Weekly Scroll: AI THREAT LEVELS
AI - COMING FOR YOUR CELEBRITIES? YOUR JOBS? YOUR MIND?
If you’re particularly savvy, the kind of discerning reader who’s been on this ‘internet’ for a while, experienced with ‘surfing the World Wide Web’, you may have noticed people talking about AI. It’s a closely kept secret, but apparently AI is a big deal. People are all in a tizzy about it! They’re saying AI is the future, just like the metaverse, NFTs, and Betamax. And this time, they might actually be right!
Should we welcome our new robot overlords? Fear them? This week’s edition of the Weekly Scroll is all about AI THREAT LEVELS, for every celebrity, publication, profession and concept you can think of.
CELEBRITIES: THREAT LEVEL MINIMAL
Why would celebrities be under threat from AI? Ask Zach Braff, whose ‘I AM NOT DATING AN AI CHATBOT’ t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by his shirt. Or ask Zendaya, whose own family and friends were fooled by AI-generated wedding pictures of her and Tom Holland. Welcome to the future, where all men are gooning with chatbots and all women have deepfakes floating around. Still, these are minimal threats to the celebrity industrial complex - if there’s controversy, that only serves to stimulate more interest in the celebrities in question.
Meanwhile, Hollywood is all worked up about the newest AI creation, Tilly Norwood. Our dear Tilly is an ‘actress’ entirely generated by AI, and in order to showcase her talent ‘she’ has released a music video for her new single ‘Take The Lead’.
I’m struggling to describe to you how bad this video is - halfway through the video, my mind had already wandered into thinking about how the video would be improved if Tilly was to be suddenly and violently torn apart by orangutans. I was fantasizing about the death of someone, who I must remind you, is not technically alive. Seriously:
If you can watch that all the way through without pausing or vomiting, leave a comment and I will gift you a free month on your subscription.1 I think the celebrities and actors are safe for now. The video above is a technical marvel, yet has absolutely no artistic value whatsoever. It also just doesn’t give you a reason to care. We follow celebrities for the storylines, for the drama. Wake me up when AI is capable of hitting its own child in the face with a chair, that’s the kind of thing that gets the public going.
The one exception I see is how conservatives are following ‘influencers’ that are obviously AI by the millions (and even subscribing to the AI characters’ OnlyFans page). Not sure if this is a story about how porn is being automated, or about how Trump fans are just very, very dumb.
BASIC TASKS: THREAT LEVEL MODERATE
One of the paradoxes of current AI models is that they’re astoundingly capable in some areas, while being astoundingly incapable in other areas. Think about the most impressive thing you’ve seen AI do in the past month or so. Perhaps it created a beautiful work of art from a short prompt. Perhaps it gave you a deeply researched report on a niche academic topic, complete with many helpful citations and summaries. Maybe it helped you vibe-code a website.
With those capabilities in mind, watch ChatGPT’s bleeding-edge model fail to count to 200 dozens of times in a row:
