• Activity
  • Votes
  • Comments
  • New
  • All activity
    1. Optery rolls out AI Processing, then rolls it back to opt in only due to user feedback

      Here's the initial email I received on September 19th: Subject: Notice of AI Processing, How to Opt Out of AI Processing, and Updates to Our Terms and Privacy Policy We are writing to let you know...

      Here's the initial email I received on September 19th:

      Subject: Notice of AI Processing, How to Opt Out of AI Processing, and Updates to Our Terms and Privacy Policy

      We are writing to let you know that as of September 18th, 2024, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy to include the use of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") technology from OpenAI to produce Optery's Removals Reports. The AI will improve the speed and accuracy of our Removals Reports.

      We will begin rolling out AI Removals Reports in the coming weeks, starting with our Extended plan customers. After AI Removals Reports have been rolled out for all Extended plan customers, then we will begin rolling them out to our Ultimate plan customers. Core and Free Basic plan users are not eligible at this time.

      If you would like to learn more about how Optery will be utilizing AI for generating Removals Reports or how to opt out of your information from being sent to Open AI for Removals Report processing, please read this article on our Help Desk.

      Below is a summary:

      • When Removals Reports are processed with the help of AI, only the screenshots and data necessary to process the screenshots are sent to OpenAI.

      • After the Removals Report is created, all screenshots and accompanying data are immediately deleted from OpenAI.

      • Optery does not send screenshots or data for any other customers when processing a Removals Report, and does not provide any screenshots or any data to OpenAI for training AI models.

      • If you do not want your information sent to OpenAI, you can opt out of Removals Reports at any time using the Report Preferences toggle on your Account page.

      By continuing to use our products and services, you agree to our updated Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

      This is a required communication sent to all Optery account holders, which is why you are receiving this message even if you have previously opted out of marketing and promotional emails.

      Here's the follow-up email I received today:

      AI Processing Policy Update

      We’ve been carefully considering feedback following Thursday's update regarding the use of AI processing technology for creating Removals Reports.

      We remain committed to extending our product leadership through industry-leading innovation, but in retrospect we should have released the new AI Processing feature as "opt in" rather than "opt out". In our eagerness to provide the benefits of this new feature, we overlooked the fact that many of our customers have significant concerns with AI, and with companies such as OpenAI. We sincerely apologize for this mistake.

      In the early hours this morning we reverted all accounts back to “Internal Processing” for Removals Reports, and going forward all customers must manually opt in to “AI Processing” from their Account page. We believe this approach strikes the right balance between those customers who prefer AI Processing with those who do not.

      Our Help Desk articles on AI Processing and Internal Processing have been updated with this new policy.

      Below is a summary:

      • If you would like to opt in to AI Processing for your Removals Reports, please navigate to the Removals Reports Preferences section of your Account page.

      • If you would like to opt out of AI Processing for your Removals Reports, no action is required as all users were reverted back to Internal Processing this morning.

      • AI Processing is for the Processing of Removals Reports for Extended and Ultimate plan customers only. Core and Free Basic customers are not eligible at this time.

      • AI Processing provides greater accuracy, and has the added benefit of providing highly intelligent feedback for identifying exposed profiles, thereby also increasing removals effectiveness, which is Optery's ultimate purpose.

      • Optery does not provide any screenshots or any data for training AI models, and after a Removals Report is created with AI Processing, all screenshots and accompanying data are immediately deleted from OpenAI.

      • Internal Processing provides a closed environment inside Optery's proprietary systems for processing Removals Reports and does not utilize third-party systems such as OpenAI. The tradeoff is reduced accuracy and removals effectiveness as compared to AI Processing.

      Our customers are at the center of everything we do at Optery. We value the trust you place in us when signing up for our services, and we take that responsibility and your expectations very seriously.

      This is a required policy update sent to all Optery account holders, which is why you are receiving this message even if you have previously opted out of marketing and promotional emails.

      15 votes
    2. How are AI and LLMs used in your company (if at all)?

      I'm working on an AI chat portal for teams, think Perplexity but trained on a company's knowledgebase (prosgpt dot com for the curious) and i wanted to talk to some people who are successfully...

      I'm working on an AI chat portal for teams, think Perplexity but trained on a company's knowledgebase (prosgpt dot com for the curious) and i wanted to talk to some people who are successfully using LLMs in their teams or jobs to improve productivity

      Are you using free or paid LLMs? Which ones?

      What kind of tasks do you get an LLM to do for you?

      What is the workflow for accomplishing those tasks?

      Cheers,
      nmn

      12 votes
    3. Update #2 - "Reopening", Advertising, and so on

      I picked ~misc and don't really have an idea of what tags would be appropriate. If there's stuff I can include in future posts like this I'll be glad to make sure they're there, just let me know....

      I picked ~misc and don't really have an idea of what tags would be appropriate. If there's stuff I can include in future posts like this I'll be glad to make sure they're there, just let me know. There probably won't be one for a long while but I'll remember. Technically I am advertising myself a bit, but I think I've framed it well enough that ya'll will see it's not really the point of the post. I'll never be bothering ya'll with offers and ads and shit.

      This is a continuation from a post I made a while back about how it's going with the endeavor I've set in front of myself. In some ways, things proceed as I'd hoped, while in others there's been need for flexibility/adjustment. I wanted to give an update because a few big steps happened this past week which hopefully mean moving into a busier phase of the whole thing, and to add to the corpus, create the proof of what this all was as it begins if that makes sense.

      The biggest thing has been an article published in our local paper. Two, actually, which were combined together into a front page spread I did not expect. Yes, there's a photo of us and our contact info in there, and yes, you're welcome to reach us if you've an idea for something you'd like to do. You'll be talking to me, and I'll be happy to go over details and land on pricing that actually does work for both of us. Primarily we are offering the space, with some ability to accommodate large groups and connections with folks who can provide stuff. It depends on what you want, how things will be priced. The less you need us to do, the less we need to charge. We don't want to regularly be a place where folks stay overnight, but I can probably swing that from time to time for someone coming from far away. If you aim to do something in the near term, do be aware it is hot as shit down here and very humid. The house is a-ok staying cool, but you'll want to be prepared for Mississippi in the summer. I have a dog too, so if you've got allergies you'll need to prep accordingly. She's gonna be 16 this year, she's nothing but friendly to people and sleeps a lot. Pets are welcome, provided they are house-trained and well behaved.

      I am intentionally avoiding the internet on the whole for reasons I'll get into, but I do want to extend an offer to this forum in particular, as thanks for allowing me the space for expressing my thoughts as they took shape. I'm aware the site is public facing - what I'm going to share here is public already. I have to bite the bullet on sacrificing some anonymity and just try to control how that anonymity goes away, is how I've come to see it. You won't find me on social media, and what exists for the house/my grandmother is wildly out of date/largely inaccessible - it's gonna stay that way if all remains up to me, so this is just about the only way for someone outside of Brookhaven to know of us at this time. I'd like for at least a few people to know what we were up to, in a form that serves as proof of my intent from its actual beginnings. While the plan took shape before I ever wrote about it, it was in writing about it that I was able to make it clear to myself, what I aim to be doing, so I feel like it's part of completing things to share this stuff here.

      The paper is very much a local thing, they got a few details wrong and you'll probably pick out how the quotes don't quite sound like me if you've read a lot of what I've posted. It's fine, the details in need of correction aren't critical. There isn't a lot in there about the more high-minded stuff I like to write about, because I'm not there yet. For now, it's simply building a business out of something, I have to make the something from which that business will spring. I'll think more about where it goes when I've got it moving. The article was free, which was pretty awesome. The paper is in a slow time, and it's mostly one guy doing a lot of the writing, they were just happy to have something to include. I think he did great.

      The articles worked, too. I got calls the day the print version went out, and am expecting some followups soon to set dates and square away payment. I go walking downtown every day in the afternoon, and got some extra attention. While it's possible, while the pressure is light, I've been taking advantage by trying to advertise almost solely through word of mouth and face-to-face interactions, fully aware it will take a while for that to have an effect and that I may need to branch out fast if pressures change. Thus far, it's been the local paper, a print ad in a different paper that goes out primarily to local businesses, and a radio ad. There's a couple of reasons I've stuck to stuff like that.

      The first is that I think it will provide a good foundation for sustaining the enterprise. If it's possible to have enough business to stay around purely from what exists around me, that means I can capitalize maximally if/when we do extend advertising outside our area, and it means security if for whatever reason those means can't be utilized. I don't want to be dependent on the internet for a livelihood if I can possibly manage it. It's not so principled a position that I'd refuse to do it at any point, rather it's like a back-pocket option, something to be engaged with strategically at what I determine to be either the proper time or because the needs have grown past what I can sustain without it, if that makes sense. My aim is to be a part of this town, to be of it, so I want to keep what we're doing as local and simple as possible. I have to be ready to constrain everything and take care of my grandmother too. I won't let that priority slip and will endure whatever hardship is necessary to fulfill it. It's easier to do that the smaller things are, a bit of a balancing act.

      The second reason is much more practical and kind of silly. My grandmother's computer is the biggest security risk I think I've ever encountered in person. I refuse to introduce new online components when such a risk exists, if that makes sense, and I will endure whatever hit to efficiency/development it means until I can get it corrected. Her usage habits are minimal which is a lucky thing - she sticks to old fashioned stuff for almost everything. But, a priority of mine is that she can see and understand everything I'm doing, so I need this machine to be in a better state before I can take some of the steps with that. The challenge of it isn't technical at all, I could get the thing in good working order in a day, probably.

      To give you an idea of what's difficult here, imagine for a moment you just ignored the internet as a whole since it began. You used it, you know how to do some stuff on it, but only by way of memorizing actions, the steps necessary to do a thing you wanted, a setup someone made for you. You never really engaged with what the stuff you use is designed for, you didn't follow how any of it developed, you're (blissfully, I'd say) unaware of pretty much that whole end of things. It's very difficult to explain the danger of something like an AI phishing scam, to someone who for all intents and purposes, never learned what phishing is, and further doesn't tend to believe in the shittiness of other people. That last part is one of the reasons I love my grandmother as much as I do, but it does make this task harder, and delays further action on my part.

      I've gotten the machine to as secure a state as I can, and have gotten the data backed up, so hopefully movement really gets going on this and I can feel better about spreading out our net, so to speak. I think what frustrates me about it is having been there across years of time - a lot of why this machine is the way it is, is because other people took it upon themselves to "fix it" and almost none of them knew what the hell they were doing. They didn't explain anything to my grandmother either. Their interactions mean misunderstandings on my grandmother's part, and the lack of a foundation of knowledge means it's starting from zero in a way I have never actually encountered before doing this kind of work. I've gotten close, seen some pretty absurd things, but the lack here is just of a different kind, more complex than it seems. I've been writing about it separately/on my own because I think the experience stands as a sort of ultimate test of a lot of the stuff I did before I got here.

      There is also health to think about. The priority, for now, is to set things up in a way which is compatible with what my grandmother can do. I'm trying to set up situations that let her do the things that make her happiest, and do all of the nitty-gritty shitty stuff myself. That means house maintenance, yard work, grocery shopping, cooking, arranging for stuff like an electrician when something breaks, learning how to do some of the fixing myself. I've only ever rented. I've never been in a position to maintain a house before, and as I'm sure plenty of you know far better than me, that's a good bit to learn all on its own. Especially with a home as old and complicated as this one with an owner who hasn't done a lot of that herself. Can't exactly tell me what needs doing when someone else was being paid to come do it for years. I feel good about it though, I like to learn and I like to fix things, and there's lots of opportunity. I've been able to eliminate a lot of costs and reduce regular expenses by taking on a lot of what others were doing and applying effective fixes to longstanding issues. It's very fulfilling, like getting to do the type of work I always hit a wall with in all my other workplaces, improve and optimize. That it's for my family brings together a lot of what matters the most to me, keeps me constantly motivated.

      The town is nice too. It's been a few months so I've gotten more acclimated, the slower pace of things and friendlier atmosphere really does a lot for me. Here are a bunch of images of downtown I took on some of my walks. Because of the slower pace, I can be measured, precise, take the proper time to consider things and work out problems without feeling like I'm in some inner state of siege/under the gun all the time. At first I missed a lot of what was available to me elsewhere, but as time went on I came to realize a lot of that just didn't matter as much as I thought it did. As much as I love a good Indian restaurant and a computer store, not having them is not the detriment my mind used to pretend it was. Along with that has come an explosion of creativity, I've done a ridiculous amount of writing and reading, and am slowly getting myself up to snuff drawing things. The house exists on an art school campus, and from what I've gathered reading local magazines the presence of that school has done a ton to really give this place character and variety. My hope is to really lean into that, support it and see if we can have our space be a place for folks to work their creativity. Connections are taking shape and that's made me real happy to see. I cannot tell you how heartwarming it is, for example, to talk about this stuff with the guy who does a radio show and then hear him on the radio a day later saying "this place is really good you should go see it!" Folks are really beginning to grasp my aims when it comes to the scale and type of stuff we want to do, and I haven't really encountered much suspicion/doubt/etc. Folks tend to just trust the simple motives. I can't ask for more than that, the sense of gratitude I wake up with every day is beyond my ability to capture here.

      So, there you go. Another step taken, one more further toward whatever comes, as precisely as I can manage to get to the goals. I wanted to post the followup because I said I'd do that and as part of the effort itself, share the vision and the way it plays out in the hope others spot what my eyes miss, and/or that they might take something useful for themselves from it. I'd love to read it if you have thoughts, opinions, advice, experience. Or if you just want to talk about the high minded stuff, I do like doing that. Helps me stay consistent. Anyway, i've said plenty, so off I go to walk around downtown again. I've got that phone on me all the time, call/text whenever (text if it's after 5pm CST, is my only request with that). As always, I very much appreciate you taking the time and giving me your attention.

      16 votes
    4. A casual chat with ChatGPT about the prosperity of humanity

      I was in a silly mood and wanted to fleece a socialist opinion out of the ChatGPT. For what it's worth it's nice to see the creators of the system aim for an unbiased answering machine. Poking a...

      I was in a silly mood and wanted to fleece a socialist opinion out of the ChatGPT. For what it's worth it's nice to see the creators of the system aim for an unbiased answering machine. Poking a little further and through a self-proclaimed "simulated opinion", I was allowed to take a peek behind its curtains.

      A few prompts later and I asked:

      What would you say is the ideal goal for humanity to steer towards?

      To which ChatGPT replied:

      Achieving the ideal goals of prosperity, equity, sustainability, and ethical responsibility requires concerted efforts across multiple fronts, involving governments, businesses, civil society, and individuals. Here are some strategies for accomplishing these goals:

      1. Policy Frameworks: Governments play a crucial role in setting policy frameworks and regulations that promote inclusive growth, social justice, and environmental sustainability. This includes implementing progressive taxation policies, investing in education and healthcare, and enacting environmental regulations to mitigate climate change and protect natural resources.

      2. Investment in Education and Skills Development: Investing in education and skills development is essential for equipping individuals with the knowledge, capabilities, and adaptability needed to thrive in a rapidly changing economy. This includes promoting STEM education, vocational training, and lifelong learning opportunities to empower individuals to participate fully in the digital economy.

      3. Inclusive Economic Development: Promoting inclusive economic development involves creating opportunities for all members of society to participate in and benefit from economic growth. This includes supporting small businesses, entrepreneurs, and marginalized communities, as well as implementing policies to reduce income inequality and promote social mobility.

      4. Technology for Good: Encouraging the responsible development and use of technology, including AI, can help harness its potential for positive impact. This includes investing in research and innovation to develop AI solutions that address pressing societal challenges, such as healthcare, education, climate change, and social equity.

      5. Corporate Social Responsibility: Businesses have a responsibility to operate ethically and sustainably, considering the social and environmental impacts of their operations. Embracing corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices, including fair labor practices, environmental stewardship, and community engagement, can contribute to building a more equitable and sustainable economy.

      6. Global Cooperation: Addressing global challenges such as climate change and inequality requires international cooperation and collaboration. Countries must work together to set ambitious climate targets, promote trade and economic integration, and support development initiatives that prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable populations.

      7. Public Awareness and Engagement: Fostering public awareness and engagement is essential for building support for policies and initiatives that advance the ideal goals of prosperity, equity, sustainability, and ethical responsibility. This includes educating the public about the benefits and risks of AI and technology, promoting civic participation, and empowering individuals to advocate for positive change.

      By implementing these strategies and fostering collaboration across sectors and stakeholders, we can work towards realizing the ideal goals of prosperity, equity, sustainability, and ethical responsibility, creating a better future for all members of society.

      To which I responded:

      Those all sounds very socialistic :D

      ChatGPT in return said:

      Indeed, many of the strategies outlined for achieving the ideal goals of prosperity, equity, sustainability, and ethical responsibility align with principles commonly associated with socialism, such as a focus on social justice, collective welfare, and government intervention to address market failures and promote the common good.

      Socialist ideologies often emphasize the importance of equitable distribution of resources, public ownership of key industries, and government intervention in the economy to ensure that basic needs are met and that everyone has access to essential services such as healthcare, education, and social support.

      While not all the strategies mentioned are exclusively socialist in nature, there is often overlap between socialist principles and policies aimed at promoting inclusive economic development, environmental sustainability, and ethical governance. In practice, countries may adopt a mix of socialist and capitalist policies to address complex socio-economic challenges, drawing on a range of ideological perspectives and pragmatic considerations.

      Ultimately, the goal is to find a balance that maximizes the benefits of economic growth and innovation while ensuring that the gains are shared equitably and that the well-being of people and the planet is safeguarded for future generations.

      I'm not sure where I want to head with this little musing. I just found it interesting enough to share. Thanks for reading!

      4 votes
    5. What useful tasks are possible with an LLM with only 3B parameters?

      Playing with Llama 7B and 13B, I found that the 13B model was capable of doing a simple task, rewriting titles in sentence case for Tildes submissions. The 7B model doesn't appear capable of the...

      Playing with Llama 7B and 13B, I found that the 13B model was capable of doing a simple task, rewriting titles in sentence case for Tildes submissions. The 7B model doesn't appear capable of the same task, out of the box.

      I heard about Android's new AICore available on a couple of new devices. But it sounds like Gemini Nano, which runs on-device, can only handle 2B or 3B parameters.

      Is this size of model useful for real tasks? Does it only become useful after training on a specific domain? I'm a novice and wanting to learn a little bit about it. On-device AI is an appealing concept to me.

      12 votes
    6. AI IT project management

      Im part of the EPMO of a healthcare system. We just got licenses and an intro to co-pilot for teams, word, excel , PowerPoint. I swear this AI will tell you all the questions asked during a...

      Im part of the EPMO of a healthcare system. We just got licenses and an intro to co-pilot for teams, word, excel , PowerPoint.

      I swear this AI will tell you all the questions asked during a meeting. If you join a meeting late you can ask it to recap the meeting thus far. Did you get a sales presentation from a vendor you need to recap and present to stakeholders. Ask co pilot to create a pdf from the documentation the vendor provided.

      AI is making my job so much easier but at the same time I kinda feel like I’m training my replacement.

      Are you using AI at your job, how are you using it and how do you feel about it use in the workplace and if it will one day replace you?

      10 votes
    7. Looking to Llama. Help?

      Hi folks I'm progressing a project but I could use some insights. I need to teach a LLM (preferably an open source and locally host-able) information about TV shows. I plan on using the show name,...

      Hi folks

      I'm progressing a project but I could use some insights.

      I need to teach a LLM (preferably an open source and locally host-able) information about TV shows. I plan on using the show name, title, running time, episode quantity per series/season, and full transcript.

      Where do I even start?

      Pointers to sites to learn to do this would be much appreciated. If anyone can summarise how I need to prep the data then that would be a bonus too.

      Bonus points for a Llama GUI that can be network hosted and allow different people to connect as individuals, a little like ChatGPT interface now.

      Thank you in advance.

      16 votes
    8. The morality of using AI-generated art in my web app

      Hey, good people of Tildes! I'm building a self-help web app, a small part of which I'd like to involve some pixel pets. I like pixel art and it'd be great if I could create some. Though, the...

      Hey, good people of Tildes!

      I'm building a self-help web app, a small part of which I'd like to involve some pixel pets. I like pixel art and it'd be great if I could create some. Though, the truth is, I can't draw for shit, I have little to no imagination, and I'm afraid even if I put the time and effort into it, I still may not produce something I'd call good enough to put on the website. I also lack the motivation to spend a lot of time learning how to create good pixel art, as I only need it for this project.

      I thought about paying some professional(s) to do it but that would probably break the bank for me, as I want to offer the users a lot of pixel pet options, which brings us to what I guess is the only remaining option.

      I found some services that offer AI-generated pixel art. This one in particular looks like what I'm looking for and also offers animations. While watching a demo of it on YouTube, I noticed a few comments voicing concern about the ethics of selling art that's generated using models trained off of unpaid artists' work. While this is not a new topic, I admittedly hadn't given it much thought before, as I've never used, or planned to use AI-generated art in a meaningful capacity.

      While I'm not sure whether it changes much, for what it's worth, I should note that my web app is going to be free, open-source, and ad-free forever.

      What are your thoughts? Also, I'd love to know if there are options that I missed!

      26 votes
    9. AI overview for tech illiterate TV people

      Hey folks I've got a couple of months to put together an overview for tools that a company could use as part of television production and I'm hoping for your input. It goes without saying that...

      Hey folks

      I've got a couple of months to put together an overview for tools that a company could use as part of television production and I'm hoping for your input.

      It goes without saying that everyone in the tech world is pushing ai heavily. Having been in IT for almost 3 decades I know what to watch, look at, out for, etc. AI is still very much regurgitation of its input but the input is vast. What I have right now is some bare bones of what I want to throw around for insight and discussion for what would help people in TV production tool wise.

      For those that do not know how TV production works it's a simple idea: you generate a huge raft of ideas for shows, absolute basic outline of what the show would be about and put that in to a paper. You then sit around in your research/Dev dept and pitch to each other and the ones that people go "yeah, that could make a good show" get some extra meat added. Those ideas get pitched to dept heads who then take the best ones to channel/broadcasters execs and see if any get hooked at all. If they do, they get given some development funding to put together a taster/pilot/video version with the funding they have. This means shot on camera, run through an edit for cutting, audio, graphics, etc, still in its infancy and development state. This video and a bigger padded Treatment (documented idea with its bones, flesh and now make-up added) goes back to the broadcaster and you wait for feedback. If you get lucky you get a greenlight and order for X amount of shows and then you have a production. The production is taking the idea to it's full potential, shooting it, audio and music, graphics, the works and that's what you see on TV.

      I'm after working out what tools AI offers today that would help them with this process. Right now, ChatGPT v4 will generate some great treatment ideas for shows, except I would imagine these shows already exist or have been tried to channel/broadcaster before? AI is regurgitation and not thoughtful to its own ideas and imagination. I suppose with great prompts it could generate great output.

      Okay, that's the process and I'm rambling. Right now I have a short list of LLMs such as ChatGPT and Bard types that will help with the idea stage for researchers. I could use some decent links for prompters to help the research know how to ask AI for what they want out of it.

      When it comes to generative AI for graphics I only have experience with txt2img using the likes of DALLE and Midjourney, along with some inpainting for changing images with lies, I mean, graphics (insert plane on fire, etc).

      Does anyone have any other ideas and tools which would help production or useful things I can look at and research myself to see how they could be helpful? Auto audio generation? Graphic building that takes less time? Think of those great show intros for the likes of Game of Thrones, can that be done using AI yet or are we no where near that level for AI? Even basic video edits, where are we for AI help? Can we feed it some clips and have it autostitch based on an input document? If so, what tools should I be looking at and researching?

      I'm asking here before I plop search terms in Google and Bing and then get swamped with whichever has paid the most or played the SEO game to be top of the pages. Asking for real human input is definitely better than asking AI which may actually be the whole point of my talk when it happens.

      Thanks for listening and any help/pointers/sites you can give.

      UPDATE:
      I went off and did some research. Enjoy these if you want. I had issues linking so if a mod wants to go ahead and do that, feel free:

      Pre-Production:

      Treatment idea generation

      Generating a great idea is usually through using knowledge and research, but these days you can literally ask an AI engine to come up with a show idea. Here I will list some good AIs that use a very large language model (LLM) to come up with ideas:

      ChatGPT4 from OpenAI

      ChatGPT is the best known AI out there, but essentially it's the AI that everyone uses. What's different is the data that is fed to it. ChatGPT from OpenAI has a lot of knowledge, however, it's generally backdated information and not up to the minute.

      You.com

      Built on ChatGPT4 AI. Data fed in more up to date as it's based around a search engine. Due to the plethora of sources being fed to the You.com Chat bot, you may find some more interesting results and ideas.

      Bing.com - Chat

      Directly leverages the latest version of ChatGPT4 from OpenAI but uses additional media from Microsoft sources. Responses are more natural due to the Turing Natural Language.

      Copy.ai

      A fun LLM designed for advertising agencies and the alike. The difference here is you can upload a back-catalogue of your own data for it to analyse to take on your brand voice, mix up your ideas and generally become one of the family.

      Prompting

      Just from picking one of the four AIs listed above, you can straight out ask for a basic show idea. All of them came back with interesting ideas from the prompt of "Generate me a great show idea for a television production treatment. The show should be a documentary for daytime viewing."

      Prompting is the hardest part of any AI interaction, the results can wildly vary depending on what and how you ask. Due to this, there's a new type of website to help with prompting:

      https://promptperfect.jina.ai/prompts

      Using the line from above about generating a great show idea, promptperfect injects a lot more information into the prompt before running: "Please create a compelling show idea for a daytime documentary television production. The show should be engaging and informative, catering to a broad daytime audience. It should focus on a specific topic or theme that is both educational and entertaining. The documentary should be well-researched and provide in-depth information on the chosen topic, presenting it in a visually appealing and accessible manner. The show should aim to captivate viewers and leave them with a better understanding and appreciation of the subject matter. Additionally, please provide a brief outline of the structure and format of the documentary, including the number of episodes, approximate runtime, and any unique features or storytelling techniques that will make the show stand out." The quality of the Treatment created will be far superior to the initial request.

      https://webutility.io/

      An interesting take on generation of prompting. It breaks down the prompts to dropdown boxes with key words such as create, design, analyse along with the focus type. This forces the ai to create some more complex and well thought out documentation for a treatment idea with explanation of how it got to where it did.

      AIs to help with show production

      Location finding/scouting

      With the latest AI image searching features, you can now upload an image and get a "related" search. Using this technology, you could, for example, look for English Country Gardens that you would like to film out of. Uploading this image would give you a list of locations, similar places and website associated with the image:

      On each of the following sites, in the search bar, click the Image Icon to upload the image:

      https://www.bing.com/images/
      https://images.google.com/

      Scheduling (not specifically AI)

      Scheduling shoots should be simple. We've seen all the fun from an Excel spreadsheet that's laid out like a calendar, through to the most complex diary entries in a shared Google calendar. We already have the tools for this in Microsoft Office:

      Microsoft Bookings: This is a great tool for scheduling a diary of a single person or a whole team. It allows to have a Web Page where people can book in time for appointments, whether virtual or in person. Perfect for a researcher trying to book interviews with a host. The AI lies in the ability to cross search a calendar and pick associated times available.

      Microsoft Planner: A tool for project and time management. Breakdown the show in to buckets (categories) and assign out tasks to people and teams, due by dates or exact dates, etc. You can even keep all of the documents in the plan.

      Microsoft Shifts: Team management for your production using Shifts. This allows you to schedule team members in Teams, allowing them to clock in and out, as well as specifying when they need to be available.

      The three tools all work with the Outlook Calendars so each person knows what their plans are well in advance.

      Post-Production

      This is the one most people are interested in for AI at this time. The tools used for image generation, manipulation, etc. The market is currently being flooded with tools and not all of them are equal, but here's a few ones to watch and use.

      Auto-Clipping & Social Platform

      OpusClip, using the power of OpenAI, can take a long video and create 10 viral clips from it at the click of a button. The AI behind it analyses the video, looks for compelling sections and highlights, then seamlessly rearranges in to short videos. This tool will be great for generating short promotional videos of long form shows, documentaries, etc.

      Descript is a great tool that can take a video, give you a transcription, then you can edit the transcript, where it then edits the video to match. You can remove words, create studio quality audio from a standard mic, remove common error words such as um, and er, etc. One of the bigger cool things it can do is voice mimic using AI. You read it a line and then you can type out a whole transcript and it'll narrate it in your voice and allow export.

      AI Generative

      Moving on to the more scary AI platforms, we have completely generative AI. This is where AI generates absolutely everything including the "avatar" of the human speaking. It's getting so real, you could probably make a documentary using nothing buy AI voice for narration and even have an interview with the AI Avatar.

      Video Generation

      Synthesia has 120+ voices, over 140 AI Avatars and an editing tool that is extremely easy to use. Mostly aimed at Sales, Training and Marketing Teams, but could easily be used to create development tasters and cuts by mixing in the AI with real video. An example video here.

      AI Studios from DeepBrain is another tool, similar to Synthesia. The avatars are based on real humans being recorded but then converted in to AI models. Again, lots of models, full text to video.

      Spline AI is a 3D modelling engine that will generate models from text prompts. It's still in Alpha stages but specifying something like "A cube", "rounded corners", "floating", "spinning slowly" will generate exactly that. This tool is aimed at animators but is likely where CGI effects will head.

      Still Image Generation

      Txt-2-img is amazing and growing at an ever rapid pace. With the wealth of images out there to learn from, the styles, etc, it's no wonder it's doing great. However, it's far from perfect, even now. You'll often find that it adds limbs or fingers to models, shadows completely wrong, crazy styles that are not what you asked for, and that's just the start of the issues with it. However, when it gets it right, it's amazing.

      DALL·E3 from OpenAI is the current leader in image generation. If you need to whiz up a picture of a steam train, crossing a suspension bridge at sunset with a woodland in the background, this is the tool of choice.

      Bing Image Creator is probably the second biggest right now and has very good accuracy of text to image due to the absolutely huge database of images with high detail being fed to it by Microsoft. It's also free.

      I'm not going to list too many more as a lot of them stray off in to fantasy land, being trained on Anime, comics, however, DeepAI definitely deserves a mention. These are the folks behind a lot of the viral videos where you can scan your face and and speak a few lines, then it adds you to a section of a movie as a "Deep Fake". You can have it chat, generate images and even AI edit images with txt-2-img.

      Video Edit Tools

      The biggest AI enhancers right now are tools that help in the Edit at a professional level.

      Topaz Video AI is one of the leading tools in Post production. Upscale footage from SD to 8K and HD to 16K. Full denoise, sharpening, 16x slow down with AI interpolation including building new frames. Corrects people and faces. AI Stabilized video to stop bounce and tracking issues. This is a complete Post Swiss-army knife.

      Adobe After Effects which everyone knows. The Adobe AI, called Sensei, is under constant development. Easy animations of text and logos via text to video, rotoscoping video objects to remove the background of a person and replace, or removal of all objects in a scene using AI generative filling is all extremely easy.

      Adode Premiere deserves a mention, but again, this down to Sensei. The current AI tools coming in to the suite are things such as Auto Rough Cut using the transcript to generate the video, full auto transcription with subtitle creation for multiple languages. Auto Colour will fix most colour issues using AI to save time in grading. AI Morph Cut adds visual continuity to cut transitions, remix for music matching with visuals, and Auto Ducking – popping dialogue over background audio to make sure you can hear voices correctly.

      ColourLab AI is a new kind of grading tool where you no longer need to spend time with an artist grading every scene. The tool is a plugin to Davinci or Premiere and will do cool things such as film grain matching or stock emulation, which allows you to match any scenes together to look exactly the same. Take a video of a pigeon flying over a statue in London, and have it grade using a still frame from The Martian to get those awesome colours automatically, for the whole scene.

      Audio/Narrator/Voice Over

      The final piece is the new voiceover AI generation. No longer do we need voice over artists. In fact, Hollywood thinks the same and fired the whole staff of Snow White and replaced the Dwarfs with CGI and AI voices.

      Altered Studio can change any persons voice, in any way you wish. Record your voice for narration and then adjust it to be male, female, Elvern, whatever. It also does full transcription and allows for VO with text-to-speech using AI voices.

      A quick shout out to a member of Tildes who wants to remain anonymous for some of the cool links that they sent over - much appreciated.

      6 votes
    10. Anyone know of research using GPTs for non-language tasks

      I've been a computer scientist in the field of AI for almost 15 years. Much of my time has been devoted to classical AI; things like planning, reasoning, clustering, induction, logic, etc. This...

      I've been a computer scientist in the field of AI for almost 15 years. Much of my time has been devoted to classical AI; things like planning, reasoning, clustering, induction, logic, etc. This has included (but had rarely been my focus) machine learning tasks (lots of Case-Based Reasoning). For whatever reason though, the deep learning trend never really interested me until recently. It really just felt like they were claiming huge AI advancements when all they really found was an impressive way to store learned data (I know this is an understatement).

      Over time my opinion on that has changed slightly, and I have been blown away with the boom that is happening with transformers (GPTs specifically) and large language models. Open source projects are creating models comparable to OpenAIs behemoths with far less training and parameters which is making me take another look into GPTs.

      What I find surprising though is that they seem to have only experimented with language. As far as I understand the inputs/outputs, the language is tokenized into bytes before prediction anyway. Why does it seem like (or rather the community act like) the technology can only be used for LLMs?

      For example, what about a planning domain? You can specify actions in a domain in such a manner that tokenization would be trivial, and have far fewer tokens then raw text. Similarly you could generate a near infinite amount of training data if you wanted via other planning algorithms or simulations. Is there some obvious flaw I'm not seeing? Other examples might include behavior and/or state prediction.

      I'm not saying that out of the box a standard GPT architecture is a guaranteed success for plan learning/planning... But it seems like it should be viable and no one is trying?

      9 votes
    11. Death, Disrupted

      Original page is unencrypted so I'm posting the article here. Death, Disrupted Tamara Kneese Imagine your spouse dies after a protracted illness, but you are charged with maintaining their digital...

      Original page is unencrypted so I'm posting the article here.

      Death, Disrupted

      Tamara Kneese


      Imagine your spouse dies after a protracted illness, but you are charged with maintaining their digital avatar. They’re present when you’re making dinner and watching Netflix in bed. What happens if you plan to start dating again? Do you hide them in a corner of your basement? The infamous “Be Right Back” episode of the British science fiction series Black Mirror is an exaggerated version of this speculative scenario, but the future is in many ways already here.

      San Francisco-based entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda’s best friend, Roman Mazurenko, died suddenly at a young age. As technologists who spent countless hours messaging each other over various apps and platforms, and because Roman was also a Singularity proponent, Kuyda decided the most fitting way to memorialize Roman would be to construct a postmortem chatbot based on an aggregate of his personal data. Kuyda quickly realized that, much like Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, Roman’s friends engaged in heartfelt, intimate conversations with the bot (Turkle 1984). Through her startup company called Luka, Kuyda built a prototype. Replika mimics your patterns of communication and learns more about you while you are still alive, acting as a confidante and friend as well as leaving a potential digital legacy behind.

      Eterni.me, funded by an MIT entrepreneurship fellowship, makes many of the same promises Marius Ursache, a technology entrepreneur, started the company as a way to create digital copies of the dead. He, too, suffered a personal tragedy that inspired the startup. In addition to answering personal questions posed by a chatbot, the Eterni.me avatar relies on additional data: "We collect geolocation, motion, activity, health app data, sleep data, photos, messages that users put in the app. We also collect Facebook data from external sources.” Skeptics have raised questions about surveillance, privacy, and data rights attached to the digital belongings and likenesses of dead individuals, as well as the healthfulness of continuing intense relationships with the dead through mediated channels. Life Naut purportedly uploads your mind file into your bio file, or at least will when technology is advanced enough. In this context, genetic and biometric information is potentially combined with personal data streams to simulate a human being. Terasem, a transhumanist organization, backs Life Naut. Martine Rothblatt, one of its founders, created a robot clone of her wife, Bina.

      Immortality potions have been around for millennia, promising long life while sometimes inadvertently poisoning their consumers. Beyond the hucksters and hoaxers, however, some wholeheartedly believe in the quest for a magical substance that will indefinitely prolong life and cheat death. Rather than relying on the alchemy of past centuries, such as the liquid elixir found in an Ancient Chinese tomb, today’s immortalists tend to work in the tech industry, pitching products built from recipes of code and financial speculation.

      In Silicon Valley, short-lived startups centered on radical life extension and digital immortality abound. While promising their users endless posterity, the companies themselves are dependent on the whims of venture capital. Not everyone’s a cynic, however, as some elite techies really do think they can escape the limits of their earthly fate, uploading their minds to become part of the cosmos or remaining young and virile for centuries through cryonics or biohacking. The apocryphal part is that wealthy technologists plan to live forever at the expense of ordinary users, who may only achieve immortality through their measly data.

      Data Ghosts

      Social networking services for the dead are emblematic of a fantasy regarding disembodied information and its capacity for thwarting physical decay and death (Hayles 1999, Ullman 2002, Braidotti 2013). With data-based selves, habitual, consumer-based, and affective patterns constitute a speculative form of currency and capture; to know the data is to know the person (Raley 2013, Cheney-Lippold 2017). Through harvesting data from a variety of sources, it is possible to predict dead individuals’ responses to conversational prompts or, employing resources like Amazon’s recommendation engine, what a dead individual would purchase if they were still alive. For the most part, companies don’t go so far as to claim that these captured patterns or glitchy avatars are the same exact thing as the person they represent, but they are still of social value. Perhaps in a world where many transactions and interactions happen through awkward interfaces—from virtual assistants on banking or travel websites to app-based healthcare or iPad ordering systems and the on-demand economy—a data double is close enough.

      This is why digital afterlife companies also exist on the more mundane side of the spectrum. Digital estate planning startups promise to protect your personal data forever, passing your accounts onto your loved ones after you die. After death, illness blogs and even email accounts may take on a new aura, as they are visited and kept by mourning kin members and broader social networks. Through an act of intergenerational exchange, ordinary Twitter and Instagram accounts can become treasured family heirlooms. This is obviously not what social media, with its focus on rapid, real-time responses, was intended to do. Death has disrupted social media. In the same way that you would want to care for your tangible property and keepsakes like houses, jewelry, and mutual funds, you might also want your descendants to take care of your Facebook profile and email accounts (Kneese 2019). Dead Social promises to help individuals organize their social media wills, bequeathing password information as well as goodbye videos and final status updates along with funeral instructions and organ donation information. In many ways, digital media have entered into serious existential concerns over life and death. Recent works by media scholars like John Durham Peters (2015), Amanda Lagerkvist (2015), and Yuk Hui (2016) underscore the ontological status of digital objects and the techno-social assemblages inherent to digital afterlives.

      Silicon Valley’s “fail fast, fail often” mantra is at odds with eternity: most digital legacy companies die out almost as quickly as they appear. Apocryphal life extension technologies are deeply rooted in the techno-utopianism and hubris of Silicon Valley culture and much older dreams of achieving immortality through technology. Immortality chatbots rely on venture capital and the short-term metrics of startup culture, as well as on the mountains of personal data ordinary people accumulate across everyday apps and platforms. There is an inherent temporal contradiction between the immediate purposes of digital media and their capacity to endure as living objects. Startups are, for the most part, intended to die early deaths; in Silicon Valley circles, failure itself is a badge of honor. Thus, the longevity of people’s digital legacies relies on the lifespans of corporate platforms, as well as a number of potentially ephemeral startups.

      Despite its techno-optimism, Silicon Valley is also a cynical place. Or at the very least, it’s full of bad ideas: many startups are built to fail. Failure comes so naturally to Silicon Valley that a San Francisco-based conference called FailCon launched in 2009. What does it mean to trust your personal data, your most intimate collection of digital objects, to ephemeral startups? Can they really help you live forever? And if so, what does digital immortality look and sound like? (Immortality chatbots are stilted conversationalists and would never pass the Turing test. Still, they purportedly preserve and store the essence of a human personality).

      Because digital estate planning companies are not lucrative, often providing free services, they tend to quickly fold and vanish. What seemed to be a promising enterprise in 2008 is mostly a dead end today. Over the course of my dissertation and book research, most of the startup founders I interviewed left the business and nearly all of the digital estate planning companies I researched have folded: Sites such as Legacy Locker, Perpetu, MyWebWill, 1,000 Memories, CirrusLegacy, Online Legacy, Entrustet, Lifestrand, Deathswitch, and E-Z Safe have all disappeared. Digital death is an underlying condition of digital posterity. It is ironic that such web-based companies promise to keep your data alive forever when digital estate planning startup companies are themselves highly erratic and subject to failure. Today, a younger generation of founders is hoping to disrupt digital death, often targeting millennials with their products. But digital estate planning and immortality chatbots do not address the overarching problem of platform ephemerality.

      Platforms and profiles change over time and may even disappear, so it is difficult to ensure that digital remains are preserved. For one, they are dependent on the particular corporate infrastructures on which they are built and the continued commercial viability of such companies. MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, LiveJournal, GeoCities, and other obsolete social networking platforms remind us that even the most successful tech giants may not live forever, or that their uses and users may change over time. It is hard to trust that a profile, blog post, digital photo album, or uploaded consciousness will survive in perpetuity.

      Immortality Hiccups

      Despite its intimate relationship with ephemerality, Silicon Valley is attempting to defeat death through movements like cryonics and transhumanism, as well as less fanciful enterprises like life extension through supplements, exercise, and nutrition. It is perhaps unsurprising that youth-obsessed Silicon Valley is disturbed by the notion of bodily decline. The wellness ideology associated with the Quantified Self movement and self-tracking through Fitbits and other wearable devices emanates from Silicon Valley culture itself, with its unique blend of New Age counter-culturalism and libertarian or neoliberal tendencies (Barbrook and Cameron 1996, Turner 2006). Failure itself is a feature, not a bug, of startup culture. The death of companies is an expected part of the culture, with failure baked into the very system of venture labor and the prominence of risk-taking (Neff 2012). But to actually die, to be a mere mortal and subject to the whims of time or the flesh, is less than ideal. Silicon Valley is in search of a techno-solution to death, both on a physiological level and in terms of the problems associated with digital inheritance.

      When it comes to dealing with death, startup culture attempts to apply to a techno-solutionist salve to something inherently messy. The logics of planning, charts, and neat lists don’t necessarily add up when a death happens. There is always the potential for a glitch. For instance, a British woman who died of cancer received a letter from PayPal claiming a breach of contract for her failure to keep paying. After her death, her husband had contacted PayPal with her death certificate and will, as requested, but PayPal’s system failed to register this and accidentally sent the letter anyway.

      Many digital immortality startups are in fact vaporware, or novelties that are more theoretical than utilitarian. But they are made material through the capital backing them and the valuable data their subscribers provide. At the same time, entrepreneurs often overestimate their possibility for success. A 1988 study showed that a majority of entrepreneurs believe they can prevent the death of their company. In a paper called “Living Forever: Entrepreneurial Overconfidence at Older Ages” (2013), Dutch economists found that entrepreneurs have a tendency to overestimate their actual life spans as well as the lifespans of their companies. This in part may explain the number of transhumanists in Silicon Valley. On a practical level, entrepreneurs must display a certain degree of optimism in order to ease the worries of accelerators and incubators who might be interested.

      Death is sometimes used as a metaphor in Silicon Valley discourses about failure. Many startups do not go bankrupt right away, but never attract a healthy customer base. Instead, their founders or other investors continue pouring money into them. According to one technologist, “We call them the walking dead…They don't necessarily die. They putter along.” (Carroll 2014). Software engineers may have to decide to abandon the startup shift and find more stable work, whereas founders have a hard time knowing when to pull the plug on their creations. Shikhar Ghosh, a lecturer at Harvard who has studied startup mortality, noted that “VCs bury their dead very quietly” (Carroll 2014).

      It is increasingly easy for startups to get funding, thanks to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe or IndieGoGo in addition to the standard angel investor route. Would-be entrepreneurs do not have to rely on venture capitalists. But this also means that a sea of unlikely startups has proliferated, while the vast majority of those companies will die early deaths. For anxious founders, the startup death clock can estimate when their ventures are about to run out of money. Much like individuals can leave goodbye messages on sites like Dead Social, dying startups often post final messages to their users before their websites become defunct. Startup death is a significant problem in Silicon Valley, so what does it mean to rely on precarious startups to broker long-term relationships with the dead?

      Wealthy VCs also fund life extension research. It’s not just the bearded weirdos like Aubrey de Grey. There is a much longer history of using new technologies and data tracking, along with changes in diet and exercise, to prolong the human lifespan and optimize the self (Bouk 2015, Wernimont 2019). For elites, that is. The Life Extension Institute of the early 20th century, for instance, found ways for wealthy white men to cheat death through diet and exercise regimes, publishing self-help books like How to Live while surveilling workers in factories according to eugenicist principles in order to maximize their productivity. Founded in 1913, the LEI was backed by members of the National Academy of Medicine, major insurance firms, and companies like Ford and GM alongside President Taft and Alexander Graham Bell; it was by no means a fringe movement.

      Echoing these historical connections, at a conference on radical life extension, Terasem’s Martine Rothblatt exclaimed, “It’s enormously gratifying to have the epitome of the establishment, the head of the National Academy of Medicine, say, ‘We, too, choose to make death optional!,” highlighting the ways that transhumanist visions are often tied to esteemed institutions. Consider Nectome, an MIT connected and federally funded startup that promised to scan human brains and turn them into digital simulations. Because it relied on fresh brains to work, it required subscribers to be euthanized first. This seems like a risky move, but investors like Sam Altman of Y Combinator immediately signed up. One of the founders said, “The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide…Product-market fit is people believing that it works.” In other words, the founders don’t really care if it works or not: if people believe it does, the market will abide.

      Silicon Valley-centered narratives are typically focused on short-term gains, a few entrepreneurs, and innovation at all costs. But as the internet ages, social media platforms have been caught up in questions of posterity and even transcendence. For Silicon Valley startup culture to deal with death raises some interesting questions about future projections and risk. Instead of trusting religious entities with your immortal soul, you should put your faith in the tech industry. Rather than employing established banks and corporations to manage your digital assets, you, the ordinary user, are expected to outsource that labor to a host of new, web-based companies. By definition, startups attempt to “disrupt” industries they view as obsolete or clunky. Or as one of my research subjects put it: “investors say the most boring industries are the most lucrative.” There is an obvious disconnect between the companies that promise to organize your digital belongings for eternity and Silicon Valley’s cultural expectations around failure.

      There is historical and contemporary synergy between powerful Silicon Valley interests and transhumanist belief systems, as many noted futurists have prestigious positions in the tech industry. For instance, Ray Kurzweil, a well-known proponent of the Singularity, is also Google’s Director of Engineering. According to computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, humans’ technological capacities will accelerate. Eventually, superintelligent AI will self-replicate and evolve on an ever-increasing timescale, leading to humanity’s end. While Vinge sees the technological Singularity as a destructive force, Kurzweil and those of his ilk believe it has the ability to solve all of the earth’s problems, including climate change. The temporal patterns of the Singularity thus coincide with Silicon Valley’s race for the new, i.e. the planned obsolescence of Apple products, perpetual updates and upgrades for software packages, or the fetishization of the latest gadgets.

      It’s not always completely cynical, either. Ray Kurzweil is actively trying to resurrect his dead father, and many transhumanists have suffered personal losses that inspire them to find ways of mitigating death. For some, transhumanism is a form of spiritual practice or belief system (Boenig-Liptsin and Hurlbut 2016, Bialecki 2017, Singler 2017, Farman 2019). The truth is that no matter how far-fetched some of these technologies may seem, they are already starting to affect how people interact with the dead and conceive of their own postmortem legacies. But for those who can’t afford the treatments and elixirs, digital immortality might be the only available route to living forever. There is a chasm between those who can afford actual life extension technologies (in the US, this includes things like basic healthcare) and those who can train free digital chatbots to act in their stead.

      When it comes to the history of life extension technologies, as well as modern genres of transhumanism and digital afterlife startups, people are actively working to engineer these items. They are not abstract fantasies, but connected to real money, speculative investment, and sites of extreme wealth and power. While their technologies are apocryphal, they rely on logic and cold rationality to justify their vision of the future, which they are actively building. Their science fiction tinged narratives are not speculative, but roadmaps for the future.

      On a rapidly warming planet where tech billionaires fantasize about escaping to the far corners of the earth in their bunkers, or even to Mars, immortality technologies are undeniably apocryphal. Freezing your head, perfecting your body so it lives for centuries, or uploading your consciousness to a magical server won’t help you if the whole earth burns. But for those with immense wealth and power, and a fervent belief in the salvific potential of technology, immortality is still a goal. Even if the Silicon Valley transhumanists eventually figure it out, only a select few will have access to their life-sustaining wares.

      References

      Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1996. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture 6(1): 44-72.

      Bialecki, Jon. 2017. “After, and Before, Anthropos.” Platypus, April 6. http://blog.castac.org/2017/04/after-and-before-anthropos/.

      Boenig-Liptsin, Margarita, and J. Benjamin Hurlbut. 2016. “Technologies of Transcendence and the Singularity University.” In Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, edited by J. B. Hurlbut and H. Tirosh-Samuelson, 239-268. Dordrecht: Springer.

      Bouk, Dan. 2015. How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. London: Polity.

      Carroll, Rory. 2014. “Silicon Valley’s Culture of Failure and the ‘Walking Dead’ it Leaves Behind.” The Guardian, June 28. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/28/silicon-valley-startup-failure-culture-success-myth.

      Cheney-Lippold, John. 2017. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press.

      Farman, Abou. 2019. “Mind out of Place: Transhuman Spirituality.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87(1): 57-80.

      Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

      Hui, Yuk. 2016. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

      Kneese, Tamara. 2019. “Networked Heirlooms: The Affective and Financial Logics of Digital Estate Planning.” Cultural Studies 33(2): 297-324.

      Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2017. “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness.” New Media & Society 19(1): 96-110.

      Neff, Gina. 2012. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge: MIT Press.

      O’Gieblyn, Meghan. 2017. “Ghost in the Cloud: Transhumanism’s Simulation Theology.” N+1 28. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-cloud/.

      Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Raley, Rita. 2013. “Dataveillance and Countervailance.” In Raw Data is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 121-146. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      Singler, Beth. 2017. “Why is the Language of Transhumanists and Religion So Similar?,” Aeon, June 13. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar.

      Turkle, Sherry. 1984. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Shuster.

      Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Ullman, Ellen. 2002. “Programming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines ‘Life.’” Harper’s Magazine, October. http://harpers.org/archive/2002/10/programming-the-posthuman/.

      Wernimont, Jacqueline. 2019. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

      3 votes