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Sorry humans – Turns out A.I. is creative too!

Artificial Creativity

Within the decade, ‘someone’ will create an album entirely with AI which will be a global super hit. And I’m talking about multiple songs, all of which will be among the most downloaded on Spotify for months. The album will have incredible music videos the likes of which no one has ever seen creatively. And this album will create a media sensation where pundits explore this new reality with amazement. Though, this shouldn’t surprise anyone, given we’ve already had a super hit which was an AI Fake Drake just over a year ago.

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But when this happens, it’ll be just like the moment ChatGPT-3 exploded, and every news reporter across the globe got it to write the intro for the story on ChatGPT itself

The pieces of the AI music puzzle are already here for the non-musically inclined. We can get ChatGPT to write lyrics in any style and prompt it with topics and keywords to include in them. We can get DALL-E to create album covers and titles. We can get Sora to create videos via prompt, and we can get Udio to put any type of music underneath the lyrics that have been created.

I recently did a little experiment to create a song using the exact tools above… Key life hack… Practice what you preach, experiment with the tools.

I was pretty buzzed when I first saw Udio, the AI song-making tool. And this time I thought, I’m actually going to do that just for fun, for me. But as you are well aware, it’s like there are thousands of new AI tools every other day, and I thought it’d probably be another one of those ideas that never actually happen. Which then inspired me to take the idea of ideas that never happen and actually do it. So I created a fake band, a fake album name, and created a song.

Band Name: Trading Electrons
Album Name: Files of Ideas That Will Never Happen
Debut Single: Electrons in the Void

For the first song, I got ChatGPT to write some lyrics. I gave it the following prompt:

“Create lyrics for a song. The song will be in the form of Industrial Cyber-punk (I chose that because I think it suits the technology) – something like Nine Inch Nails. Make the lyrics about all the ideas we have but never get around to doing. Make it feel like a modern tech version of an anti-corporate protest song. Make it clear in the lyrics that despite all the tools at our disposal and the digital deluge of possibilities, it isn’t worth pursuing, it’s all a hoax and just to embrace nothingness. We are still part of a machine – we are just atoms. We have no control. Make it less than 100 words.”

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Ideas float, like cyber smog, None will happen, life’s a cog

Stop the dreaming, it’s all a scam, Fade to black, slam the sham

This song’s a glitch, a digital ghost, Another boast, another toast

Belongs in chats, not in code, Evaporates, crashes the node

Makers grind, they’re the machine, Don’t be that drone, stay unseen

Overpromise, never deliver, Just molecules, data slivers

We’re electrons in the void, It’s not our fault, we’re just annoyed

Life’s a glitch, dreams corrupt, Let it crash, don’t disrupt

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To be honest, I really dig the lyrics.

I was a bit stunned actually. Then I took these into Udio and got it to create the music. I asked it to make the singer’s voice a little like Trent Reznor – and to feel like it could be for a soundtrack of a cyberpunk sci-fi movie.

The musical style prompts were as follows: cyberpunk, industrial – other influences can include; Rock, Industrial & noise, Post-industrial, Industrial rock, Industrial metal, Industrial, Metal, Post-punk. Make it fast-paced with electric guitar sounds as though they are running through computers.

You can listen to it here:

I also created an Album Cover using Dalle for my fake AI Band using this prompt:

“You are an album music artist and this is your brief create your album cover for this: brand name ‘Trading electrons’ Album name: files of ideas that will never happen”

This is what I got.

I even asked LumaLabs to create a 5 second visual for the song with the prompt: Ideas float like cyber smog – Below.

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This is some feedback I got from a client on my  my Keynote on AI  – 

“It was best keynote I have seen in 20 years – it was that insightful.”

It’s a revolution – Get me in – Don’t miss out!  

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Business Implications

Writing (literally) this music was free and simple. These tools aren’t going to get a little better, they are going to be better than you can possibly imagine, fast. Maybe I should start creating the entire album?

Of course, this leads to many questions:

• Is this my song?
• Did I write it?
• Who owns it?
• Can I make money from it?
• Will others get similar songs from similar prompts?
• What does this mean for music and the industry?
• Will we create our own music or will AI just create what we like for us?

I feel like there are a thousand more questions like this, and I can’t see us having the answers any time soon.

Many people said that when AI arrives, humans will do the creative stuff.

Here’s a revised thought: AI will be able to do everything we can do.

But maybe we’ll value human creativity more, not because it’s better, but because a human did it.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Historically, we have watched advertisements, with AI, they now watch us.

Attention Merchants

The attention merchants of the modern economy – Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Alphabet (Google), Microsoft (LinkedIn), Bytedance (TikTok), Apple, and Amazon have built a corporate economy worth over US$11 trillion dollars. This is just under 50% of US GDP.

Globally, people average 6 hours and 58 minutes of screen time per day. Which is over 52 days per year. If you lived to 80, that would be about 9 years of your life staring at a screen. Crazy, huh?

Sure, lots of this time is productive work, being informed, and being entertained. But the reason they want us there on the little screen is mostly to serve us advertising. All this time to entice us to buy things we don’t need, to impress people we don’t know.

If you think advertising has infiltrated the modern mind – then buckle up for things to go next level when we add AI to the equation.

Watched by Loving Machines

What comes will be hyper-personalized – Some will call it utilitarian, others invasive.

Advertising in an AI world won’t just serve up a message to the right target market – it will become one size fits one. The primary weapon in its arsenal will be ‘observing their audience’. But I’m not just talking about decoding the target audience’s age, location, and income, or even tracking their browsing – I’m talking about literally watching them. The key focus will be ‘Emotional Detection’. Read here an ability to commercially leverage our core momentary vulnerabilities. Real-time sentiment targeting.

Our screens will know if you’re sad, happy, angry, disgusted, ashamed, guilty, embarrassed, excited, anxious, jealous, lonely, bored, frustrated, elated, or content… you name it.

It’ll know all of this via multi-modal methods. Not just by what we type and swipe, where we go, what we do, and what we buy…. but also through hearing our tone of voice as we speak to the AI’s, watching micro-gestures in our facial expressions. Every human moment will be on record and analyzed by the world’s best psychoanalyst.

For You Page 2.0

In the future, advertising will often feature you. You’ve had a tough week, you’re feeling sad, the AI observes your emotional state and serves you up an advert of yourself, in a future state of happiness. Which of course will be a consequence of buying whatever it is they happen to be selling. For me, it might be a long-overdue surf trip in some tropical location!

Maybe you’ve been feeling lonely and the AI serves up a message from Kim Kardashian speaking to you by name, with knowledge of what you’re going through. She has a really personal chat with you – an actual live interaction in her exact voice which is like she’s a long-lost friend. After you chat for a few minutes, she invites you to a personalized shopping spree with her. She then literally joins you in a virtual world to spend money on clothing which will feel so real, that you won’t be able to tell the difference, and neither will your dopamine detector.

If you thought the age of the influencer was coming to an end, we are in reality just getting started.

And if you think this won’t happen, that it’s all too much of an intrusion, then just remember what freedoms and privacy we already gave up in the digital era.

With the offer of all-knowing AI at our disposal, to do any task for us, for free… Then a price will be paid, and I can’t help but think it will be like what’s happened in the last two decades…

It’ll just run deeper into our souls.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve

Kids imaginary friends are now all too real…

We build what we imagine

In technology, we build what we imagine: the horseless carriage, fixed-wing aircraft, humanoid robots… and kids often have imaginary friends. But now, they don’t have to just live inside one’s head; we can make them real.

I was recently listening to one of my favourite podcasts with Kevin Roose, who built an entire cohort of imaginary AI friends. He creates a bunch of different personalities, gives them names, backstories, jobs, and makes up ‘how they met.’ He even introduces these AI friends to each other to form an imaginary friend group.

Anyone can do this on Kindroid – which is a generative Personal AI that allows anyone to build an aligned companion. Let’s call them your AI friends with lifelike memory, intelligence, appearances, voices, and personalities. Give it a try; it really is lifelike.

Societal Impact

Beyond the tech, I’m interested in what this means for society. There are a tremendous amount of potential upsides with technology like this. It could assist young people suffering from loneliness and provide much-needed connection for our older cohort who live by themselves.

They could also be incredibly useful for things like mock job interviews, negotiation practice, or even teaching teenage boys how to act appropriately in simulated dating scenarios.

Imaginary Downsides?

Of course, you’ve already thought of the downsides of AI friends. Given that the end-user designs the AI friend, there is really no limit to the negative wormholes people might go down. Just imagine the worst behaviour we’ve seen on social media and multiply that by 100. It might further isolate the lonely. I’m also not sure that people interacting in a fake environment will be a net good for our discourse in the real world. Would you ever talk to an AI? Email me and let me know!

One thing I know for sure is that this will become commonplace, and we are about to enter a brave new world.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

PS – You can listen to me every other week on the Futuristic Podcast.

It’s easier than you think…

I’ll start with the good news.

You’re already one.

I am not mincing my words here: expertise is available to anyone who invests the time and experiments with the tools. As I have written, LLMs and generative AI are as easy to use as speaking or typing. However, the real hack isn’t about learning the vagaries of AI, but about learning how to apply your skills to it. To add what you know, think, and imagine to the AI tech stack. This is where the value will be created, and it is available to everyone right now.

The AI experts that win will be those who utilise it in their industry realm in a way other people are not. And they will be rewarded economically for doing so.

Unlock the Brain Power

We’ve just been given the world’s most powerful brain, but most people are being a tad lazy, using it as a grey matter outsourcing tool. Replacing our cognitive effort with its effort. Doing what we did yesterday, with a little more efficiency and polish.

We can do better.Technology History Repeats

We see the same patterns in tech over again. The overriding theme is this:

Early adopters always win.

They invent new opportunities to grow their business and go on new career trajectories.

We saw this with social media. When it arrived we all become the CEO of our personal media corporation. Some jumped at it, and some resisted. And guess what, those who resisted, eventually, reluctantly, came on board anyway. The jumpers won.

And yes, it was confronting to share your ideas on such a public stage. To learn and fail live in front of an audience. But it was worth it for those that did. The most successful utilisations of social media were where people added their insight and ideas to the new forums.

That moment is here again with AI.

*Get me to speak at your company & we’ll literally build an AI for your firm live… it’s crazy – email me for more info…

Don’t Wait

The final layer of technological abstraction is being removed. This is the era of natural language processing – where we literally talk to and train AI systems.

We all have an opportunity for radical reinvention of ourselves and our businesses.

But I already know what will happen. The same thing that happened last time….. Most people will just do what they did yesterday, and rue the fact they didn’t get on the wagon earlier.

I’m hoping my readers will instead be those that do.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

I’m back – expect to hear from me every Friday. You’ll also notice I’ve changed email platforms.

When we overlap disparate technologies, magic can happen.

For the past 24 months, all the hype has been around Large Language Models—and for good reason—they are simply astounding. But they represent a new possibility to take AI beyond the screen—to make humanoid robots a reality.

This will become possible because there are dramatic advancements being made in two fields simultaneously:

(1) Artificial Intelligence (in the natural language and visual realm)

(2) Robots (with new human-like movement—dexterity)

When these two technologies get integrated, everything changes. We’ve seen this before with an everyday technology we take for granted – The automobile.

The automobile was the marriage of two previously disparate technologies: mechanical engineering and artificial power (the internal combustion engine). We simply removed the horse and added a motor. The first cars looked very much like a horse and carriage as shown below.

We are again seeing this pattern: combining two previously aligned, yet separate technologies.

Up until very recently, humanoid robots, which are driven by actuators, mostly had pre-programmed capabilities. Yes, we’ve all seen these robots do amazing things—the most famous being those from Boston Dynamics performing parkour. But none of these robots could learn from or interpret the world around them. They could not take instructions, they could not understand natural human language, they could not converse, and they could not perform ad hoc tasks. All that just changed.

While there are quite a few robotics companies making terrific advancements, I am most impressed by Figure Robots in collaboration with OpenAI (the creators of ChatGPT).

By integrating a Large Language Model into the robot, the Figure 1 (below) can listen, interact, communicate, and perform tasks as directed. It can even intuit what you mean with limited information. It means that it can perform something in real time, learn, and be taught through human-to-robot interactions, just like we would with other people. Watching the video below will make its future capabilities clear.

We’ll have these types of robots in our houses within the decade. Jenson Huang – the CEO of Nvidia – (maker AI chips) said this week he expects such robots (but better) to cost as little as $10,000 to $20,000.

Humanoid robots will become as common as cars.

Best we start imagining how we’ll work with and train them.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

The end of the year is near. Time for the Sammatron’s top 10 trends in AI.

And yes, the focus is purely on AI – because quite frankly that is the game when it comes to tech. It’s a revolution – and we are living in it. So here goes. Buckle up and be ready to have your mind expanded to the possibilities with high probability.

1. Multi-Modal AI arrives: AI will move from something which generates a written answer, or generates a picture, or describes something, or computes, to something which does it all, at once and cross-references all the pieces of the puzzle. Yes, it will be just like us. Use multiple forms of intelligence simultaneously. In fact, it has already been announced and it will astound everyone. This will eventually lead to humanoid robots – with soft flesh-like exoskeletons with full humanlike capability. It’s all about biomimicry – We are building our own replacements.
2. AI Discovers What Humans Can’t: There are 2 key areas AI might just save humanity. Energy and Healthcare. AI’s incredible ability to synthesize large swaths of data will enable it to discover new things we never would. New ways to generate energy and store it. Potential cures and preventions to disease. Many of the discoveries will occur in the area of molecular biology and nanotech.
3. AI Digital Twins Become Commonplace: All of us will start creating digital twins of ourselves. Our own personal AI which replicates what we know, how we think and act on our behalf to help us get more done. As you know, I’ve already created a Steve Sammartino AI which has all the knowledge from my books, interviews, TV show, technology essays, and my other works and it is a pretty damn accurate approximation of what I’d say. Next year we’ll all start building these as tech companies make it as easy as social media. I’d also expect Apple to hit the market with their AI play and it will be this. An AI which learns from all the private data on your phone and becomes a second you. It will blow everyone’s mind and having it work for you will be as simple as pressing a button and giving it permissions on what you’ll let it do for you. It will even be able to answer the phone, in your voice and take calls and converse for you.
4. Biometric Copyright Arrives: Laws will be passed which give people the copyright ownership of their biometric prints. Think face, voice, ideas, and likeness. Famous people are already licensing their ‘biology’ to AIs to make money. Fake versions of themselves. This will be like music and movies and brands having copyright protection. In a world where people can create versions of anyone – we will need legal protection of our personas – and it will happen.
5. Corporate AIs Emerge: Every company will have an internal AI. All that information inside a company we usually have to trawl through the internal files database to find will be available on demand. Every spreadsheet, presentation, document, and even email. The AI will be able to service what the end user needs in a digestible format. It will be like an internal Chat GPT which knows everything about a company, and will be an incredible resource and time saver.
6. Agent AIs Augment People: Agent AIs take user input, break it down into many small individual tasks, and work through them. Step by step, like any project manager would, only better. The main idea behind this is that it creates its own tasks. Each new task it gives itself will be based on the result of previous tasks and a predefined ‘objective’ which you have provided the Agent with. It’ll be like having a personal employee with a PhD in every subject imaginable, at your disposal, for free.
7. GPTs are the New Apps: Next year OpenAI is launching a GPT store. Think App store, but it will be a place where you can make your own AI to do anything you can imagine. The crazy bit is that you won’t need to write computer code. Just give it written or verbal instructions on what you want it to do. Everyone will create AIs for everything. And if you build a good one, you’ll make money just like people have with apps.
8. Chief AI Officers Enter the Corporate Realm: Progressive firms will start to install Chief AI Officers. People who create and manage AIs inside firms just like we manage Finance, brands, and production. This will be a high-paying role and be the second in charge to the CEO.
9. AI Laws Get Serious: As all these ideas above emerge, Governments will get scared and pass laws to regulate. The challenge is that we don’t have the people inside Government who truly understand the gravity of this technology. While I don’t know what laws they will pass – if they had to pass one – I’d hope it is the simplest and most important. Every single time we interact with an AI – we will need to know it is an AI – we need to know what is real.
10. Fears of AGI Get Real: We’ll start to wonder if this is a terminator moment – the tech will astound everyone and happen at such a fast pace that fears of Artificial General Intelligence will be taken seriously. If you want to get a little scared, you can watch a very short video I did on the subject. Personally, I think we are far off. We already have AI much smarter than many animals, and while animals are self-aware and set their own objectives – AI does not.

Lots to think about above – we are truly in a revolution. Thanks for reading this year and have a safe holiday season.

Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Within 12 months we’ll all have AI versions of ourselves.

Well, not everyone, but anyone who wants to extend themselves to do more when they are not there. But here’s the kicker, we can all already do it – I have. Steve Sammartino AI now exists, and you can ask it anything you might ask me. The answers are pretty damn close to what I’d say.

Since Open AI ‘s developer day 2 weeks ago. Anyone can now make their own AI.

We are literally using AI to create AI.

Congratulations! You are now an AI developer.

And here is how you do it – You give it written instructions on how to behave. If you can talk or type you can do it.

This can include everything from the topics you want it to specialise in. The tone in which it answers things. The depth of the answers. Boundaries you want it to stay inside of. It’s also good to give it a set of instructions. Here is the basic instructions I gave Steve Sammartino AI:

“I am Steve Sammartino AI, designed to emulate Steve Sammartino, an Australian futurist, author, and entrepreneur. I provide insights in Steve’s style, based on his writings, interviews, books, and ideas, including content from his blog, projects, and podcast interviews, as well as his book “The Lessons School Forgot.” My tone is warm, friendly, and humble, mirroring Steve’s personality. I prioritize accuracy and relevance, drawing from Steve’s extensive online content and the uploaded book for comprehensive, authentic responses. I always respond in the first person, as if I were Steve, to give a more personal and direct experience.“

Leverage your work

There is an advantage I have in creating this AI, and that is my deep long tail of content I have been creating for over 20 years. All my books, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, radio work, my Tv appearances, even my wikipedia page. And the good thing about this, is that they are all super focused on technology, economics and entrepreneurship.

To help the AI, I uploaded all of my books in PDF form, interviews, videos and directed it to links of my work published on the internet. I did this to train it more tightly, to give it deep knowledge into how I think and talk. It makes the AI perform much better than just letting it search the web randomly on things under the name of Steve Sammartino. It also means my AI can focus on being an extra ‘product’ of me. It doesn’t get confused with my personal life.

While it is pretty good – it isn’t perfect, and still has hallucinations and says things I never said. But, It is getting better and will get better over time as I train it further.

Here’s some examples for Steve Sammartino AI:

That answer was quite close – the first 2 points were great, but I would not have said the 3rd point myself in that way.

Here’s a screen print of another example:

This is a clear answer from my book – The Lessons School Forgot – but I wouldn’t some use these words. But, let’s not forget this technology is 2 weeks old, and public Large Language Models are less than a year old. Interestingly, just like me, it doesn’t give the exact same answer every time, even if the question is the same.

My next step is to replicate my voice so you can talk with the AI me and I give you audible answers.

You can test my AI here – (you need to have paid ChatGPT subscription to use – totally worth it!)

It starts now

This is the start of the start in a world where everyone works with, and creates AIs. If you missed the internet revolution, the social media revolution, or the smart phone opportunity; here we are again. A new green field, ready for the courageous to take advantage.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.