The Daily Valet. - 9/29/22, Thursday

✔️ The Birth of a New Medium?

September 29, 2022

Thursday, September 29th Edition

Cory Ohlendorf, Editor in Chief of Valet.

It’s all fun and games until the AI gets a little too clever.

Cory Ohlendorf , Editor ⋯ @coryohlendorf

Today’s edition is presented by

Today’s Big Story

Is AI the Birth of a New Art Medium?

Artificial intelligence can now create any image in seconds, bringing wonder, controversy and perhaps even danger

Creative artificial intelligence is the latest and, in some ways, most surprising and exhilarating art form in the world. But as The Atlantic points out, it also isn’t fully formed yet. That tension is causing some confusion and concern.

Remember when the Dall-E mini AI image generator took the internet by storm? That lead to the next iteration, DALL-E 2, which was initially open to only 200 beta testers, which included artists and researchers hand-selected by OpenAI. By May, OpenAI was introducing 1,000 new users a week from a huge waitlist. And on Wednesday, the company opened it up to the general public.

DALL-E 2 is the best known text-to-image AI application, but more recent (and arguably cooler) applications include Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Their products have to be seen to be believed: realistic street scenes and dreamy strawberry-covered ice-cream mountains in space.

The best way to get a sense of their power is to test them yourself, and a lot of people are, it seems. Stable Diffusion reportedly has a million users just a month after its release, and many more than that are already using DALL-E 2, generating over 2 million images a day.

The technology is now spreading so fast, AI companies can’t keep up to create norms around its use and prevent dangerous outcomes. According to the Washington Post, researchers worry that these systems produce images that can cause a range of harms, such as reinforcing racial and gender stereotypes or plagiarizing artists whose work was siphoned without their consent. Fake photos could be used to harass people—or create disinformation that looks authentic.

From a more artistic standpoint, there are other concerns. Like question of ownership. A tech exec became a figure of consternation for entering an AI-generated art piece into a local art competition and winning the top prize. He went on to tell the New York Times that “It’s over. AI won. Humans lost.” The writer Walter Kirn recently wrote an essay titled “There Is No Such Thing As A.I. Art.” But tell that to the artist who claimed to receive the first copyright for work created using AI art. Unfortunately, the U.S. Copyright Office has stated they do not accept any work that was not created by human hands, meaning the question—along with the future of this medium—remains in limbo.

↦ FYI: Deep Blue was the first AI robot, made in 1996. It was a chess-playing computer which won its first game against a world champion player later that year.

Hurricane Ian Pummels Florida

The storm is one of the strongest ever to hit the state, as it continues to plow inland

Hurricane Ian weakened to a Category 1 storm late Wednesday, but the National Hurricane Center warned it's still battering the Florida Peninsula with powerful winds, storm surge and “life-threatening, catastrophic” flooding in some areas.

Did you see some of those photos? Eerie shots of a near empty Tampa Bay as the water first got sucked out to sea before the storm. And then cars washed out into the Gulf of Mexico by the storm surge. Shots from space as the swirl of angry clouds covers the entire state.

And while the storm is slowing as it creeps towards Walt Disney World, forecasters cautioned that the winds remain dangerous and that the storm brings other threats with it. As much as 18 inches of rain could fall across central and northeast Florida, with the possibility of 30 inches in some spots.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned at a briefing Wednesday evening “there is going to be damage throughout the whole state.” The eye of the storm was expected to move across central Florida overnight and Thursday morning before emerging over the western Atlantic later today and then turning northward on Friday toward Georgia and South Carolina coasts.

↦ FYI: Here’s how the ‘Waffle House Index’ measures a hurricane's potential impact.

Partner

Time to teach the robots. Instead of programming, smart robots are utilizing imitation learning (the ability to learn by watching humans work).

Ukraine Vows to Keep Fighting

While Russia is poised to annex occupied Ukraine after sham vote

Russia positioned itself Wednesday to formally annex parts of Ukraine where occupied areas held a Kremlin-orchestrated “referendum” on living under Moscow's rule that the Ukrainian government and the West denounced as illegal and rigged.

Meanwhile, Putin's announcement last week of a “partial” military mobilization of Russian reservists for his war set off a frenzied dash for the country's borders by thousands of men affected by the order. Americans were also warned by the embassy that Russia could take measures to bar U.S. citizens from leaving the country.

Separately, the U.S. announced an additional $1.1 billion in aid to Kyiv, with funding for about 18 more advanced rocket systems and other weapons to counter drones that Russia has been using against Ukrainian troops. The latest package brings the total of U.S. aid to Ukraine to nearly $17 billion since the Biden administration took office.

In an interview with the Associated Press, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was determined to reclaim all the territory that Russia has seized during the war. The annexation by Russia would change nothing on the battlefield, he said. “Our actions depend not so much on what the Russian Federation thinks or wants, but on the military capabilities that Ukraine has.”

Coolio Dies at 59

The legendary ’90s rapper apparently suffered a heart attack

Coolio, the rapper best known for his hit “Gangstas Paradise” and “Fantastic Voyage,” has died, reports Rolling Stone. His longtime manager told NBC News that the rapper passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack while at a friend's house on Wednesday night. He was 59 years old.

Born Artis Leon Ivey Jr., he moved from his hometown of Monessen, Pennsylvania to Compton, California where he then attended the local community college. According to Pitchfork, Coolio was a crack addict and juvenile offender, but decided to become a volunteer firefighter and picked up a job as security at the Los Angeles airport to kick the habit and pursue music.

In 1994, he released his debut solo album, It Takes a Thief. Just a year later, he'd drop his most famous single, “Gangsta's Paradise,” for the movie Dangerous Minds. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks, became a staple on MTV and earned Coolio his first Grammy.

According to Variety, he was also an accomplished actor, appearing in dozens of films and TV shows throughout his career. He apparently had three movies in the works and also continued to perform on stage—having just recently played a set at Chicago's Riot Fest on Sept. 18th.

In Other News

↦ LeBron James Is Buying a Professional Pickleball Team

↦ Here’s Everything Amazon Announced on Wednesday: A Kindle You Can Write On, a New TV and Four New Echos

↦ The Scariest House on Airbnb Is the ‘Hocus Pocus’ Cottage

Other Things We’re Talking About Today

What you couldn’t stop buying

A sweatshirt that’d make my dad proud

The power of growing out your hair

Partner

Welcome to the Golden Age of Robotics

Machines and automation are the future (which is why investors see such huge potential in them)

Ally Robotics is solving the biggest problem in the $300 billion fast food industry: the labor shortage. Automation and robotics are clearly the future and Ally is currently supplying robotic arms that are flipping burgers and frying chicken at restaurants like White Castle and Buffalo Wild Wings.

Founder Mitch Tolson was helping a $500 million fast food automation giant with their tech, when he realized that most robotics systems are still far too complex and expensive. That's when the idea struck him and he developed a robot that can eliminate programming entirely and learn by watching humans work—no coding required. Plus, it costs 70% less to produce than competing bots.

Leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence and deep reinforcement learning, behaviors and tasks can be trained by anyone through demonstration, similar to a human being. This obviously has huge potential and Ally's arms can do a lot more than cook food. They can solve the same problems in industries from construction to agriculture at 30% of the cost of competitors. But your opportunity to get in early and invest in the company before it really takes off is closing fast—today is the last day to invest.

↦ Invest Before It’s Too Late: Today is your final day to invest in Ally Robotics.

What We’re Eyeing

Wayne Enterprises for Patricks WE2 Moisturizer

Let's get dark for a second. Until I'm able to kit out my own secret bat cave, this collection will have to do. Gotham City's Wayne Enterprises has joined up with Uncrate for a high-performance range of fashion, accessories, fitness gear and other hero-worthy essentials. But our favorite of the all-black capsule collection has to be the grooming gear from Patricks. Looking like something that might go in a utility belt, the WE2 Anti-Fatigue Moisturizer utilizes Swiss biotechnology and colloidal gold for a mattifying and invigorating oil-free hydrator that brightens skin while reducing the signs of aging and fatigue associated with long nights—something Bruce Wayne knows something about, right?

↦ Get It: $118 by Wayne Enterprises for Patricks