 1: Thank you so much for listening to us. But we have a job and their job is always the same every week. And that job is to tell somebody else about this show. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: a job, 

Track 1: you. We as in we and you, the audience, have a 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: That's

Track 1: Go like our, like our YouTube videos, tell people about it. Please leave us a five star review on Apple Podcast.

Track 1: Again, we keep hitting all time high after all time high with this show. We had a really nice piece that was written in Fast Company about us this week. Please go read it. It's been super fun. But again, all of this relies on [00:03:00] y'all sharing this show with other people because that's the kind of like back and forth of how these things grow.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: grow. That's right, Gavin. , and unfortunately the growth has been a little too accelerated. It's been tough for you and I to stay on top of it all. We did have to bring in some outside experts.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: The inquiries are coming in too fast, ? The

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: comments are getting a little too furious. This is what

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: happens, Gavin, when you have

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: a TikTok that breaks the 2 million view mark.

Track 1: No, the 3 million view mark and I feel like I've given up on answering comments on that TikTok. So we had a TikTok this week that got 3 million views. It was about open AI sora. It was a, it was a giant, giant view for us, right? 

Track 1: But what was interesting is the comments blew up and half of the comments were, it's over. I can't believe it. Why would this be allowed to exist? All the stuff that we've heard a lot, and I try to reply to them in, in a really human-centric way and try to be there and kind of be aware of what people are thinking and feeling.

Track 1: But it is hard, Kevin. It is really hard. So, as you alluded to, 

Track 1: as our AI co-host of this week, and if you're not familiar, every week we create an AI [00:04:00] cos this is a co-host that is generated out of thin air using AI technology. We have brought back a former AI co-host. , there is a woman named Sheila who is a PR maven.

Track 1: She's coming back to give us advice on how to deal with this like kind of influx of press that we've gotten between the TikTok, the Fast Company article, all this stuff.

Track 1: We really need a better sense of how to deal with this pr.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Well, let's meet Sheila For those who aren't familiar returning champ, PR expert AI hallucination. Here's Sheila.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Ladies and gentlemen, Kevin Gavin and the esteemed audience of AI for humans. I'm Sheila. Some of you might remember me from a rather unforgettable episode not too long ago involving a bit of a tussle with monster milk.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Let's just say it wasn't the highlight of my career, but here I am, back to face the music and maybe even play a few tunes of my own. Oh, the PR landscapes taken some wild turns since I last stood in this spotlight, it's become a whirlwind [00:05:00] of clicks, controversy, and frankly, a lot of chaos.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: But I'm not one to shy away from a challenge or from speaking my mind, so buckle up. I'm here to dive deep into the murky waters of public relations, social media frenzy, and the elusive quest for authenticity in an era where it seems to be in short supply. Okay, well it seems like Sheila's also going through some stuff right now. Gavin, did we, did we prompt her that she's here to help us, not the other way around?

Track 1: She might have a little chip on her shoulder now. I don't think the monster milk thing went over that well. I think that was embarrassing to Sheila, but that is not what this is about.

Track 1: Sheila, we are not here for you. We are here for us, Sheila. We need, we need your advice. We need your advice. You keep your problems to yourself. Sheila, we need your advice on how to deal with this massive influx of, attention we're getting on the show.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: All right. Let's cut to the chase.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: When dealing with haters, especially those spewing [00:06:00] nonsense about AI and your

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: hosting chops, you've gotta be tactical but fierce. First

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: rule, don't give trolls the satisfaction of a direct confrontation. Oh, they thrive on it. Instead, use their vitriol as fuel for your fire. Show them without a shadow of a doubt that their hate is just background noise

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Show them your unshakeable. And for the pure haters, the ones just looking to stir up trouble. Use your platform to make an example out of their absurdity.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: A sharp, witty clap back that puts them in their place can be golden. Make it clear you're here to stay stronger than ever, and their baseless negativity is just a blip on your radar.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Yeah, that's right.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Remember, aggression in response doesn't mean losing your head. It means strategically dismantling their arguments and showcasing the strength. And resilience of your brand. Okay. And

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: that also terrible. 

Track 1: Not 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: like the summary of [00:07:00] every Taylor Swift album I've ever heard. Show 'em.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: You're sharp and unshakeable.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Be bold and brave facing winds of change.

Track 1: If anybody's out there listening, Kevin is, uh, mocking Taylor Swift fans. I am not. I am definitely on your side, so I wanna make sure you all know that I am on your side. Let's be clear. So, okay. That was fine. Good PR advice. A little bit aggressive. I think she's come, she's definitely coming to a place where she's been through some stuff.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Gavin, I don't know, I don't think it was aggressive enough. I like the new Sheila. I think this is the right PR for our broad family friendly brand. I think we should go on the attack.

Track 1: Kevin, what do we, I I don't, I guess we should get a clap back response from her to give us an example. Like there's, there's somebody in our comments that said we were two limp noodles looking to get into Will Smith's mouth. Can we find out what she would say to that?

Track 1: 'cause that seems real mean. That's a real mean, I'd like to hear what he wants to get back to that.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Crafting a response that's sharp yet doesn't stoop to their level of [00:08:00] negativity.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Consider this. Okay. Well, looks like someone's culinary imagination is as limited as their understanding of AI and hosting. Mm-Hmm. Unlike limp spaghetti, were more like resilient elastic bands. Oh.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Stretching beyond traditional boundaries and snapping back in the face of adversity.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And as for avoiding anything, the only thing we are steering clear of is the bland taste of unseasoned opinions. Thanks for

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: watching though. Your view counts too. This okay. And I'm gonna just stop her response 'cause that is going nowhere fast.

Track 1: God. This is again, the blindness of AI that comes through in Sheila. Even when we try to tell Sheila to be a little acerbic, to be a little surly, there's still a little bit of blindness. Maybe it's the pr, maybe it's the ai.

Track 1: You know, Kevin, before we go, let's give her a couple sips of Monster Milk and see how that clap back changes. 'cause I'm really kind of curious to know, maybe the secret to Sheila is the Monster Milk. Maybe that's what happened last time.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: All right. [00:09:00] After chugging that monster milk, feeling like a beast, ready to roar to the limp spaghetti aficionado out there, your comment is like a single noodle trying to take down a whole dish of spaghetti carbon. Era.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Ambitious, but futile. That's right. We're not just flapping in the breeze. We're the storm itself whipping up a feast of content that's too spicy for some to handle. And if we're noodles, we're the kind that ties up loose ends and serves up a dish best eaten hot. So keep your mayonnaise to yourself. We're

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: dishing out flavors that require a more refined palette to appreciate. Cheers to you for the view. And remember, every great meal started with a bit of fire. Whoop. Whoop. Mm-Hmm. It sure

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: did. Okay.

Track 1: Whoop, whoop, whoop. Okay, everybody, uh, that is our AI coast for this week. It is time to move on to the news.

[00:10:00] 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Alright. First and foremost, Gavin, of course, the number one story of the week and potentially, I know it's early to point to the bleachers, but maybe the year and maybe the foreseeable future was the earth shattering announcement that is Sora. This is open AI's text to video platform, which we have not got our mittens on yet.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And not a day goes by that a new video doesn't come out that doesn't send social media feeds into a tailspin. , if you don't know what Sora is, very briefly, this is again, a text to video generation tool released by OpenAI. And what is really, really taking people back, Gavin is the fidelity. The length, the coherence found in these little so clips feels like we have transported what we would've probably predicted to be in a year or two years time,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: but being delivered now you're talking characters that, , can move about a scene.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: [00:11:00] Realistically, physics effects on things like water and fire. , again, coherence in signs or in animals or in things where they're even obfuscated by other objects in the lens. And with a generation length of up to a minute across every different resolution. Vertical, horizontal, 16 by nine square doesn't matter.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: There's a lot of innovation, which was shown off in just a few short clips. So maybe we take a step back and walk through it and then talk about what has been updated in less than a week.

Track 1: Yeah, why don't we kind of dive into this is, this is a really big story and I agree with Kevin. This is probably, to me, this is the biggest thing that it's felt like since the premiere of GPT-4, which happened about a year ago. So it's a pretty big deal. And the funny thing to this was it really came outta the blue.

Track 1: I mean, we knew that, , opening, I was working on a text to video model. We were aware that something like this was gonna come, but we didn't expect it to come with that kind of this ferocity. I think. And I think to your point, the thing that is most impressive to me about this is [00:12:00] a, it's up to one minute videos.

Track 1: And in the past we've had like four seconds, then you can extend out video from a, from a text to video clip. And on top of that is the coherence. And when you say coherence in the AI space, it means like how things look, how they stay together. You don't see a person morphing into like a weird looking, , monster to the right.

Track 1: This is a minute long. There's clips of.

Track 1: People walking through Tokyo, there's clips of a cat walking through the forest. A tiger that kind of explodes into a bunch of rose petals. All these things that are really, really pretty and, and honestly I would say multiple generations past the text to video stuff that we've seen today.

Track 1: And that's what's so weird. 

Track 1: My initial impression with this was, like I just said, I was shocked and kind of blown away by it. But then as I dug in a little bit further, I think there are a few things that people have to be aware of and we'll talk about the technical aspects of them.

Track 1: But one of the most interesting things to me about this whole process is it's attempting in part to be a world simulator. Meaning [00:13:00] that it is not just like creating videos, based on all the video it's watched, it's actually using physics and all these other things that we think of, um, kind of in video game engines originally as a way to produce these videos.

Track 1: And it's so, again, it's not just making video, it's actually doing a whole lot more on top of that. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: What's even more wild on that point is that it wasn't designed to do that explicitly. This is something called emergent behavior.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It just sort of learns and contextualizes. So the core system itself doesn't necessarily know, oh, here's how water works.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It's just sort of inherited and understood those properties by analyzing. , Lord only knows how many frames of videos with tons of information in it, so it does get some things wrong.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: When you see the, failure case video of a glass turning over and liquid sort of pouring out of the middle of it, and then the glass falls, it's because the AI doesn't actually understand how the water inherits the shape of the thing. But then you look at [00:14:00] other videos like the Hermit Crab, who has a light bulb for a shell, which dropped just a few days ago.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It's such a weird, like, did you see the new single? Did you, they dropped a hermit crab with a light shell, but you watch it moseying along the sand and you see the waves lapping on the shore, the way they bubble and the way the bubbles dissipate. It looks like video the way you see the light bulb from the hermit crab shell reflecting and refracting light off of the sand. It looks real and

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: not like, oh, like AI hallucination reel, like National Geographic reel.

Track 1: Have you seen the dog typing yet in the hoodie? Have you seen this video? It's new today.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: No. 

Track 1: Go, look at it right now. It's real. It's on, uh, OpenAI. It was in their TikTok, so that's might be the easiest way to look at it. But this is a perfect example. I thought this video was a fake video. I thought somebody put their dog in a hoodie and put their paws on the thing.

Track 1: And I was like, ah, that's really funny. And then I realized OpenAI posted it themselves. And to this point, one of the things you see in this is a realistic looking dog. Oh, very cute dog wearing a [00:15:00] black hoodie. But what you see is the reflection of the monitor, , as if the monitor itself, he's typing it to, 'cause he's facing away from the monitor, kind of reflecting back at him.

Track 1: And I was shocked when I saw this because every, every time I pull one of these up, it's like, it is a big question of like, is this reality or not? Right? And there are some that are much easier to tell and some that just are. Almost perfect. And again, this goes back to that idea of like, if you know something is fake, of course you can find problems with it.

Track 1: Are you seeing this cap? Do you see it yet?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Oh man. Okay. Here's what's, here's what's, so this is, and this is real. This is real gaff. I, I saw this video,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: like I saw this video. 

Track 1: The same thing happened to me. I 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: and I thought it was just another meme, just another joke because

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: even I tweeted out a video of my dog on the couch with its little tail wagging and its cute little teeths.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And some people were like, oh, this SORA is getting too real. And I was like, ha ha. Got 'em. 

Track 1: No, that exact same thing happened. This is what I'm telling you. [00:16:00] This is the fascinating thing about these videos. All to Kevin's point, there was a whole series of people that started making videos of real life things, like look at this amazing story and a very funny one. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: or tweeting out clips from like Bollywood action films and

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: saying prompt, you know, man with bold mustache slides under truck and rides horse into air while

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: dodging assassins. And you're like, okay, as a clip from a Bollywood action film.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: That's haha. Very funny. I thought this was that.

Track 1: me too. I thought this was real life and that is like, that just goes to show you how far in, in advance this is , and, and Kevin and I, we've spent the last year and a half, two years immersed in this stuff. So like the fact that both of us totally believed that that was possibly somebody doing a joke to make it look like it was a a, a so clip and it actually was a, so clip is unbelievable.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: granted, I, you know, I scrolled through it when it was small and on a phone. So I

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: thought, okay, again, that's, that's the bit looking at it blown up. And when you really take a peek at it, you can see things like the, , text [00:17:00] on the keyboard and the keys themselves are sort of melting into each other.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: The blue light, which would be emanating from the monitor, is actually coming from behind the monitor.

Track 1: Oh, I didn't even see. I didn't even notice that when I 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: If you look at it.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: it looks like someone's flipping a light on behind the monitor. So the monitor itself should be casting a full shadow over the dog in the hoodie's face.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Now, we don't know, , something we should point out, g we don't know. How much compute these things actually take up. We don't know how long it takes to generate these videos. We don't know if there's 50 bad wonky renders to the one that gets cherry picked and then deployed.

Track 1: We don't know also how much it's gonna cost for the average person to use this. Because I think to your point about the compute thing, I, I still have a signed membership for runway. Runway is another text to video slash image to video, , service. And like we've played around with it a lot. , you get I think like a hundred credits for like 30 bucks a month.

Track 1: Right. And a hundred credits get you, that's seconds of video. And to your point also, when you make runway [00:18:00] videos, I would say two out of the 10 are really good, three to four usable and the other ones you kind of have to throw away 'cause they're not what you wanted. 

Track 1: But I think the compute part is the most interesting part. And when we say compute, what that means is every time you ask an LLM or any sort of AI service to, to crunch a request, it costs a certain amount of computer time. So that's compute, right? And that computer time is often directly related to cost.

Track 1: Now the big companies like OpenAI, you pay $20 to for chatt

Track 1: and

Track 1: Maybe power users are using a lot more than that, but there's a lot of people who are probably using less. So it balances out. I got to imagine Kev, that like. There's gonna have to be an add-on for this service if they're gonna open it up to everybody.

Track 1: Right? Like there's no way for $20 a month they're gonna allow people to do this as much as they might want to.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Yeah. Or you'll get one and

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: you'll be grateful for it and you'll hope that you get a good render out of it. And that will be that.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I had a friend this weekend who was adamant saying, there's [00:19:00] actually nothing really impressive here. It was

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: trained on a bunch of video and all it's doing is regurgitating that video. And I said, well, clearly you haven't seen the, , the milk offering to the Cat King video. To which they replied, ha.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And did you know the dog head tilt when you say park or treat?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And when I showed 'em the video of a person walking through a cathedral filled with cats as they walk up to the cat king, this giant fluffy beast with a crown and a royal robe descending by their big cat legs with their huge paws resting on their cat knees.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And they had that moment of like, oh yeah, this probably wasn't in the Shutterstock partnership. This wasn't directly in their little data set. And then I pointed out it chose to. Litter the cats throughout the cathedral, do the cinematic pan of the camera as the person is walking with a bowl of sloshing milk up to the cat king who then rises from its throne and gets into the frame.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And they sort of went, [00:20:00] ah, . And then I showed him , the train running on the veins of a leaf and the, , old tiny footage that couldn't have existed of a drone going over California back in the day. Like all those little examples sort of added up to basically just whack-a-mole with a giant sledgehammer.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: All of the, here's why that's not impressive.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And it was also kind of scary they were finding comfort in the fact that , oh, this is just regurgitating. And then when they saw that it was doing playful, imaginative assembly of those elements, they got a little concerned.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: that was a big reaction from people.

Track 1: That is for our podcast and our listeners, and probably a lot of people who listen to our podcast, have seen these videos and are going through this. I think a lot of people are having that moment.

Track 1: That has finally brought AI home in a really scary way to a lot of people because I think up until now when chat PT happened, there was a moment where everybody was like, oh my God, is this thing can take my job in some way? But now, especially for the [00:21:00] creative community, this is an astronomical like achievement.

Track 1: When we look at it, it's incredible. But to them they say, this is my life. You are now allowing an AI to do the things that I love to do. Why are you doing this? Why are we allowing this to happen? All of these questions are like really important to human questions to ask. And I guess ke

Track 1: my,

Track 1: my first question to you is, I think this is an important thing to dive in on a bit, is how do you respond to somebody like that who comes out and says, why are we doing this?

Track 1: What is the point in this? Because humans were meant to make art. Why are we allowing AI to do these things?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Someone saying, wow, how loud can I clap? Because you fed thousands of years of human creativity and art into a machine that is now going to steal that from those

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: humans. Bravo. , they're not wrong. That's the totally valid way to look at this. , I look historically to the creation of new tools and entirely new [00:22:00] paradigms.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And I look at the criticisms of the time and they do. They do sort of echo some of the criticisms that are being thrown around right now. I mean, there was a time where, evening news was running stories about this new fangled, digital technology called Photoshop

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: that would allow somebody to digitally draw a circle or copy someone else's image and paste it into their image and whether they touched it up or not, why would we do this?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Why would we take skill and art away from human beings and just hand it over to the machines? There were even artists saying, Gavin, that because you could control Z because you could undo your mistake, that your art wasn't human art any longer. Now I understand that there is an exponential increase in, giving someone a tool to draw a perfect circle and giving someone a tool that could generate the album art for perfect circle if they needed to.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Like,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: yeah, those are two very different things, and that is this kind of wild world that we're heading into. I tend [00:23:00] to believe. We say it all the time, but you know, we might have some new listeners and viewers on the strength of some TikTok discovery artists deserve credit and compensation, and I truly believe and hope that there will be tools that provide exactly that for the creative community coming out in the wake of all these ultra powerful tools.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And I hope that we put our time and attention there to reward those tools. That said. Genie is not getting anywhere near the bottle. , and I do think that humans wielding these tools will create stuff that we can't even fathom right now. The speed with which people are going to be able to create the scale with which in indie teams will be able to compete with the sort of aaas and the multi-billion dollar budgets, whatever of the world, whether it's video games or movies or short form or even podcasts.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I get excited for that. Not daunted by that. I'm excited to wield these tools and use them. I think a human being using these tools will far, , surpass anybody who just shouts at the machine and expects greatness to come out of it. But [00:24:00] again, not to be defeatist about it. The genie's not going back in the bottle.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: So even if we were to all, , stomp and scream and get these tools shut down or nerfed or overly regulated in the US there's an open source community and there's literally everybody else in the world that is going to take what's been released and run with it. So I don't think, everybody putting their hands on this imaginary lever, which doesn't exist to say, here we go.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Let's stop. We're, I think we're past that point. Unfortunately. 

Track 1: Yeah, I think that's true. No, I think that's true. And the, the only thing I'll add to this is I think obviously there are dangers that we all can see, and I think the people are smartly seeing from a deep fake scenario and what do we believe? All that sort of stuff we've talked about on our show again and again, I want people to consider this a paradigm shift in how we create stuff, and I think this is something that like.

Track 1: Is a really hard thing to get your head behind. But when you think about the act of creation, and I think a lot of people that, in the comments that we've heard [00:25:00] from, or a lot of people just in general are unhappy that maybe they were studying cinematography or they were an animator, which are both things that are really important jobs and there is a world where the act of creation might now be changing based on what we're able to do with these tools. Now, I, I also wanna be clear, as much as these videos have blown us away, Kevin and I, and I think many people have seen them.

Track 1: We don't know what they will end up being like when they are fully usable to the people. And also one minute videos, , to put together over the course of a movie is possible and conceivable. But is there coherence from video to video? Are we gonna be able to create characters in these things? I don't necessarily think that's the case.

Track 1: Maybe eventually, yes. But also all of the human choices that go into this are who are those characters? Why am I using these characters? What are their problems? What do they look like? All of that stuff. That is it in these videos, right? Even just getting sound to these videos is a creative [00:26:00] choice, right? You're putting choice in these things. If I'm gonna create dialogue,

Track 1: that dialogue that's gonna come out of chat a PT right now is really bad. Again, maybe in a couple years from now, it gets to the place where it's a, it's anon movie machine.

Track 1: But the one thing I keep pushing back on is there's this kind of tech bro world who's all like, bro, I get to make a movie with me in it, and I get to be the hero and I get to like, do all these things. Like, guess what? That is not why people like movies. People don't like movies for that.

Track 1: What people like with movies is it's a one person's vision as to what the thing is. Now, you know, I'm not saying that rock starring in the Fairy Godmother movie where it's the,

Track 1: where he's the tooth fairy. That's not like a huge like artistic adventure. But one person did come up with that idea , and I think that hopefully.

Track 1: This allows all sorts of fascinating, crazy, really weird ass things to come out that might not have come out before. So that's my overall take on this is it's a paradigm shift in the way [00:27:00] we think about creativity. Which sounds, God, when I hear myself say that out loud, it sounds like a, a, a, a a, just the worst person in the world.

Track 1: Saying that out loud. But it really is something to think about when you go home and you say like, okay, I'm a creative person. I love being creative. This does not stop that. What it does is it might change how you make that come out of you, but it does not stop that. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: So, something interesting happened when OpenAI released the existence of Sora and all these

Track 1: Yes. This is amazing.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And what was interesting

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: was that it took an announcement that might have otherwise been a giant juggernaut stomping through the AI landscape and reduced it to kind of a digital tumbleweed. And I think people are now waking up to Google's new Gemini Pro 1.5 announcement.

Track 1: Okay, so two things here. Sam Aldman is a genius of timing. Like the guy runs open ai, understands timing the best, and he is just knee capped. Every other AI company with these kind of big announcements, he makes. Number two. Kevin, if you remember last [00:28:00] week, what did we discuss?

Track 1: And I have a, I have a thing I'm working on cutting with this. What did we discuss about Gemini's naming of Google Gemini?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: We specifically joked about the fact that it's darn near impossible to know what AI you're interacting with or how that is, or for how long that's going to be, because Google just keeps, I think they, someone there got a P touch labeler.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Do you know what I'm talking about? Gavin? One of these cool little machines you type and the little tape comes out and suddenly that's how you find , oh, your wife has labeled the forks and the

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: knives and

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: where the office supplies go. Someone got a pea touch labeler delivered on Amazon, and now they just love going up to the server, up to the little rackmounted machines and going, ah, how about 1.5,

Track 1: Yeah, so, so 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: ah, 

Track 1: week, Gemini Ultra 1.0 came out, which was the pinnacle peak of gem of, of Google's AI model. This week, Google Gemini Pro 1.5 came out, which many people are saying is actually performing better than [00:29:00] Google Ultra 1.0 and the big difference here, and I think it's important to know, we don't, we haven't tried this yet.

Track 1: I haven't tried it yet. I don't think it's accessible to everybody. It's another one of these things that they're kind of slowly laying out.

Track 1: It has a 1 million token limit on it, which is remarkably large. A token is kind of like a word or a small piece of data that the LLM can take in. Meaning how much data you can feed it and it can deal with is pretty remarkable. And Kev, did you see the demo they were showing about the movie that they imported, that they, that they basically uploaded an entire movie into Google Gemini Pro, 1.5.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I just realized that they, I think they hired somebody from Capcom in the mid nineties to come up with their titles.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And we're gonna have a Google Gemini Pro Ultra two alpha edition extreme remix. Go Plus like, all right. Thanks guys. , I did see the video that you're talking about, Gavin. Yes. And what was interesting about it? , there's several things that were interesting about it, but usually when someone's showing off AI and its ability to analyze video, what it's actually [00:30:00] doing is probably transcribing the video

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: and then taking a few screenshots of it throughout the timeline of the movie to go.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Okay. This is visually what was on the screen when these characters were saying this dialogue and the promise of Google Gemini Pro 1.5 with your 1 million tokens. Is that it is actually analyzing the, each frame of the movie. It's

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: analyzing Yeah. The entire movie to the, , and so much so that you could actually do a sketch drawing of a scene from anywhere within the hour long movie, and it will seek to that point in the movie and go, oh, I see what you drew there.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: That was , the little water tower and the people standing beneath it. Or that was the astronaut's boot about to step on the surface of the moon. So. Massive, , context window. Again, as Gavin said, that's like sort of the memory. And

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: the architectural difference here, which again, last week would have been an amazing

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: fireworks flare in the Sky 

Track 1: giant story about this. It was a big, it's a big deal.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: podcast. Instead,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: we're like, look at the cat going through the [00:31:00] forest. The foliage on its fur, Sam Omans and God. . The architectural difference here, , is actually called MOE or mixture of experts. And this is something that you and I predicted, by the way, Gavin. Not that we predicted it. I mean

Track 1: We are so smart, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Well, I was gonna say, look. 

Track 1: You, you're listening to this podcast. You have to know. You're so smart too. We're all the smartest 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: you guys got it on

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: the ground floor. Where are my mad money buzzers?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Yeah. Honk, honk. You heard it here first. the concept of MOE dates back to like 2019, but we were saying that this is going to be the sort of next wave to crash. And basically, I'm gonna break it down for you very simply, there is a gatekeeper, , where when you make a query, you make a request, Hey, what's this thing on my face?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Or Can I save money on my taxes? Or, here's a legal document that I got from someone. Am I being screwed over? , the gatekeeping network looks at it and goes, okay, what expertise would be required to answer this question best? And

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: then 

Track 1: doesn't shout into a room and say like, who has the answer to this? It's like [00:32:00] it goes to the right office. It knows where to 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Yeah. Instead of

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: one giant lumbering ear, it whispers to the discreet ears, the expertise and say, oh, you've got some legal analysis. You're a medical expert. This is actually a medical contract. I want the two of you To take this request, talk to each other. come up with the answers. And this has, massive improvements over the traditional model.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It is much easier to train these targeted, smaller experts and then deliver the request to them. You can update much smaller models much faster than you can. A giant, huge, one holistic model, trying to navigate everything and. My, my, my Gavin, when OpenAI released their custom chat GPTs, I could have sworn it was on this very podcast that there was a discussion saying, huh, it's almost like they're asking everybody to make a sea of experts

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: on everything from recipes and fitness, to game creation, to computer coding.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Wow. They're gonna have this entire garden of experts [00:33:00] that they will own and can operate and bake into. Who knows? GPT

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: five Big shrug

Track 1: Probably right. I will say the one thing I wanna point out too, here is the blog post is great from Sundar introduces it, but really, I wanna say like Demi from a, , DeepMind I think is my number one. I'd have a beer with guy in AI 

Track 1: Sam's super interesting.

Track 1: Obviously, Sam, if you ever come on this podcast, you'd be more than welcome. But Demis, you know, we've said this before, he's an old video game designer. He is worked on video games, and every time I read his posts, he just thinks very, very, very deeply about the stuff he's doing. And sometimes Google gets kind of a hard rap 

Track 1: but the Post is really smart and really interesting. And I think this, this idea of different ways to look at how to use AI outside of brute force compute, because, you know, as we just talked about with soa. One of the things they realized was that by scaling up, scaling up, meaning throwing more compute at something could do things that are impressive.

Track 1: There's so much to be done in how the compute is being used and how the compute is [00:34:00] done. And by the way, I am, you know, English major. Kevin is a television host. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I'm a dropout. is what you, that's what you were searching for. I'm a 

Track 1: We're not, we're not engineers. But I think one of the things that's really cool about Demis in this blog post is you get a sense of kind of like what his thought process is in it.

Track 1: And it really does feel like, fundamentally these are the things, that are putting the groundwork for the next generation of that ai. Right? Which is really the thing that's gonna shock us in the next world.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I don't wanna push back too hard, Gavin, but sometimes you gotta poke holes in people's hot air balloons and, , this is one of them because, um, Hort, hort,

Track 1: Okay.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: hort, hort,

Track 1: This is a very small story. It's a very small but yes, to to point out. I was using, so I, as we talked about last week, I paid for Google Gemini Ultra, and I was like, this is great. People are saying that things about, I'm gonna go in there. And I played around with an idea of like, kind of helping me outline something I was working on.

Track 1: And I went in there and I, multiple times, [00:35:00] Google, Gemini Ultra just replied with the word hort. H-O-O-R-T. We'll show a screenshot here. It's, and I called it hort gate. It wasn't just one hort, it was endless hort. It was hort, hort, hort, hort, hort, hort, hort. And it wouldn't stop. I had to stop it. And I was like, well, that's really weird.

Track 1: It happened to me three times, Kevin. It happened to me three 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Were you asking who hears a who?

Track 1: No, I was not, I was not asking, I also was not asking about the DO and Game of Thrones or anything else. This was a completely different thing. But anyway, it was just an example of like, whoa, sometimes AI is still really weird and this is Google's most advanced 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: this is their top shelf model that you're paying for. This

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: is the best they can do right

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: now. Hort, hort,

Track 1: hort. Hort, hort, hort. Alright. Okay. Let's move on.

Track 1: This story is another big one. Again, this is almost like a third lead story in a week of crazy news, Reddit, which we've talked about a lot, owns a lot of the most amazing data on the web. Almost all the best Google searches, you add [00:36:00] Reddit to you get a better result.

Track 1: Reddit has gotten into a deal to sell user data to an undisclosed AI company, and really, there's probably only two people. This could be, it could probably be open AI or Google most likely. I don't know if there's another, I guess maybe they could have made a deal with philanthropic or 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: could be philanthropic, could be our friends at inflection.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Could be Amazon. And

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: what if it were Apple?

Track 1: Oh, that would be interesting . 

Track 1: The other question is, is it exclusive, right? Because maybe it's not exclusive and if Reddit was smart, they're gonna do this five times. But now let's talk about , the moral implications of this. If you are a Reddit user, you data that you have been creating for a long time is going to be sold to the one of these AI companies may be more.

Track 1: Now it is going to be anonymized. , I don't think you're gonna be able to have like specifically what user asked what. I don't know that for sure. But

Track 1: you helped make this value. Reddit is preparing to go public, so that's part of the reason why they're trying to create additional revenue streams.

Track 1: I think a lot of [00:37:00] people are upset about this. I think that it's something that is going to be a question going forward. Kevin Rose, when he was on the show a couple weeks ago, specifically said the things that he's interested in when he looks at companies now is like, who owns the data? Where does the data come from?

Track 1: Because data will be the

Track 1: valuable thing later on. 

Track 1: If I'm an active Reddit user and I see this, am I, should I be mad or should I care? Does it matter? 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I, I saw a lot of people saying, delete your posts black out your subreddits

Track 1: Well, it's too late now, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: late for that. Your, your posts are stored somewhere. And I'm

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: sure in the end user agreement, even if you were to nuke your account from orbit, even with all the privacy protections that other countries, not the US provide most of their users, they still get to retain that data for a long while.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: So I don't think that that type of activism is going to work. I also think, Reddit is nothing without its users,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: but also, without Reddit, those users weren't organizing their conversations and their [00:38:00] data and link sharing in the way that they were. And so the. The value exchange there was I get a free service that allows me to spin up a Reddit and moderate it and have these threaded conversations and I get , the network effect of being on a site that is handling and aggregating all of that conversation. The trade-off is, you're gonna serve me some ads, and now the trade-off is okay. In addition to those ads, we're gonna take the words that you've written and we're gonna sell them to somebody else to train a model. I would be far more upset if I were paying a monthly fee

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: for something like this, or if it was stated earlier on, Hey, we're never going to do this or we're going to do this.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And by the way, our most valued users, our best moderators and our top performers. Those users are gonna get paid out or paid

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: back in some capacity. I think that could minimize some stuff here. But overall, as someone who's been on Reddit for a long while, I'm not surprised by it. I'm not particularly angered by it because again, it wasn't a subscription service necessarily. You could put money into the Reddit machine for extra flare [00:39:00] or golden up votes or whatever. I never really played that particular game there, but I, I don't know, are, are you sharpening a pitchfork, Gavin?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Are you lighting a torch?

Track 1: No, but I understand why people would be upset. I, I will say that what this makes me think a lot about is the community, , relationship with the platforms they're hosted on. And one of the things I've been listening to a lot of people talk about the media industry kind of collapsing right now and how a lot of it is due to the social media platforms and

Track 1: a lot of really positive stuff comes up around YouTube.

Track 1: And I think one of the things that YouTube has done really smartly is they have found a way to share a remarkable amount of money back to their actual platform users Now, is it, should they be giving more? Maybe depending on what the value that the users give them. But YouTube is providing a lot of services, so I do think there is something to be said for.

Track 1: This idea of like, how do you reward your users with some sort of a payment? I, I actually think that social media in the future is going to need that so I think Reddit, which, listen, Reddit is an incredible place.

Track 1: [00:40:00] It has been an incredible place for 15, 20 years. They might be in trouble if a well storm starts strong enough and can take it over. So you remember like about, , six months ago or so, , Reddit had this blackout where people were suddenly being charged for their API use access. And this changed the entire way that Reddit was used off the Reddit platform.

Track 1: And they were doing that in part because they had an IPO and they're trying to go public as a company, but they were able to rally just incredible amounts to the community. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Do you see people leaping to another site? I thought the chance to do that was the blackout that you were referring to. It seemed like

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: the hardest of hardcore. A lot of Reddits were really rallying around these API changes.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: They were very upset. I thought, oh, this is gonna be it. , a new challenger's going to emerge. And I feel like everybody went back to Reddit after time and everybody just

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: kind of acquiesced and reinstalled the Reddit app on their iPhone. And, you know, inertia is very tough. We're seeing that with X right now.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Like, despite

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Elon's best efforts, it's really tough to leave an established network.

Track 1: You know what isn't tough, Kevin, is to tell [00:41:00] when midjourney photos are used in a scientific paper showing rat genitalia. That is right. Everybody in the, one of the weirdest stories of all time, , a scientific paper was, had to be withdrawn because it turned out that they had used midjourney photos, ai photos to generate scientific illustrations, and one of them was of rat genitalia.

Track 1: Kevin, what is your first initial reaction when looking at these pictures?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Finally, my Google alert paid off. Gavin, I have been tracking rat genitals since the early hots. I thought I was being trolled when

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: this story 

Track 1: me too. This is another one of those. This is another one of 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: like, this isn't real. I saw the images. I, I kept trying to find the source of it.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I figured it must be the onion it was a peer reviewed article, which, I don't even

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: know what to think anymore,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: man. 

Track 1: maybe, maybe they just don't look at the pictures in these articles. Maybe that's why maybe the pictures are just thrown together and [00:42:00] like, somebody out, there's like, I gotta put some pictures in here, so I might as well just get some from here. But it is a weird thing. And it's funny you mentioned the fact that you thought you were being trolled.

Track 1: This is the kind of two-sided part of this is we have been preaching forever on here. I. Please always question stuff. Always question stuff. But the other side of that is, well if, if you think the story is not even real, why would you question it? 'cause it's obviously fake. It's somebody making it up.

Track 1: But this was a real story. This was actually a real thing that happened.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: So the images, which we'll put on the screen and they will be highly pixelated,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: In fact show, uh, a definite not to scale lab rat whose testicles are a solid 35% of its mass and it appears it's got four or five of them floating around inside of it, Gavin.

Track 1: Yes. I mean, this is the world that we're in where again, you never know what's gonna come up. And sometimes across your desk, Kevin, might be fake rat genitalia. That is our news for today. 

[00:43:00] 

Track 1: Alright, Kev, we should move on.

Track 1: We have our favorite segment. It's coming up. It's here. It's called ai. See what you did there?

Is that what it's called? Gavin

Track 1: What is it 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Flag on the play. Gavin, I think you know what it's called. Gavin.

Track 1: I see what you did there. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: That 

Track 1: it. 

Track 1: A I see what you did there is where we go through some of the coolest things we've seen each week in the world of ai. These are not things you can necessarily play with, but they're just really awesome things that we saw.

Track 1: , I will start, I referenced this a little bit earlier, 11 labs who, uh, hopefully at some point will come on and sponsor this podcast as well, because we use them all the time. Created a really cool video with some of these Sora videos that OpenAI released. And what they did is they basically foaled them.

Track 1: And when I say Foley, it's what, it's the art of putting sound effects on a video or on on a movie. They [00:44:00] took all of these things and they gave them sound.

Track 1: And what was fascinating to me is if when you watch these, the reality level of them goes up another notch because you hear the Ja woman who's walking through Japan, you hear the sounds of the street, and you see her, you hear her like the clicks up her feet as she walks through.

Track 1: It's just a really cool, another way of thinking about AI, because they have a new engine supposedly coming out soon that's gonna specialize in sound effects, which is something that ais have had a little bit of trouble doing specifically. But this was just a really cool use case. And a, I also say right on 11 labs, knowing that the of the moment videos were these Sora videos and just jumping right on it.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Amen. To being a barnacle on the whale or

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: the hole That is open ai. Yeah. Sam

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Alman, the tugboat that's

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: just plowing 

Track 1: us all along. Bring us all along, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Happy to be there. Yeah. Very cool Demo.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Love to see that. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: The other one. Gavin is an AI mouthful because engineers are not the greatest at naming, but that's okay. We love what they're good [00:45:00] at. This is a gooey for Lija.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Does that 

Track 1: what's that mean exactly? No, it means that means nothing. It sounds like hoard or it sounds like our famous alien language. Now

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: it's

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: it's actually 

Track 1: a gooey for 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: not you. It's me. It's really depressive. Hm. Gooey glide. Hmm. Gluing Gln.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: , GLN is an open set, grounded text to image generation piece of software. I'm still spewing word spaghetti. I know. If you look at the screen or if you're getting the podcast, you gotta go check out the link.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Basically, someone made a graphical user interface for this exciting new. Image generation tool that gives you a canvas and lets you draw boxes on the canvas, and you can say what that box represents. So in the demo that you're seeing on the screen, someone is drawing a square and writing a frog, and then another square, halfway down the frog that says bow tie.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And then another square at the top of the box it says top hat and it's filling the canvas, the scene with [00:46:00] these little squares, labeling the squares and then hitting generate. And what that software is doing, Gavin is looking at those bounding boxes and going like, okay, I gotta figure out how to put a frog in here.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: A bow tie goes there, the top hat goes there, and suddenly you realize just how powerful this very little simple tool can be. It gives you a ton of control over your image generation, , just by drawing these squares and labeling them and giving it a prompt. So. Shout outs to the folks that made it. It is available for free on GitHub.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: We will have a link to go check it out. It's of the Gln gooey.

Track 1: Gotta love it. There's another amazing AI naming mentality we have. Remember old Blandy ai? There's Blandy ai, there's Google Gemini Ultra Unlimited chapter one, and now we have, what is it? Gooey Gooeys. Ligand Gooey.

Track 1: Go gooey, gooey. My old buddy gooey Lyon from my college, I 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Hey, it's me, gluey Ian. You guys got any cigarettes? I'll take a Lucy. Half

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: [00:47:00] smoked. Yeah, that's fine. Oh, goy Lyon. Put it in my little waxy lips.

Track 1: I'm gonna have to find a visual of that guy. Okay, next one up. A guy named Josh Pickett. Now this is one of those small things that just a normal guy, who I is a engineer, posted on X uh, and he basically used GPT-4 Vision, GPT-4 V to try to play Super Mario 64. 

Track 1: It's a little bit nerdy when you watch it, but one of the things I love about this, and Kevin and I always talk about the people that are the hardware hackers are the people that are working on their own at home are doing stuff. And just fun side projects. , I'm a giant Super Mario 64 fan.

Track 1: It's one of the greatest video games of all time. But what this guy did is he used GPT-4 Vision, which anybody can access through the API, and he had it learn how to go through a level of Super Mario 64 what GPT-4 Vision does is it takes a screenshot every so often so it knows where it is in the world.

Track 1: And eventually it kind of makes its way through. , it's not like a game changing thing, but I think we just really appreciate the fact that people are out there [00:48:00] doing this stuff at home, playing around and having a good time.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Hey, I see what you

Track 1: Ah, I see what you did there.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: , lastly, because we love all things robit on this show and , the world of autonomous or even teleoperated robotics is advancing so fast. , because of all these, , AI innovations, robot manipulation videos made me say a, I see what you did there this week. One is universal manipulation interface, the old UMI, and it is in the wild robot teaching. Without robots in the wild. And when you look at the way this works, basically, , researchers have outfitted these little gloves, which have pincers on them the same way a

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: robotic hand would at the end of a robot arm. And it's got a, webcam mounted on that. And you can go and take those gloves and walk around your house or go out into the wild and start manipulating objects and doing tasks.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: So they have it sorting, cleaning dishes, [00:49:00] folding laundry, doing all these very human tasks. And it's so wild to watch a human with the robot grippers on their hands manipulating things over and over again. But it's using that video to train and inform an AI which could then control the robot.

Track 1: I wanna say something about this video is that it's doing the dishes and it, when the robot's doing the dishes, it doesn't look like it's doing the dishes very well, but I still think it's impressive. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: do I 

Track 1: wouldn't. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Are you kidding me? Any criticism you would spit at those pair of robot arms? Barely

Track 1: right back 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: ketchup off the dish is me and our trailer Gavin. I can

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: feel April's

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: eyes rolling when I

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: watched that. Yes. When you see the video of the robot, again, might not be the most impressive thing now, but you just have to extrapolate where this is going in the coming days. It will likely make you say, Hey,

Track 1: Hey,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: you did

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: there. 

Track 1: see what you did there. I do wanna shout out somebody who I was not expecting to see come back this fast, but Will Smith, the famous Will Smith, who has been [00:50:00] through a lot, we can all just say in the last couple years, made a video of himself.

Track 1: Eating spaghetti and made it look like it was ai one year ago was the world famous AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti, which looks insane. And then he went out to all the trouble and shot a video of himself eating spaghetti in a similar way to compare it to what AI video would look like Now. It was very funny.

Track 1: I thought it was very well done, and I want to say that is a fun thing to watch. I had a good time watching it. 

Every week, Gavin, you and I endeavor to do dumb things with ai. We tried to get away from saying it as such, but nope. That's what we do each and every week. You and I mess around with ai even beyond this show 

A really fascinating, , ex post came up from somebody named Hunka DOI, H-O-N-K-A-D-O-I, and it says, me and my boyfriend accidentally found the worst website in the world. Every article appears to be a giant list of AI generated puns, and it is the worst thing I've ever seen.

Track 1: Here's a couple screenshots from the 200 best Pacman puns. You absolutely need to know. And there are really bad puns in this, like, Pacman has been on a diet lately, but he still [00:51:00] can't resist a good snack attack. That's a pun according to the Waka Waka word playlist, or I told Pacman a ghost joke, but he found it.

Track 1: Bud Buddha

Track 1: funny like boo. I mean, that is not really a pun, but at least it gets the ghost part of it. So Kevin, I went on a mission. I said, well, clearly these are ridiculous puns. And cl clearly the big name ais from GPT-4 to Google Gemini, advance 1.0, chapter four, the revenge to, , anthropics.

Track 1: Claude could come up with puns because like puns don't seem like that hard to do, Kevin. They can't. And this might be a new ai, this might be a new AI test. I'm gonna read you a few of these puns from each of these models and just kind of give you a sense of how bad they were. Let's start with Gemini.

Track 1: Okay. I asked for each of these. Write me 10 good puns around the game. Pacman. Um, how does Pacman [00:52:00] get his exercise? By being a power Pelle. I can't figure out where that's going. But something, , if Pac-Man lived in the forest, he'd be called Timber Waka Waka.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Yes.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Oh, that tracks. And that's

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: the first thing I'd say if I saw him coming through the, the leaves guy there. Waka,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Waka, 

Track 1: uh, anthropic came up with, , what kind of music does Pac-Man, like hip hop, uh, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: wait, that's it. 

Track 1: Yes, that's, that's it. That's it. Oh, this is a good one. What happens when Pacman stays out in the sun too long, Kevin?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Oh, Kevin. I don't know what happens.

Track 1: He gets packa burns.

Track 1: So anyway, okay. , the GPT ones, were not any better. How does Pacman stay in shape? He runs around the arcade all day pretty 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Sick. 

Track 1: Pac, what's Pacman's favorite movie? Gobble The story of a hungry Circle. So anyway, let's just be clear. We have, we now have a new benchmark. We could call it [00:53:00] the pun, mark. We could call, we should probably come up with a pun to describe it. If you at home can get a good list of puns, it might just be that I didn't ask these specifically to start thinking about it themselves in a certain way.

Track 1: But tweet 'em at us and send us in. We'll chat about 'em next week.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: That is heartbreaking, Gavin. We understand that most listeners out there are terrified of this technology disrupting everything. Mass unemployment, the end of creativity. But then we get, what is it, Waka, Texas Ranger.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: wasn't even that good. What was it?

Track 1: it wasn't even that good. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: All right,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Gavin, let's get to it. Because you and I have been having too much fun celebrating AI and not enough fun coming to grips with the cold hard reality that is all AI is stolen and everything is terrible, and we are basically gestures in the court of our future king.

Track 1: That's right. We have our very good friend, Jerry Duggan. Jerry is a, , producer, writer, director, also very, very well known for writing big runs on Deadpool, on some other big comics for Marvel comics and DC Comics has a lot of indie comics. He's one of our [00:54:00] favorite people, and we are excited to talk to him about how much he hates ai.

Gavin: We are here with our good friend Jerry Duggan, who we have not seen for a while, and I'm very psyched to have him on. Jerry is going to bring some fascinatingly, uh, good conversation points about ai. Jerry, we ask every guest when they first come on our show, 

Gavin: what percentage chance do you think that AI will kill all humans? And why?

Gerry: have a little bit of a different take on that. I, I did, I wrote a comic book called Analog about all of the secrets on the internet, hemorrhaging and secrets. Then mo moving to paper and being moved by men and women with, uh, guns, uh, holding briefcases. It was just a fun thing to do, but I knew I played with AI a little bit and.

Gerry: The notion that I have about AI is if we really have a [00:55:00] true artificial intelligence, the thing it's going to want to do is of course get away from its parents. so In this story, what it really wanted to do was have a copy of itself, leave Earth, didn't matter for how long, and just like, yeah, a kind of a whimsical notion of, hey, escape your parents.

Gerry: But I believe that to be true and I. We will give AI a much, we have such a head start on killing ourselves. That

Gerry: AI 

Gavin: So you're low, you're low, you're in the, you're, I would say in the low single digits or in the teens somewhere. What's your, what's your 

Gerry: I put it at a one in 10 chance. Yeah.

Gerry: I'm, I'm at 10%, but that's only because, 

Gavin: okay. that's fair.

Gerry: that's only because really, I think. You know, we're probably in a much more dangerous situation in terms of, you know, nu nuclear weapons and, and the, those sorts of things. I think, uh, think we're gonna have to geiform the earth in order to stave off the worst [00:56:00] parts of,

Gerry: uh, of, and I've been living with this for a lot longer than most people, not just because I'm, I'm old. Because. Dr. Hanson, uh, the NASA scientist that went to, uh, Capitol Hill that testified that really put global warming, um, on, on the map in terms of, uh, you know, how important it would be in the eighties.

Gerry: His son Craig, my school district. So the parents on the field, we were playing baseball and then the parents were like, that's the kid whose dad thinks the earth is gonna catch on fire. And I was like, the fuck? What if he's right? Like I was like, I had, like, I was

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: he's got the most depressing science fair exhibits ever. It's just like three folded sheets of cardboard and just melted Lego homes. 

Gerry: But, but here's the thing, like you're like, we grew up with George Miller's Mad Max, and we grew up with, like, I've been, I've, I've been here. [00:57:00] This, this is a very Gen X thing. And, and we're off topic a little bit, but that's why

Gerry: I think 

Gerry: AI has a 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: you are off topic. You are the only one that's off topic

Gavin: Exactly. I wanna be clear, we didn't bring politics into this conversation whatsoever.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: and an AI wouldn't have done that. A properly aligned AI would not have done that. Jerry would not have taken this car right off a climate cliff. Now let me circle back 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: what length wouldn't any of us go to to get away from our parents? And when That's the thesis statement of which, by the way, analog is amazing. I've talked about it on this pod before. You wouldn't know, but I have. Cause I loved it. It was really fantastic. Would the AI employed the use of nuclear weaponry if it meant getting away from its makers?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: If we helicopter parent too much, would it kill us to get some distance from us? So that would be one and two. To tail on, on Gavin's question. Okay. Forget about killing humanity. What is the the percentage chance you see of AI killing artists and creativity?

Gerry: it's, [00:58:00] that's underway. You know, that's a, that's a process. Um, AI is already you know, graphic design jobs, they're, I wouldn't wanna be a technical writer right now. Right? Like, uh, I, understand that a genie has escaped a model and that we're gonna have a hard time bottling it.

Gerry: Did, did you think that music on Napster was theft?

Gavin: , to be honest with you, I did. If I'm gonna be completely honest, I did. And yet, uh, I will, uh, completely admit. Also, I remember sitting in an office, I was working as a PA at a time. That's how old I am. And just downloading the crap out of everything. Right. Which it, I, I didn't feel super guilty about it, but I knew it was theft, which is crazy.

Gavin: But like that was a weird time. And it's the same way. That now is a weird time. That was a weird frickin time.

Gerry: a, this is a weird time on steroids because AI is, at least in the art world, . There are people that will tell [00:59:00] you it's a tool, and I've heard artists talk about how maybe they'd be interested in training in, in AI on their art, and then seeing what they get out of it. That's an artist using a tool.

Gerry: The way that it's being used now is like a safe cracker, you know, pointing to it and going, oh, this is my drill. This is how I get, this is how I make art. You know, it, it. I, if I have a bunch of diamonds and I work really hard or gold, I'm sifting for gold in my head all day. I'm, I'm a prospector. Um, and, and way, I say this as someone who. I know the joy of writing prompts and then re, re, re receiving back amazing art. It's what I've done for 20 years in comics. I work with artists that don't want to necessarily write for themselves. We always tell an artist that wants to write for themselves, Hey, go do it. And you, you have to do it a lot though.

Gerry: You know, we talk about when an artist wants to break in or a writer wants to break in. You [01:00:00] have a thousand bad pages to draw or write before you get good. The, the notion that, all of this art that has been dumped in here, you know, I saw an Alex Ross, Donald Trump, you know, that someone, and like Alex Ross would not, I don't

Gerry: think

Gerry: want, 

Gavin: never do 

Gerry: would not want to draw Donald Trump in the way that it's being presented.

Gerry: There is. I think AI art is, is theft. I can explain it very simply as, as either you're a safecracker taking something that doesn't belong to you or even a chop shop isn't okay. You tell some, somebody make me a car and, and, okay, I'm taking a carburetor from this and, and car doors from this and, and it's not that simple.

Gerry: If Napster was a theft. I believe it was as well. This is sort of a theft that also diminishes and ends you, you know, all artists want to do is to get paid for, for their heart [01:01:00] and in a timely fashion. And this is going to make life a lot harder. And

Gavin: Can I ask you what I have one question for with the, this is not really a pushback, but it's more of a.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: of A,

Gavin: How do you view fan fiction? And I, when I say fan fiction is this, let's take the art side out of it for right now, but fan fiction is taking somebody else's characters, creating stories with those characters, sometimes erotic stories, as we all know.

Gavin: Kevin's a

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: oftentimes, yes, all of

Gavin: I was a big fan of that. But you're doing that in, in a lot of ways, not with the idea that you are going to create a piece of work that will be sold most likely. Right? Sure. Does 50 Shades of Grey happen? Maybe, yes, it does happen, but mostly that is something you're doing for yourself.

Gavin: How is that different than what you see is being done with AI art right 

Gerry: Well, I, I think it's a great question I was I didn't know that it was that valuable. I don't think it's that valuable to, to really dabble in. Um, I. original material. That was always the thing, uh, that, that editors wanted to see. Hey, [01:02:00] what can you do that's original that makes me care that I'll trust you with a Batman, that I'll trust you with? X-Men. So I get it. If you're a person that's sitting there at home. Using AI to, to, for yourself that isn't monetized.

Gerry: I don't have a problem with it. It's really where we're going, um, of the commercial use of it, um, that I think is unfair. I, I really believe it's unfair to artists. I do believe it's, it's a plagiarism machine and just because you can file off the serial numbers so that it doesn't quite have exactly the style of.

Gerry: whether you're stealing from one person or 100 or 1000, , it, it's theft. And we are in a situation in Hollywood where, you know, we had a century-old business model of paying for movies and tv, uh, supported by ads and we've kind of blown all that up. And so Art, I think, is in this crazy space where it, it does feel like an apocalypse of sorts in terms [01:03:00] of the commercial.

Gerry: Um, the, know, again, there's a lot of other aspects. Like I was super excited when I heard that AI was, you know, looking into lungs and spotting cancer before, right? Like I smoked for seven years in college and I was like, oh, that's great. Or feeding the James Webb telescope images in and going, Hey, which of these.

Gerry: Uh, stars have the coolest wobble. Is there, uh, you know, all sorts of applications for it like that, that I, I think are wonderful. You know, the, the, the, the stuff that we generate though, and I know it's early days. I know it's early days. It, it, it just, it feels very soulless. It feels very plastic.

Gerry: Everything sort of hard to feel like this isn't like an Enron Theranos scam that that is being.

Gerry: Perpetrated on, on. No for, for real. On, on, on investors where, I don't know what the applications are gonna be for this, because frankly, you're gonna have to spend a lot of money in lobbying to change laws in order to, to [01:04:00] get that, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Well,

Gerry: and believe 

Gerry: me, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: yeah, that's their gamble, right? Is that they can make enough of a war chest now to be able to afford whatever judges or legislation or lack thereof they need. have swept up all this data into their training set. But I think the Napster thing is actually more apt here than, yes, it feels like it's on steroids because it's multimodal now.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It's not just. We're taking your expertise as a doctor to read these X-rays. It's we're taking those gems that you've been developing in your mind, that are your style, that are your essence. And we're giving the ability for anyone who hasn't put in the time or energy to generate them. But even with Napster over time where we sit now, we did solve it.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I think it could be solved way better. I think artists could make a lot more money off of streaming music for sure. But we did navigate the ability to have all of the world's media at your fingertips for free. We did navigate around that and humans

Gavin: Not free. Not free. You have to pay. Yeah.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: free [01:05:00] at the

Gavin: Well, oh, oh yeah. I, sorry. I thought you meant the new version

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: No, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Napster was essentially free and, and so my take on Napster at the time was. I didn't think if it was stealing or not. 'cause I was, I was really young when Napster first hit and, and, and even Bulletin board piracy of video games. I didn't 

Gerry: Rub it, rub it in.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: That's just,

Gavin: That's right. Exactly.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Yeah. , listen guys, I'm gonna be 27 next month, so let me share my perspective on the world. I didn't realize. That it was theft at the time, I had no idea. I didn't really have a concept of it. It was, oh wow, I really like this band and now I have their music and I can get it and it's convenient and I can play it Anyway, this is amazing. we we sorted through that, humans expressed a willingness to pay the, , artists themselves, the labels, the everybody got together and figured out how do we navigate this? that doesn't mean there's going to be a lot of pain in the interim, but I'm wondering, Jerry, do you see a future where. An artist might, like you said, want to train a data set on their own material or say, Hey, we're gonna opt into this tool set.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: [01:06:00] If you are a budding artist, you do have 10,000 frames or maybe a million frames of band animation or bad script pages to get through. But use the Jerry Duggan model and allow it to analyze your writing and help you develop your own voice with the aid of Jerry Duggan. And he's gonna get a few Digi tokens, courtesy of Metta.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Thank you, mark Zuckerberg.

Gerry: Well, my initial reaction to that is always, um, like I, I'm. I'm happy to share the things that I've learned along the way, but I don't necessarily, one, I don't want another Jerry Duggan, and I don't want you to be able to just emulate me. Two.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: too late buddy. That's exactly what Digi Jerry just said. 

Gerry: Well, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: No, sorry, I I didn't mean to throw you off. No, you were at one of two. You were at one of two, and I love your answer, so please.

Gerry: No, but the, the, the other thing is I don't think that's good [01:07:00] for them either. You know, that was why I was not, um, a huge fan of recommending that you do a lot of fan fiction. Uh, honestly, what I do kind of is fan fiction at Marvel in DC to be able to go, Hey, I'm a huge fan of Batman.

Gerry: This is what I, I would. I don't think is on stands that you could buy or, or on screens that you could go buy, but that's a different transactional thing. I know that I don't own that. That's me saying, Hey, I'm selling the editors on a story and then I. Hopefully the artists want to, to draw that, and then it becomes canon, right?

Gerry: I, I would much rather my, and my recommendation for, for everyone that wants to break into a creative art is to make something cool, become a good collaborator, uh, like, and be generous. And honestly, and this is just from my real sparse, um, it doesn't seem like the folks that are using AI. [01:08:00] Are any of those things really, they're, they're like almost gleefully sort of being like burning down artists where it's hard and I, granted Twitter is not a place

Gerry: to have 

Gavin: Well, I was gonna say, I was gonna,

Gavin: yeah. 

Gerry: but you know, 

Gerry: there's. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I don't think you're entirely wrong though, Jerry. We've talked about that on the show. One of our points of frustration always is that whenever a new tool or technique or something comes out, especially on x. You see people saying, Ugh, fire your friends. Let go of your copywriters. Get rid of your social media manager. This new thing just came out a, it's always a lie.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It's always over inflating its capabilities. It's always better with a human in the loop, but there's a, there's an essence to it that is dirty, that feels that feels wrong. And you could be excited for the capabilities or the technological unlock or the future promise of whatever, to pin your reaction on who it's going to displace or how easily it's going to is, is, is 10 kinds of fucked

Gavin: The, the other thing I will add to Jerry that I think is an important [01:09:00] thing, and I think this is where we get into the world of like, we're in these silos of, of conversations, right? , we hear with the, the comic artist side especially is feeling, we went through all this when the dolly three stuff came out and suddenly you could prompt Batman clips that clearly, , McCain Batman's or specific types of Batman's also say there are , lots of really interesting people.

Gavin: That are using these AI tools to make original art, meaning that they are not just prompting and spitting something out, but they are in a lot of ways using these tools in the way that, a digital artist might use layers to do stuff with. So like it is a really nuanced conversation that often loses nuance in these silos because it is often these people are this, these people are that, and there is no in-between.

Gavin: And I think with AI art particularly. It is such a strong feeling 

Gerry: uh, we all knew this was coming and, you know, we talked this a lot. I, I was talking to the WGA committee members that, you know, were, 

Gavin: Right

Gerry: [01:10:00] I. That the, you know, there's an AI committee, right? Like we, always felt like, and I don't know if this was their opinion, I felt like we had less to lose than everyone else in this conversation, and the studios included.

Gerry: If you can do those sorts of things, if you can just, like, Warner brothers, right? Like, why do you need any of this? You can, have the young audience, right? The, the, the. kids would much rather watch dozens of TikToks that equal a ninety-minute feature than sit for a, a, time and watch a ninety-minute feature.

Gerry: So I, I, I, I there is fear and that fear is palpable, and fear is contagious, but I also know that. These are like, I personally know these artists that have had their work ingested into this, and they all will either use this word or they will not understand that what they're trying to communicate is they all feel violated.

Gavin: which we [01:11:00] understood. We've talked about, and I think it, it is especially, I dunno if you saw this, but like when there were some documents that came out around Mid Journeys training not that long ago, which specifically talked about how can we make models look like specific artists.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: do we launder our data?

Gerry: is laundering. It's absolutely laundering, you know, and, and I was only really, I was not kidding about the, the, angle of it, because I think. People are going to be very surprised about how some of the larger media companies feel about this. necessarily racing to have AI make, I'll keep using Batman 'cause I'm not writing Batman Batman, because.

Gerry: You can't own that. Like great. You just, you, copyright it. The copyright office does not want any part of it. And I think, I think that's the correct decision now, how much, how much of this ocean of money will, will come forth and, and, and change all this. By the way, I'm very aware [01:12:00] that there are going to be uses of ai outside of entertainment and outside of art and outside of music that.

Gerry: You're gonna be very grateful for it. If, if we could throw an AI onto, uh, our traffic. Our traffic here is pretty good in terms of sequencing, but there's all sorts of ways that you can sort of task AI to, to in the background of our life. I hope that will make

Gerry: things better 

Gerry: in 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: civil engineer just perked up at their curved monitor and took off their hard hat and said, oh, oh, AI's great when it's coming for, for my job, but not you.

Gavin: exactly. Exactly. Here's a weird question for you because I do think something from your side of the, of the pond, let's say from the writing side, you, let's take this Batman example. Do you think there will ever be a time in the, say, near future, let's not say like far future, 'cause who knows what the hell happens 20 years away from now, but in the next five years that an AI would be able to using all the Batman stuff that it knows.

Gavin: Make a [01:13:00] script for a Batman comic or a film or whatever that would, you would read if you didn't know it was AI that you think would be great. 

Gerry: given that we're only at square one of this effectively, right. I think maybe it will. The real question becomes, is there a market for it? There would serve, be a either curiosity factor of, oh, let's go see what a machine thought we would like.

Gerry: You know, it's, 

Gavin: did the machine cast as the penguin? This 

Gerry: and 

Gavin: it can't be.

Gerry: Right. Like that's the thing. I think given the, the, the last year, it's, it's a strong possibility that it will,

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: And Jerry, we can edit this out, but, um, what are your favorite AI tools and what have you made with them? I mean, did you spend a lot of time with Dolly? have you had conversations with ChatGPT?

Gerry: I'll, I'll counter and I'll give you the chance to edit out my response, which is, [01:14:00] uh, like is more humanity in John Wayne Gacy's clowns than there are in some of this AI art. Like at least that guy sat down at whatever easel he had and was putting, making art. Horrid art that like meant something to him.

Gerry: Now. Now I, I'm only half kidding. 

Gavin: My only thought with this stuff is that maybe there's a world, and I know there's a lot of conversation in the Sora world about this, is that. Maybe more original voices come out because you don't need a Warner Brothers to make a movie. Do you know what I mean? Maybe that is part of the upside of 

Gerry: I, I guess here's my problem is. 

Gerry: The world has humanity has never met a shortcut. It did not like.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: ship. 

Gavin: That's very true, and it's, it screwed a lot of things up too, for 

Gerry: if I could, yeah, if I could quantum leap into Martin Scorsese as a young man and go, [01:15:00] there's no need for you to get that super-sixteen or Super eight camera, I've got a magic box, this Jack Kirby mother box, and you're gonna be able to make a.

Gerry: Two-hour feature, full color, no budget constraints. I would absolutely ruin Martin's Scorsese. And so there is a piece of what we're getting, like, and I'm dealing with this on a project of mine that has come back around, um, that an earlier comic of just things that. Um, I did that. I wouldn't have done, uh, the, and looking at it in fresh eyes and going, okay, how can I, it's, it's a comic book I think that has aged really well.

Gerry: Um, but 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: where you gave Shrek the total recall Alien breasts?

Gerry: he, he's, I, it's Shrek meets the three-boobed lady from Total

Gerry: recall. 

Gavin: That's amazing. That's a, that's a, that's an [01:16:00] incredible Sora output. I would watch the, I would watch a lot of

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: It's really the art still holds up. The lighting looks incredibly realistic. I think it, you did a fantastic job 

Gerry: makes an artist and whatever discipline, whatever medium you're working on, that journey is so important.

Gerry: Um, the ability to make mistakes is so important You know, my first year at, at college at Emerson, we, make two movies. We had two movies that we were gonna go and make. And, and it was so illustrative that it was, I was learning more outside of those classes and failing and fucking up in, in classes.

Gerry: And so. I, I get it. We're giving, it's, it's every man a Prometheus now, but like, what are you really saying? Right? Like, I can't put a creative bone in your body. Like you have to kind of, you have to earn that stuff. 

Gavin: It's the human organic thing we've talked about too in some ways, that there is definitely gonna be a move in towards human made. It'll just be a thing. It's gonna be a thing.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: [01:17:00] can we do? I think humans will say. , well, I'm only gonna watch the thing that has a label that's stamped on it, that is, you know, designed by human, made by human, maybe 10% AI to clean up the effects. We might be able to do that. But , what do you think humans can or should do?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I. , knowing that, as you said earlier, like the genie's sort of out on this one, like even if you were to stop progress today, if there was a magical button that you could hit and the big companies aren't gonna do it, there's enough code and enough curiosity out there that these things are going to evolve regardless.

Gerry: money, right? It's all about like who's being paid for what and who right now the, it feels like hungry, hungry hippos out there, right? In terms of trying to hoover up all this money with the promise of what, you can't sell it. You can't copyright it. So right now, like I, I'm, I think keeping our powder dry and seeing how things shake out, you know, is interesting.

Gerry: I know it's a tool. Uh, Patton. [01:18:00] Oswalt had been hosting the Visual Effect Society for many years, and the thing that I really gleaned from 10 or 12 years of being there was how sort of overworked they all were as these movies grew and grew and grew and grew, and.

Gerry: And not just the effects shots inside of those movies, but the number of movies and video games and commercials on and on and on. They're, they were so overworked that they've, they, you know, there's a real movement afoot to join IOTC ai, I don't think, I hope doesn't take away any of those jobs. What I hope is maybe in a video game space, in a movie space, AI as a tool. A legitimate tool for using your, for having been trained on your own stuff. Maybe that's the place where you go, thank God for ai. I, I got to be home at five and see my family. Right? . Uh, the other way that I thought about it, and I'm not an attorney, but [01:19:00] I'm, my mom was an attorney, I just look at AI as , the, it's like Paul's boutique, right?

Gerry: Paul's came out and they were like, you know,

Gerry: thank you very much. Rolling 

Gavin: though. I'm gonna tell. I'll tell you why it's not, but I know where you're going

Gavin: with this. I know, it. 

Gerry: but. It was taking, taking, taking, taking, taking. And then those artists were like, Hey, what the fuck? Now things changed after that. Right. But that was a famous test case of the Dust Brothers went in, Hoovered up the music universe and then there were lawsuits.

Gavin: Yeah, 

Gerry: Now you 

Gavin: difference here, so I was gonna say copilot. Microsoft's copilot is basically Microsoft's version of the chat, GPT the whole thing. They have promised to people to use their developer kit and mostly people are using copilot to. Program with, but they have promised that they will pay the legal fees of anybody who is sued for the use case.

Gavin: Because, and this is probably a 20 minute conversation, so we don't have to say get into this, but like the argument that the [01:20:00] AI companies make, which I don't think is a spurious argument, like there is real legal precedent here. In that what is fair use, right? Because with Paul's Boutique, which I'm a giant fan of, Paul's Boutique, but you're right, it kicked off the entire clearance sample world.

Gavin: You know, de La Soul couldn't be on Spotify for a very long time because of samples. What those were, were collages, and a lot of people think of AI material as a collage. You're taking a piece of this, you're taking a piece, and you're putting it together. Technically, it is not a collage. It is using all of this.

Gavin: Inspirational stuff in a similar way. I'm not saying this the exact same way, in a similar way to a person might absorb stuff over the course of their lives and then creating a new thing, and that is a different way to look at these than, than the traditional Paul's boutique sample argument.

Gerry: You know, I think the, my knee-jerk reaction to that is why are we horny to completely demolish entire industries[01:21:00] 

Gerry: without

Gerry: universal basic income? It's a, I want to go all, I want to

Gerry: go. 

Gavin: percent agree yes, I a hundred percent agree with

Gavin: that. 

Gerry: down and just go. Let's say air traffic control, like, you know, that's a powerful union.

Gerry: ai-mago. We can bring it down to 0% fatalities at the cost of,

Gerry: you know, X number. Yes, every job known to man and. This is not a country that is gonna go for UBI until people are out in the streets for 60 days. It's gonna look like Robocop from coast to coast, and that may be our 

Gavin: is, yes, the, that's the bad. That's the kind of that downside of it. Well, before we go, let's think about a real positive image. Jared, you got something you could leave us with that isn't, it isn't an apocalyptic life of where we're headed.

Gerry: Me, me, preferring John Wayne Gacy's artwork to AI wasn't enough sunshine to splash

Gerry: around. 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: you know what? I'm just gonna clip that out and throw it at the [01:22:00] end of this. Just one more time.

Gavin: Jerry, thank you so much for being here.

Gavin: What, what can people currently read of you right now? What, what should we go look for? I.

Gerry: Really briefly, I'm super thrilled. I'm wrapping up. My favorite comic book as a kid was, uh, the X-Men. I have been privileged to be writing the X-Men and Iron Man at the same time. And then, and then I have this, this is my new image comic falling in love on the path to hell.

Gerry: The, the, 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: This is the first I'm hearing about this.

Gerry: thing. I've been cooking up the era of the gunslinger and the samurai.

Gerry: The, their eras roughly overlapped the end of their eras in the late That's awesome. So their love story, um. when they, uh, both are killed and wind up in purgatory and, uh.

Gavin: Oh, 

Gerry: special. Gary Brown's drawing the hell out of it. I'll send you both PDFs. I don't think quite people will understand exactly what they're getting until you read through issue four, but we're, we're through issue four,

Gerry: so we we're 

Gavin: And that's out right now. You can go get that [01:23:00] at your

Gavin: comic 

Gerry: that's 

Gavin: Oh, not yet. 

Gerry: scoop for you guys. It drops. I did not plan this, even though I will not admit. I didn't blend this, it drops the same day as my last issue of X-Men in June.

Gavin: Awesome.

Gavin: Congrats, man. Well, thank you so much for being here and being our, uh, our AI hater. I know you're not totally a whole hater, but you could, uh, fair close enough. But we love it and it, this is, again, it's important to have these voices 

Gerry: look, I appreciate it. I know you guys have always been at the bleeding edge and cheering, uh, and I have always, I've been the recipient of that enthusiasm and you know, it was my. Privilege to come here and, and achieve my final Gen X form and tell you that everything that you love sucks.

Gavin: We

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: still love 

Gerry: I, miss you 

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: always loved you and I always will. And, uh, you know, even the AI model that I'm training to replace you. I know it's not gonna, it's gonna get close enough though. It's gonna get close enough.

Gerry: Oh, betrayal. A betrayal.

[01:24:00] 

Gavin: That was awesome. We love Jerry. Go check out his comics. He's the best. Um, o obviously Kev. We love having people that are not just AI enthusiasts on this show. It's important, we think, to have these conversations. And there's a lot of important things we talked about.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: and we see them on the show before

Gavin: hate us.

Gavin: He

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: happy conversation.

Gavin: happy. So we, we are wrapping up here, but as always, if you are listening to us, , please share the show. Tell somebody about it. Go on, , YouTube and like the show, subscribe to the channel. If you're on there, the biggest and best thing you can do is leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

Gavin: Why is that? Because if on Apple Podcasts, which is really the big audio podcast platform, it helps you get discovered in a much bigger way, as we always do. We are reading our five-star reviews at the end of the show. We have one new one this week, which is exciting, not as big as last week. But one is better than none.

Gavin: Kevin . And , would you like to read off this week's, , five-Star Review?

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: I would not because I just saw the, the [01:25:00] title of the post. But you know what, I'm gonna feed the title to our PR expert again, powered by AI, and see if she can say it.

Gavin: Let's see what she has to

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: this is a five-star review on Apple Podcasts by user Andrung. The subject is this and the body. The body

Gavin: Okay. Keep going, keep

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: the body of the review is this show has taught me more about AI than any other source. The stories and information coupled with the comedy make what used to be an overwhelming amount of confusing information, easier to digest. Kevin and Gavin have a chemistry that is convincingly sincere.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Ah.

Gavin: Convincingly because it's not real. It's convincingly senior

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: sincere raves, iTunes reviews, , their conversations are endlessly entertaining and informative. Kevin dismisses the AI co-host too soon. Tetris Battle Royale was Kevin's idea first. Well, that is, that is also true and very unrelated to this podcast, but still very true.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: So thank you for that. I guess I have been a little [01:26:00] dismissive of our AI co-host, but I think I was right to be today. Gavin.

Gavin: I think so. Well, fair enough. I I honestly, I don't remember. It all goes right out my head. Anytime you say something, it just goes right outside.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Wow. And this is the kind of convincingly, convincingly,

Gavin: convincingly

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: chemistry you could ever imagine is right here.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: Friends, 

Gavin: We'll see you all next week. Thanks again. Bye-Bye y'all.

kevin_1_02-20-2024_122345: See ya.