| Impressed? Here are few things that impressed me in the long decades since I am online. In 1995 we discussed the HP48G calculator on Usenet and Dave Arnett who designed the calculator chimed in. When my uncle left illegally Hungary in 1981 for the US, communication was sparse. We went to my grandmother for Sunday lunch and wrote a letter, together. Answers came in like two months. End of the 1980s phone calls began to happen but supremely expensive and short. By the time my grandfather passed in 2011 at the tender age of 98 he spent easily an hour every day video calling over Skype for free with his son. I wintered out in Israel in 2007. It was almost impossible for me to get around on public transit as I do not read Hebrew. I also spent more than a week at the turn of 2015/2016 in Israel: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Avdat, Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat. I used public transit for all that, thanks to the smartphones with GPS and maps and real time transit instructions it was trivial. I am easy to impress. You just need to knock down barriers of communication. On the other hand, I can't say I was impressed by https://kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com/ -- I surely was entertained, no question about that. When these LLMs roared onto the scene I was neither impressed nor was I entertained. I was frightened. Nothing has happened since which would have proven us wrong, to the contrary. Australia leads the way by banning deepfake porn. More of that please, most especially ban the use of deepfakes of people who run in elections and the mass generation of texts about those. As an aside, I enjoy the translate-in-camera functionality of smartphones very much so I am not against all AI -- it just needs to be used wisely. |
I agree that deepfaking stuff with politicians is extremely concerning, but that doesn't really detract from the fact that Stable Diffusion is pretty cool. I was very impressed the first time I tried out Midjourney and Udio.