1927- A Space Odyssey

 

I've asked before what can AI do; perhaps an easier question is what can AI not do? I've just seen something that stunned me. An AI was given a very simple instruction: to remake Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001- A Space Odyssey in the style of Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang was an Austrian filmmaker who became one of the most celebrated creators in the earliest period of cinema, when films were almost all monochrome and silent. They usually had scores, but these were often performed by musicians live in the auditorium. His futuristic steampunk sci-fi classics include Metropolis and Woman in the Moon. The result of the AI instruction is this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq4pdiSPxcc. It is amusing, but also chilling. The method is very simple. Just show the AI all of Lang's early filmography and then show it 2001. Of course a human could do this; in fact such anachronisms are the basis of a lot of comedy, but I bet the AI made its own remake far quicker. It has also done Blade Runner, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7xWmgUdfOg, and Casablanca in the style of Denis Villeneuve, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RxhyqYUjOE. What else? I've already covered AI art in the background links. What about music? This is the country singer Johnny Cash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAFdzBTe2lg... only it's not. It's an AI performing the Eurodance track Barbie Girl by Aqua with Johnny's sound and style. What about books? Could AI write a new edition of Roswell Rising in the style of William Shakespeare? Yes, easily. I can't imagine what that would be like! Anything humans can do, AI can do better. What job will not be forfeit in the AI future? And if you think "It's alright, we'll still need people to program the computers." No, they can program themselves. This is why AI has boomed in sophistication in just the last couple of years. They are writing their own upgrades; and they can do it a thousand times faster than any human coder. What's more, there's no way the government will not find a way to weaponize this technology against us, like they do everything else. I'm not sure what we can do about this. I think this is one of those wait-and-trust issues. This technology could be used to do some really good things as well. For example, Doctor Who fans have spent years looking for the missing episodes of the show. In the early years, the BBC used to delete recordings from its archive to save money or space, or because of broadcasting rights. Fans have scoured the world to locate the missing episodes and have found a few of them, but it looks like some of them are lost forever because no recording at all survives. An AI could recreate them. You could enter the script and production design together with surviving recordings to compare them with and hey presto! Out would come a very accurate reconstruction, even if it's not an exact facsimile. The AI William Hartnell would be indistinguishable from the real First Doctor.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2023/03/should-we-welcome-our-ai-overlords.html.
And: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2022/12/third-rail-radio-programme-131.html.