Firma WHY | Text, lies and Ai

Once a month we fuel our minds with a guest lecture. We call it Firma WHY. Boaz Lavie, writer, film maker, game designer (http://www.boazlavie.com/) Took us to a great hour about text and Ai, and later answered our curious WHYs.

Why lies?

We are now able to build machines that can pretty much produce lies, automatically and on a large scale. It's time to consider what's the dangers and benefits of such technology, and how to make sure we're able to tell the difference between fake and real.

Why psychoanalysis?

Sigmnd Freud and his successors told us some fascinating stories (or maybe truths) about our inner mechanics. Text-generating machines can do the same, when dealing with whole populations. Using machine learning, they shed light on hidden aspects of our society.

Why DADA?

Dada artists from the early part of the 20^th century, used randomizing techniques to write poetry. During later parts of the same century, computers were used to do exactly the same.

Why should we chat with Eliza?

Eliza, an early chatbot, built in the 60s, enabled people to converse with a machine, for the first time. The conversations were basic. But the emotional effect of an empathic entity talking to you, is not very hard to achieve, apparently.

Why is there a dangerous code?

OpenAI has decided not to release the full model for its text-generating algorithm, announced in February 2019. They felt it's too powerful, and therefore dangerous. It's a debatable decision, but it has certainly created a lot of discussion around the idea of machine-generated texts.

Why Shakespeare and Harry Potter?

We're able to train an artificial neural network on the entire corpus of Shakespeare (or J.K Rowling), and to achieve a pretty convincing imitation of the originals, stylistically at least. Do we still need human authors? Yes, we do.

Why Elon Musk?

Elon Musk (who in fact left OpenAI recently) is one of the prominent people working on AI these days. His and OpenAI's actions will have an enormous effect on our future lives. We should pay attention to what they're doing.

Why should we control our mind?

I'm not sure we'll be able to "control our mind" in the future, but AI advancements give us a lot of reasons to think deeply about ourselves, our consciousness, and our lives' purpose on this planet.

Why code?

Code is becoming the infrastructure of the world we live in. Knowing how to code, or at least understanding how code works, is key for understanding 21th century humanity. It is true for anyone, artists and writers included. Coding is also be a deeply creative and satisfying activity.

Why text?

Although visual forms of communication are becoming extremely prevalent, text is still the basic way for expressing our thoughts, feelings and stories. It's how we educate ourselves and our children. Thinking about texts, and how they're produced, is crucial for anyone who's interested in human beings (and machines).