e413 — AI, your way | Games At Work dot Biz

visual representation of data in the form of points of light — Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash

Published 24 April 2023

Andy, Michael and Michael get things started for this edition of the podcast with several stories about AI. The first from the Washington Post deals with the dataset that makes up Google’s C4 – the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. The data ingested into the large language models has an impact on the systems that use them, and in the case of C4, Andy noticed that his blog was included, and also noted that the Games at Work site was not. Many large language models do not disclose the websites incorporated in their models. The Washington Post article goes into more details about the provenance of the data, as well as the ownership of the websites ingested as it relates to how large language models are trained and challenges that may arise from that selection and training. Have a look in the show notes below to see if your favorite website was included in the C4 model. After a quick note about Microsoft’s SwiftKey keyboard including AI and a cool video of a BMO-AI robot demo, the team turns to the Turing test website aptly called “human or not”. This website randomly pairs the user with a human or an AI and allows for a 2 minute conversation concluding with the user voting whether the conversation partner was a human, or not a human (an AI).

Switching to television, the new show Mrs. Davis just out on the Peacock streaming service features an AI as a central character. Well, the show is just out in the US – the launch date in the UK is still to be announced – sorry, UK listeners! It will be interesting to see how this AI is treated in the show, even if the AI does not have an entry in imdb.

With such the focus on AI in the recent weeks, an article by Alex Murrell captures the attention of the co-hosts in multiple ways. There is a thought that AI will continue to accelerate the convergence of design toward what Alex describes as “the age of average”. Citing examples such as “Instagram face”, “AirSpace” (international AirBnB style), architecture and advertising, Alex highlights the trending toward the homogenization of style. Michael R points out that breaking from the average is a way of establishing distinctiveness, because it is avant garde and breaks from the popular. The advertising tagline of “X, your way” is another example that Alex points out, which then inspired the naming of this episode. Concluding the article with “When the world zigs. Zag.” reminded Michael M of the Cadillac advertisements from some years ago – see below for an example. Take some time to read this very interesting article in full.

Wrapping up the episode for this week, Andy, Michael and Michael conclude with a couple of notes about the Apple HomePod listening for smoke alarms and some rumors about the as yet unannounced mixed reality headset. An intriguing interview with Tim Cook in GQ gives some further color on the future for AR and VR.

Andy noticed that there is an upcoming LEGO exhibition in Raleigh for the local North Carolina listenership, which will interestingly be in the same space as the Van Gogh exhibit from last year.

Is your favorite website in C4? Do you feel that AI will accelerate the move to “the age of average”, or will it help people zag faster? Will the university in Spokane, Washington be happy with more zags? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.