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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This week's revolutionary AI advance:

Imagen Video

It's not really revolutionary, as people have been pointing out this is the obvious next step for ages months now. But it still is a milestone worth noting.

As for this:

While our internal testing suggest much of explicit and violent content can be filtered out, there still exists social biases and stereotypes which are challenging to detect and filter. We have decided not to release the Imagen Video model or its source code until these concerns are mitigated.

Google's made a habit of this. They announce an amazing advance, and then say no one can have access to it because it can be used for Evil. No matter: Stable Diffusion will have something comparable out in a couple months.

ETA:

Actually, this out of DeepMind might be the bigger advance today, if less flashy:

Press: Discovering Novel Algorithms with AlphaTensor

Paper: Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

My greatest fear for AI content generation is it being dominated by woke megacorps, with independent creators permanently locked out of contributing to culture. It looks like Google is investing heavily in that dystopia.

Novelai and stable diffusion being mostly uncensored has been a big white pill so far, but it feels like the shoe is about to drop.

The biggest creator in podcasts is anti-woke and is employed by a company that has stood up to the woke, that being Rogan and Spotify. Same for Elon and Twitter (although twitter is woke). It does not have to lead to a dystopian end. So the anti-woke have huge audiences, assuming they can find a platform like with Rogan and Spotify. SD is just a technology, not a platform. Even if google wanted to censor it, there is nothing stopping a competing team from copying /replicating the core technology elsewhere...like Ethereum vs. Bitcoin (assuming it's open source, which Tensor Flow is).

Joe Rogan is no longer the biggest creator in podcasting. He stopped making podcasts 2 years ago.

  • -17

Joe Rogan is no longer the biggest creator in podcasting. He stopped making podcasts 2 years ago.

Um what?

He might have stopped uploading to youtube after all the hullabaloo over smoking weed with guests on camera but he didn't stop making podcasts

Spotify paid Rogan $200 million to stop releasing podcasts and instead release his content in their walled garden, which doesn't have an RSS feed. I used to be a regular listener, but I haven't heard Rogan's voice since the switch. 2 years on, and I'm still salty about it.

Uhh. A 2 hour 52 minute podcast featuring Jann Wenner came out today...

Could you link to the RSS feed?

Then it's not a podcast. It's some streaming service.

  • -17

Its a podcast on a platform...

I'm fairly sure you can get it elsewhere as well, its just less easy than using spotify. Is The Lion King not a movie because you only get it from Disney?

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