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156 points Sean-Der | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source

Alt link: https://mrchristmas.com/products/santas-magical-telephone

Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7QJxZWFQg

The first time I talked with AI santa and it responded with a joke I was HOOKED. The fun/nonsense doesn't click until you try it yourself. What's even more exciting is you can build it yourself:

libpeer: https://github.com/sepfy/libpeer

pion: https://github.com/pion/webrtc

Then go do all your fun logic in your Pion server. Connect to any Voice AI provider, or roll your own via Open Source. Anything is possible.

If you have questions or hit any roadblocks I would love to help you. I have lots of hardware snippets on my GitHub: https://github.com/sean-der.

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gyomu ◴[] No.45575739[source]
This is why everyone not in technology hates us.

I'm a technologist. I get it, on some level it's kinda cool that we have the technology to bring this thing into the world, and so of course one wants to build it and make it real.

Breadboarding it as a fun weekend project is one thing. But making it exist as a product sold on Walmart.com is another.

What is the point, exactly? I mean this as a serious question to think about, not as a blanket dismissal. Any object, by the mere fact that it exists, demands something from the people it is put in contact with. What behaviors does it encourage, what beliefs does it promote, what skills does it exercise?

If I spend 60 minutes with my kids writing a physical letter to Santa, then going out and putting it in a mailbox, I have a fair sense of the answers to the questions above, and whether those answers are things I want to encourage or not.

If they spend 60 minutes interacting with this object, I'm not so sure I feel so confident about the answers.

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LarsDu88 ◴[] No.45575791[source]
That's feels like such a luddite take. 50 years from now AI powered toys will be so ubiquitous and common to people, they will barely blink.

Just imagine how people must've failed against the first electronic toys 80 years ago, or Pokémon 30 years ago. Ask yourself... if this makes you depressed, what exact kind of new technology would make you happy?

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croes ◴[] No.45575828[source]
The one that doesn’t wiretap by kids.

> 50 years from now AI powered toys will be so ubiquitous and common to people, they will barely blink.

There was a time where people thought the same about nuclear energy. That every device is powered by its own small reactor. They sold even radioactive toys and medicine.

Or think of plastics. A technological success story but now we find plastics everywhere. On the bottom of the oceans and inside our bodies.

50 years from now people may ask why we wasted so much resources on AI.

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noduerme ◴[] No.45575869{3}[source]
If anyone is left to ask that question.
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1. LarsDu88 ◴[] No.45576616{4}[source]
Machines passed the Turing test 3 years ago. They now produce art, music, and poetry indistinguishable from what humans once created. In 10-20 years time, it is likely they will take over virtually all forms of human labor.

This constant negative sentiment on the internet... the brushing off of what has happened. I can only explain it as a form of fear. The fear of the end of human work, human relationships, human interactions...

But I think within that fear is a lack of appreciation of the magnitude of what is happening now.

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2. noduerme ◴[] No.45577066[source]
>> indistinguishable from what humans once created

It's distinguishable from original art in that it is, by definition, derivative and unoriginal.

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3. LarsDu88 ◴[] No.45581819[source]
What percentage of humans do you consider capable of producing art that is non derivative, unoriginal, and aesthetically pleasing at the same time?
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4. noduerme ◴[] No.45611533{3}[source]
You may be able to deduce that percentage from the percentage of humans who make art, and the percentage of art that contains original elements. (Whether it's aesthetically pleasing has no bearing on whether it is art).

All art is derivative to some extent, because all artists have absorbed cultural influences and have seen prior art. But some art contains elements and ideas which are not synthesized from prior art. You can prove this. If art were only synthesized from prior art, then there would never be any addition to its vocabulary. There are conceptual "breakthroughs" which cannot happen just by looking at and iterating upon existing art.

If an AI had been trained only on classical Greek sculpture, it could not invent Cubism or Impressionism or Surrealism. Not just that: It would have no reason to invent these schools of art. The only impetus it might have would be if a human asked it to invent a school of art; and then it could only draw upon its training data.

That's why to call AI output "art" is to fundamentally misunderstand what art is. Art is not the final result or product. An aesthetically pleasing painting is not automatically art, outside the limited commercial sense. Art is the intention of the artist and the unique characteristics of the artist made manifest in the creative process which required discovering something new. The actual output, the thing on the canvas, is just evidence of that process, it is not the art itself.

More often than not, this is also a physical process involving trial and error with real materials in a world that is many orders of magnitude more complicated than what AI currently understands.

An equation on a blackboard is not a mathematical proof, it is the residue of the logic of the proof. In the same way, a painting is the residue of art. A sculpture is a residue of the artistic process by which a person learned to turn a shapeless mass into an imagined 3D object.

This is why AI can only make simulacrum of the final result of art, the same way it can simulate coming up with a proof for an algorithm. But as we frequently see when we ask it to analyze or create an algorithm, it cannot provide a true proof, because it cannot think of failure modes unless we explicitly point them out, nor can it think of concepts that are not in its existing canon of knowledge.

Maybe with AGI this will change. But passing a Turing test and making pictures doesn't mean it can actually create anything like art.

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5. LarsDu88 ◴[] No.45614064{4}[source]
This sounds a bit like copium. There's more than one AI based technique for generating images, and its almost trivial to ask an ai to both come up with an original art style and to generate images in what it says to be original.

There are AIs that come up with working mathematical proofs now and they are getting better at it. Your perception of the current SOTA is about 18 months out of date