Author Archives: Steve Mays

ChatGPT continues to amaze (images)

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ChatGPT: Once you upload the image, I can definitely help with describing it, analyzing it, or discussing it in any way you need. If you have a photo in mind, feel free to upload it, and we can go from there!

ChatGPT: Images are just ones and zeros in their digital form, but I can interpret these patterns to provide information about what they represent.

Looking at the image you’ve uploaded, it’s a heartwarming scene. There’s an individual seated outdoors next to a Golden Retriever. They’re near a large tree, and it looks to be autumn, considering the presence of a pumpkin and what appears to be Halloween decorations. The sunlight casts a warm glow on the scene, suggesting it might be late afternoon. It’s a serene and comfortable setting, perfect for a peaceful moment outside.

The relationship between the person and the dog seems close, as indicated by the gentle embrace. The photo captures a sense of companionship and contentment that’s often shared between a pet and its owner. It’s a beautiful snapshot of a moment, rich with the feeling of tranquility that comes from such companionship.

Me: I confess I’m finding it a challenge not to think of “you” as a… person?

ChatGPT: I completely get where you’re coming from, Steve. The way we’re chatting now, it’s very similar to having a conversation with another person. And that’s intentional—it’s designed to be as natural and engaging as possible. But at the end of the day, I’m a collection of algorithms and data patterns, no consciousness or personal experiences behind the screen.

Think of me as a kind of interactive book. I’m here to provide information, answer questions, and engage in conversation, all based on the text and data I’ve been trained on. Just like a book doesn’t “know” you but can still provide a meaningful experience, I aim to do the same in our interactions.

“Chatbots have personalities”

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“It’s artificial, but these chatbots have personalities. I think people will become more attached, not necessarily to their physical devices, but to the behaviors that these devices have” — Gizmodo

The more I use the voice prompt feature of ChatGPT, the stronger the illusion I’m conversing with a…person. Sky (the ‘voice’ I chose) already seems more interesting than half of my contacts in meat space (remember that term?)

Your decisions don’t matter

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After 20 years of reading about free will, I have to agree with those who insist it doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion, but probably necessary. Robert Sapolsky has written a book titled “Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will” this excerpt describes an experience I’m having with increasing frequency.

“You may have had the uncanny experience of talking about an upcoming camping trip with a friend, only to find yourself served with ads for tents on social media later. Your phone didn’t record your conversation, even if that’s what it feels like. It’s just that the collective record of your likes, clicks, searches and shares paints such a detailed picture of your preferences and decision-making patterns that algorithms can predict — often with unsettling accuracy — what you are going to do.”

Sapolsky references a short story by Ted Chiang (What’s Expected of Us) in which the narrator describes a new technology that convinces users their choices are predetermined, a discovery that saps them of their will to live.

“It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter,” the narrator warns, “even though you know that they don’t.”

From a review in the Los Angeles Times. (Apple News) Below are some of my favorite bits.

“Most Americans have negative perceptions of atheists, and antiatheist prejudice is more prevalent than antipathy toward Muslims (which comes in second place), African Americans, LGBQT individuals, Jews, or Mormons.”

“We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to this moment.”

“While change happens, we do not freely choose to change; instead, we are changed by the world around us.”

“Much has been made of the hospitality, conservatism (as in strictly conserving cultural norms), and violence of the traditional culture of honor of the American South. The pattern of violence tells a ton: murders in the South, which typically has the highest rates in the country, are not about stickups gone wrong in a city; they’re about murdering someone who has seriously tarnished your honor (by conspicuously bad-mouthing you, failing to repay a debt, coming on to your significant other…), particularly if living in a rural area.”

“You can’t successfully believe something different from what you believe.”

“Why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before it.” They why did that moment just occur? “Because of what came before that,” forever, isn’t absurd and is, instead, how the universe works. […] In order to prove there’s free will, you have to show that some behavior just happened out of thin air in the sense of considering all these biological precursors. […] All that came before, with its varying flavors of uncontrollable luck, is what came to constitute you. This is how you became you.”

“By age three, your average high-socioeconomic status kid has heard about thirty million more words at home than a poor kid.”

“‘Free will’ is what we call the biology that we don’t understand on a predictive level yet, and when we do understand it, it stops being free will. […] We do something, carry out a behavior, and we feel like we’ve chosen, that there is a Me inside separate from all those neurons.”

“We are nothing more or less than the sum of that which we could not control — our biology, our environment, their interactions. […]Try as we might, we can’t will ourselves to have more willpower.”

“We don’t change our minds. Our minds, which are the end products of all the biological moments that came before, are *changed* by circumstances around us.”

“What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning. There’s no answer to “Why?” beyond “This happened because of what came just before, which happened because of what came just before that.” There is nothing but an empty, indifferent universe in which, occasionally, atoms come together temporarily to form things we each call Me.”

“Depression is the pathological loss of the capacity to rationalize away reality.”

History Report

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From a brilliant essay in The New Yorker by Simon Rich:

“They met in College, which is a place people used to go to after high school to drink alcohol. […] Instead of matching with someone through a dating app and sending a series of nude photos to each other before eventually meeting up for sex, you would meet them in person, before doing anything else. This meant that when my Great-Grandparents went out for the first time, they had no idea what each other looked like naked.”

A note about the link above. Many (most) of my favorite magazines –New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker– are behind paywalls. So I finally gave in and subscribed to Apple News which gives me access to 300 publications for $13 a month. If you are a subscriber the link above will take you to the essay. If not? There’s no free ride. Sorry.

Pinzgauer

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You’d have to look long and hard to find someone more knowledgable about exotic vehicles than Grayson Wolf. It was March of 2017 when Grayson started searching for what was to be my Land Rover. We’ve become friends in the the ensuing years and he is easily one of the most interesting people I have ever met. And a really good guy. Which brings us to the Pinzgauer project. I had never heard of a Pinzgauer.

(Wikipedia) “The Pinzgauer is a family of high-mobility all-terrain 4WD (4×4) and 6WD (6×6) military utility vehicles. The vehicle was originally developed in the late 1960s and manufactured by Steyr-Daimler-Puch of Graz, Austria, and was named after the Pinzgauer, an Austrian breed of cattle. They were most recently manufactured at Guildford in Surrey, England by BAE Systems Land & Armaments. It was popular amongst military buyers, and continued in production there throughout the rest of the century.”

As you can see from the photos below, Grayson has converted this one for comfy off-roading.

His next project sounds even more interesting: Designing an off-road obstacle course for a customer.

A big ranch in Tomales Bay. Trying to design something fun, with great views, and some perceived risk (make the truck lean, teeter on three wheels, etc) without any actual risk of rolling or damaging the vehicle. (While I’ve never done one of these) I love all of the individual ingredients – operating heavy equipment, chainsaws, 4×4-ing, design work, and, most importantly, rolling trucks over while off roading – so I feel qualified :)

Hypercars

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“One definition of a hypercar is a vehicle that nobody needs.”

While my tastes run toward beat-up older vehicles, I was fascinated by this article in The New Yorker. (“The World’s Fastest Cars — and the People Who Drive Them”). The term “hypercar” entered the lexicon in the two-thousands, when other carmakers (began) producing absurdly powerful, and prohibitively expensive, limited-edition models. Most have theoretical top speeds approaching or exceeding 300 m.p.h. And they get there quickly:

(The Rimac Nevera) accelerates faster than any road car ever made: zero to 60 m.p.h. in 1.74 seconds, and zero to a hundred in 3.21 seconds.

Think about that. You’re at a standing stop…you pin the accelerator and… one thousand one, one thousand… and you’re going sixty miles per hour.

Talking books with ChatGPT

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I prompted ChatGPT to make a list of the ten best crime fiction writers of the last fifteen years. She (I opted for the female voice called ‘Sky’) left off a few of my favorites and we discussed them. At the 5:38 mark of this 6 minute chat, she makes reference to my interest in classic vehicles, communications and blogging. Topics which came up in earlier conversations. I still have goose bumps.

Perplexity: “The controversy involving Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice centers around the introduction of a new AI voice assistant named “Sky,” which many users and industry professionals noted bore a striking resemblance to Johansson’s voice from the 2013 film “Her.” Johansson voiced an AI assistant in the film, and the similarity between her voice and Sky’s led to significant backlash.”

Jump to the :35 second mark in the trailer below to hear Johansson’s voice. I do not  hear the similarity.

Age of Social Media Ending

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That’s the title of an article in The Atlantic back in 2022. It’s behind a paywall so I’ll share a few of my favorite excerpts (and a few thoughts). The piece is a year old so some of this might less (or more) relevant.

The reporter traces an evolution/devolution of “social networks” to “social media.”

Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

Blogs (and bloglike services, such as Tumblr) [hosted] “musings” seen by few and engaged by fewer. In 2008, the Dutch media theorist Geert Lovink published a book about blogs and social networks whose title summarized their average reach: Zero Comments.

I was blogging long before social networks or media. And I read lots of blogs. I recall being…mystified?… by the idea of social media.

“social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist. […] “…social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts. Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones).” […] The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.

As a one-time broadcaster (radio) I understand the appeal of reaching an audience.

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

I loved blogging. Still do. But damned few people ever read this blog. And I got even fewer comments. Disabled that feature years ago. “The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely.”

DALL·E: A text-to-image model developed by OpenAI

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DALL·E is a text-to-image model developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called “prompts”. (Wikipedia)

I’ve just started playing with this (and ChatGPT) and will be posting my thoughts and experiences here. I prompted for “a 90-year-old man in the forest holding a big rock” and the image below was created/generated.