Lonely Woman

 

A Woman With No Friends (Generated with ChatGPT)

Recently, I was watching a YouTube video of what appeared to be a speech by Oprah, A Woman With No Friends, but I don't think she ever gave such a speech. When I attempted to locate a transcript, I couldn't (easily) find it, only to find many channels with videos made with that text used as captions, even "Oprah Winfrey Podcast", which calls it a "mystery speech").

I love the new text-to-speech tools. Back in the days of CSS2 it was a dream to have a voice speak the text on your website. I like the idea that I could use Oprah's voice on things she might say, or might agree to say, and would be consistent with her philosophy. But it's not something she thought of or said, but could agree with or endorse. But agreement with something is not the same as you saying it. Similarly, we can create music using other musician's ideas and performances without permission, or giving attribution. What we need are regulations that allow the public legal recourse in instances of unauthorized use of their writing or cloned voices.

On-point, from Taming Silicon Valley, by Gary Marcus:

"As we have seen, AI systems are indifferent to the truth, and can easily make up fluent-yet-false fabrications. In one particularly egregious case, ChatGPT alleged that a law professor had been involved in a sexual harassment case while being on a field trip in Alaska with a student, pointing to an article allegedly documenting this in the Washington Post. but none of it checked out. The article didn't exist, there was no such field trip, and the entire thing was a fabrication, arising from the same statistical mangling I discussed earlier. The story gets worse. The law professor in question wrote an op-ed about his experience, in which he explained that the charges had been fabricated. and then two enterprising Washington Post reporters went to look into the whole fracas, and asked some other Large Language Models about the law professor. Bing, powered by GPT-4, supplemented with direct access to the web, found the op-ed not only repeated the defamation, but pointed to the law professor’s op-ed as evidence, when in fact it was evidence against the confabulation." (p. 54)

Recently,  there was a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight of AI. The takeaway for me is that the internet itself made this all possible--as well as the deregulating effect of Section 230 of the (superannuated) Telecommunications Act of 1996, naively enacted at a time before we could grasp what would eventually happen.

Back in 2000, I was calling the new synthesizers coming out at the time "idiot appliances", where everything is pre-programmed and pre-made, and there's no longer an interest in learning anything about music. LLMs are now that idiot appliance. I still use old synths from that era and have learned to work around all the annoyances.  Workarounds might be all we can do.  But petty annoyances are easy to work around.  We need government to enact legislation to allow for defamation suits to be filed arising from deepfakes. But again, Section 230 is the roadblock.

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Lonely Woman is actually a favorite tune of mine, composed by Ornette Coleman, with a great version by Pat Metheny.

Ultimately, what's interesting is that there is a loneliness epidemic, and AI is a mirror of our collective psyche.