What can you trust in an Artificial world?

Welcome to edition #13 of the “No Longer a Nincompoop with Nofil” newsletter. I’m trying a new style this week with 3 cool AI tools listed at the bottom as well as an interesting question.

Here’s the tea ☕

• War got an update 🪖

• The worlds first AI powered political ad 🎥

• Musicians fighting for their voice 🤐

AI x Military

Just over a month ago I wrote about AI powered jets that will eventually replace humans. They’ve already demonstrated the ability to outperform human pilots and carry out manoeuvres that human pilots can’t manage due to G-forces. The groundwork for AI fighting our wars is already being laid and it’s just taken its next step forward.

Palantir announced their Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) designed specifically for military use. The platform can do a number of things so lets break them down.

AIP can help deploy drones to capture video of enemy soldiers. It can analyse their battle formations and suggest potential reasons for their operations not only through drone footage but also using satellite imagery

It can analyse for enemy assets like tanks, vehicles and weaponry. Using this information it can suggest different methods to tackle the situation and create entire battle plans.

Based on a suggested course of action it can then analyse the terrain of the environment, suggest optimal routes for vehicles and infantry and deploy means to disrupt enemy communication.

It’s honestly almost like a game. It may seem like this isn’t that useful considering countries like the US would already have systems far more capable than this. That may very well be the case. But what about countries in other parts of the world where this level of technology could tip the scales of war? There are many militias and militant groups who would benefit immensely from such technology.

Will AI replace humans in the long run? Who knows. Palantir is very specific that this tech is not being used to replace humans but rather speed up the process of decision making, creating a more efficient chain of human operators. They’re also very explicit about the need for regulation and they’re not alone. Politicians (surprisingly) are also very concerned about military AI and obviously so is the general public. But there’s also a rather interesting tangent this could take as well.

Much of the training and testing Palantir is doing with this AI is in a gamified system. What are the chances we get an AI Hunger Games? Not necessarily with robots but even simulations? I don’t think such an idea is too far fetched.

Political attack ads on steroids

The Republican National Committee (RNC) has created the worlds first major political ad completely created by AI. Nothing in this ad is human made, not even the voices. The really scary thing is, I didn’t notice anything strange about the ad until I read that it was AI generated. It depicts an essentially crumbled USA if Biden wins the next election. I must say, for a completely AI generated video, it’s actually really good.

But this raises some serious concerns. If one of the major political parties is leaning so heavily into AI created media, what on earth is going to happen when the next US election rolls around? With things like deep fakes and voice cloning so easily accessible on the internet, the sheer volume of misinformation will be staggering.

The real issue is that there is simply no way to determine if a recording might be fake. There’s no tool that can analyse an audio and tell you it was AI generated. When AI video generation becomes photorealistic, how will we be able to tell what’s real and what isn’t? The dangers of this technology are absolutely real and frankly speaking, not only are we not ready for its creation, we have absolutely no way of dealing with the consequences.

The Music Industry has a tough choice to make

Have you heard the new Drake song? Did you know he did an exclusive cover of a K-pop song as well? How about the new Drake x Weeknd song? As you may have noticed none of these things actually happened, or rather they did but not by the artists. People are creating entirely new songs with the voices of artists and well, some of them are actually incredible.

This was inevitable, and it’s not going away anytime soon. These videos are getting hundreds of millions of views across social media. Someone even built a website to create these AI songs. Someone else did the exact same thing and had Universal Music Group (UMG) lawyers threatening to sue him. You can even find some of the biggest AI hits on this website. So what will the future of music look like? If people can create songs that are essentially indistinguishable from the real deal, what happens to the artists, and the art itself?

Grimes is the first artist to offer 50% royalties on all AI songs created using her voice. She’s even released a way for people to submit their own songs and have an AI recreate it using her voice, and she’s charging for it. Whether you like it or not, this very well might be the only way for artists to benefit from these AI generations and gain some sort of control over their own voice.

People are already using this to create covers or new songs for deceased artists. I’m not sure how to feel about hearing a song from someone I know has passed away. What are the ethical implications of this? I’d love to hear other peoples thoughts on this because for some reason, people in the tech world (where I reside mainly) seem to have no issue at all with this. Comment below and let me know what you think.

Is music generation the only thing that can be done with this new AI tech? Absolutely not. Eleven Labs is one of the leaders in AI voice generation and they just released a tool that makes you multilingual.

You can now speak 8 languages instantly so you can go ahead and cancel that Duolingo membership you weren’t even using anyway 😉. If you'd like to see just how realistic it sounds, check out this clip of David Attenborough speaking German.

Tools

I want to share tools that I think people can actually benefit from. Tools that can be used right now and provide value in the things you do. Here are 3 tools I think provide this value.

Gamma

Gamma is an AI powered presentation generator and it is stunning. The design of the slides, the use of fonts and images creates incredibly aesthetic slides. I like the overall feel of the tool and think it’s a great first step in the right direction for generating presentations.

Hoppy Copy

Hoppy Copy is a tool that lets you create emails, website copy and all sorts of other writing. I personally used this tool when it came out months ago to generate website copy and it worked great. There are a tonne of content creation tools out there, but this is one I’m happy to showcase.

Humata

Humata lets you talk with your files. It lets you summarise long PDF’s and have conversations with them. I was one of the first users of this product and appreciate its ease of use and functionality.

Would you be interested in being able to talk with your files and PDF’s without having to upload them in an online tool? I’m thinking of creating a tutorial or product to do just this so you won’t have to worry about privacy.

As always, Thanks for reading ❤️ 

Written by a human named Nofil