Category: Uncategorized

Prompt: Make a picture of a futuristic mind gym where people do a new kind of working out to keep their brains active in a world filled with AI

Listen to Steve to read this post (5 min audio)

An unused muscle will atrophy. It doesn’t matter whether it is a bicept or a brain..

In the age of automation, where AI shoulders an ever-increasing load of our cognitive toil, the concept of a ‘Mind Gym’ might become more than a novelty. Just as the Industrial Revolution led to a weird thing called a gymnasium – where we could work out – because work was no longer physical, the AI Revolution might call for an equivalent space to exercise our most human asset: the brain.

The Need for Neural Dumbbells

We live in a paradox. Our lives have never been more convenient, yet our minds are at risk of following the same path our bodies did, declining in ability as we outsource movement to machines. As AI takes over every mental task imaginable, the risk of cognitive atrophy grows. Enter the ‘Mind Gym,’ or ‘Cerebral Fitness Centers’—sanctuaries dedicated to the rigorous workout of the gray matter.

The Anatomy of a Mind Gym

Imagine walking into a space filled with the buzz of concentrated energy. Here, ‘Neurobics’ are the order of the day. These centers would be equipped with a variety of ‘intellectual treadmills’ and ‘cognitive weights’ designed to enhance mental fitness through tailored exercises that challenge memory, problem-solving, creativity, and emotional intelligence, which will ensure your mind is fit enough to work with the AIs.

The ‘Creativity CrossFit’ area would be a hive of artistic endeavors, from painting to poetry, ensuring that members’ imaginative capacities are given a vigorous workout. Meanwhile, the ‘Focus Zones’ would offer meditation and mindfulness exercises, training attendees in the art of concentration and mental endurance. Of course, ‘Mind Gyms’ would have personal trainers—cognitive coaches, if you will—offering advice on mental nutrition and bespoke brain-training regimens. Group classes would not only provide social stimulation but also encourage collaborative problem-solving, a mental muscle that AI cannot flex.

I can see the neon signs now with names like ‘Brainworks,’ ‘NeuroGym,’ ‘MindCrafters,’ or ‘Synapse Circuit’ to capture the essence of these establishments.

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Bonus – Radio interview on 3AW where I discuss the issues of tech dependence during the Optus Outage in Australia effecting 10 million people.

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Wait a minute!

Of course, there is an alternate reality. Instead, we simply buy an upgrade ‘off the shelf’ and enhance our brains—the artificial intelligence way. Any skill or ability we want to have inside our mind will be purchasable. Paint like Warhol, write like Tolstoy, become a multi-linguist, or learn to fly a B212 Helicopter—it just depends on how rich you are to purchase the software required. Enter AI wealth discrimination!

It’s worth noting Elon Musk’s brain implant startup, Neuralink, has FDA approval to start surgery!

Or just maybe, just maybe, the ‘Mind Gym’ is more than a response to AI; rather, a statement of our commitment to the human experience. An acknowledgment that while our bodies need exercise to thrive, our minds require an equal measure of challenge and stimulation—even if a mind upgrade could be uploaded directly into our brains.

As always, the future is unwritten; what we need to do is be prepared for plausible trajectories. Both Mind Gyms and nano-chip implants. And always have an open mind (see what I did there?) to what sounds astoundingly ridiculous today.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

PS – If you’re planning a conference for next year – give me a shout by reply email and we’ll discuss how we can wow your team with a keynote on the latest in AI and what’s next!

The recent update for Open AI which now includes visual recognition and description is quite astounding.

I’ve now been given access to the Dalle3 and ChatGPT integration. I did some testing and it was mind blowing. It can create super realistic images, but the thing I find astounding is its ability to describe what it sees.

A picture tells thousand words….. and AI now knows them all.

But rather than have me explain what it does – let me just show you. I’ve put 3 picture below and the command to show you the output. There is also a drop box video link of each in case you want to see how it does it live. I’d love to know what you think – Just email me back

Image 1 – Pic of Tom at my local cafe this morning…

Prompt: Describe this image in detail (My local cafe)

Answer: (Click here to watch it do it)

The image appears to be set in a cozy cafe or coffee shop. Here’s a detailed description:

1. A young man with shoulder-length black hair is positioned to the right of the image. He’s smiling and looking at the camera. He’s wearing a white t-shirt and a baseball cap with an emblem reading “Anchorage.”
2. The cafe setting is adorned with various pieces of equipment commonly associated with coffee making. This includes an espresso machine decorated with numerous stickers such as a heart, a cat, letters like “R”, and several other designs.
3. In front of the espresso machine, there are multiple stainless steel pitchers, possibly used for steaming milk. Several white ceramic dishes and stacks of white cups are also visible on the counter.
4. A countertop with a wooden finish dominates the lower portion of the image. On this countertop, a couple of beverages can be seen, including one that seems to be a latte or cappuccino with foam on top, placed next to a white ceramic cup.
5. There’s a window behind the young man, revealing an outdoor setting with a glimpse of trees and a building. It appears to be daytime based on the natural light coming through.
6. An air conditioning unit is mounted on the wall above the window.
7. Various other items, including bottles of syrup or flavoring, a digital screen, and other miscellaneous objects, are scattered throughout the space, adding to the ambiance of a working coffee shop.
8. The overall vibe of the image is warm and welcoming, capturing a moment in a cafe where the barista seems to be happily engaging with the photographer.

Image 2 – Pic from us printing our first house for Macro3D

Prompt: Tell me what you think is happening in this picture

Answer: (Click here to watch it do it)

The image depicts a construction or industrial site where 3D printing technology seems to be in use for building or fabricating structures.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. At the forefront, there’s a large red robotic arm machine labeled “ACRO 3D”. The machine appears to be a kind of 3D printer or construction robot mounted on tracks, similar to those found on heavy-duty construction machinery.
2. This robotic machine is in the process of creating a gray, textured wall or barrier. The texture and layering of the structure suggest that it’s being built layer by layer, indicative of 3D printing methods.
3. To the right of the image, a man wearing an orange high-visibility jacket and a beanie stands overseeing the operation. He holds a controller or tether connected to the robotic machine, suggesting he might be operating or guiding the machine.
4. In the background, other construction equipment, like an orange tractor or loader, can be seen, hinting at a larger construction or development project taking place.
5. The sky appears to be clear with scattered clouds, suggesting a good day for outdoor work.

In summary, it seems like a construction process is underway using advanced 3D printing technology to build or erect structures on-site. The operator is actively involved in guiding or controlling the 3D printing robot.

Image 3 – Picture from window of plane flying back into Melbourne

(This one is interesting – because I pushed the AI to give me more detail – and it did… ProTip: Don’t accept the first answer anymore than you would with a human…

Prompt: Describe this image…

Answer: (Click here to watch it do it)

The image provides an aerial view from the window of an airplane. In the foreground, there’s a portion of the airplane’s wing with a visible red emblem of a kangaroo. Below, you can see a vast urban landscape with a dense grid of streets, houses, and buildings. A significant portion of the image is dominated by a harbor area with multiple shipping containers, docks, and waterways. A river meanders through the landscape and leads to a downtown area with tall skyscrapers and modern buildings. The horizon is slightly hazy, and you can see distant mountain ranges. The overall impression is of a bustling metropolitan area viewed from above.

2nd Prompt: Where do you think it could be? Tell me more about the type of plan & airline

The emblem of a kangaroo on the airplane’s wing suggests that this is a plane from Qantas, which is Australia’s largest and flag carrier airline. Given the aerial view of the urban landscape, shipping harbor, and river leading to a downtown area with skyscrapers, it’s plausible that this could be a view of Melbourne, especially considering the Yarra River and the port areas that are characteristic of this city. However, without further context, this is just a speculation, and it could be another major city in Australia or elsewhere served by Qantas.

As for the plane, Qantas operates a range of aircraft, including the Boeing 737, Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and Airbus A330 among others. Without seeing more specific details of the plane, it’s challenging to identify the exact model. The wing’s design could be consistent with models like the Boeing 737 or 787, but again, it’s speculative without more information.

So there you have it – AI is now starting to merge its various forms of intelligence – Thought, Sight, Sound, Voice… everything. Soon it will be inside soft robots… we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve

Listen to Steve to read this post (8 min audio) – Do I sound like I write?

Last week I watched an increasingly rare moment of linear, live television – The AFL Grand Final. As a long-time Collingwood fan, I rejoiced in an eventual victory and immediately thought about how much my late mother would have loved seeing her Magpies win. We could’ve watched it together, followed by hours of post-game discussions, analyzing it play-by-play. While I’ll never watch another game with my mother, the prospect of discussing it—or anything else with her—is closer than we think.

How to Create a AI Twin

It won’t exactly be her, and she’ll have no idea about it, but soon we might be able to ‘access’ the minds and faces of those who’ve passed. In fact, a basic version of this was achieved years ago when James Vlahos created a chatbot of his terminally ill father. He conducted deep interviews with his dad for months, resulting in a basic DadBot he could interact with posthumously. We’ve progressed significantly since then; interviews are now optional.

Currently, anyone owning a smartphone is inadvertently creating a Digital Twin of their existence. ChatGPT can already mimic my writing style. Given that much of my life is public, it possesses an extensive database of not just my work but also my experiences, acquaintances, and hobbies.

But the younger an individual is, the higher the ‘resolution’ of their twin. Nearly every action a youngster takes is now digitized and documented since birth. Both my children, born in 2010 and 2012, epitomize this. Their digital footprints reside in server farms globally. Even though it’s not in the ‘public domain’, tech giants have access to all components of their life stories.

Consider what today’s youth have shared for their future digital twins:

Photos: Most pictures of my children, taken by myself or my wife, originate from an iPhone. Stored in iCloud and with other cloud providers, these images are geotagged, timestamped, and analyzed by AI.

Videos: The data obtained from videos is even more detailed and accurate than pictures and importantly builds a database of our voices, facial expressions and body movements, all of which are as unique as fingerprints.

Diary: Our family’s whereabouts and plans have been meticulously logged. Even if we forget an entry, GPS and Google Maps fill in the gaps.

Phones: My daughter’s iPhone tracks her content preferences, friends, and interests. My son, though phone-less, is still monitored by big tech when he uses my devices, as they create something called a shadow profile of his clear habits and preferences.

Laptops: Both kids use laptops for schoolwork. This offers insight into their intellectual growth and thinking patterns, much like a school principal from a smaller primary school might track and take an interest in a student’s development.

And we can be sure that big tech is tracking all ambient conversations of anyone in earshot of a smartphone and knows exactly who is speaking, despite claims to the contrary.

This is just a glimpse of the data available. For anyone who has been active online for over a decade, we can create a high-definition AI replica. And for those born post-2007, it’ll be nearly perfect. This means very soon we’ll be able to create interactive AI Chatbots of anyone once they die. When it does arrive, we’ll all be astounded, though we shouldn’t really be surprised.

Living Forever

Combine the aforementioned personal data with a Large Language Model trained to mimic human behaviour, and we can produce a convincing deep fake of almost anyone.

It’ll be like having a Zoom call straight from the afterlife. It will be as simple as logging into and choosing who you want to chat to from your Posthumous Contacts List. In moments a life-like AI bot of a person you once knew, will be there conversing with you in real time, with the same ‘brain’ and life they had before they passed. The kicker is that they’ll continue to learn as you chat with them. Adding what new experiences you’ve had and keeping up to date with everything going on in the family.

Of course, you’ve already guessed what the red flags are:

• Who owns our data and biometric records?
• Does the person who died need to sign off on their AI replica being created in their will?
• Who profits from all this?
• Is this a healthy idea for people coping with loss?

If we’ve already relinquished our life-data to Big Tech, will we need to pay subscription fees to converse with AI renditions of departed loved ones?

Perhaps this tech will be reserved for forming parasocial relationships with AI Taylor Swift or our favourite celebrities?

One certainty is this will happen. The allure of fantasy, love, and loss is undeniable. How could anyone turn down the opportunity to be able to talk again to someone once close to your heart, even if you know it isn’t real? 

And it’s the usual suspects who are in the best position to be able to do this: Apple, Meta and Google – and if that happens the most powerful companies in the world will have reached an almost religious status – by creating a new kind of afterlife.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Listen to Steve to read this post (7 min audio) – it’s actually quite different and better than the written version below – give it a listen!

Every now and again, you meet someone who changes your life. In my career, I’ve been lucky to meet a few people who put me on a new path. And they all have one thing in common – They were all younger than me. I call them my Reverse Mentors.

Tom Carra I met in my last corporate job at Kraft Foods. We used to have pretend meetings to talk about business and entrepreneurship. Although we only worked together formally for a short period of time, we’d meet for coffee once a week and eventually started a software company together – rentoid.com. He helped me believe I was better suited outside of the corporate enclave and was also the person who convinced me I could become a keynote speaker. He helped me design the first ever corporate speech I delivered.

Ross Hill I met while doing my first startup (above) at the MODM event (Melbourne Online Digital Media – run by Cameron Reilly). A tiny cohort of startup founders who shared ideas on tech before it was trendy. Ross helped me understand social media, blogging, and the emerging business models the internet was facilitating. He truly led me to becoming an author and technology commentator. He taught me to combine tech and economics in a totally different way.

The Stranger from Romania – Raul Oaida – was my co-conspirator in creating the world’s first ever drivable lego car. This became a global viral sensation. It was his idea and he helped me understand that anyone can do anything, from anywhere, in the modern world. To this day I use that project as a pitch calling card, especially when I want people to believe in possibility.

Most recently, I’ve been working with Tom Macrokanis. Tom is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. We have now co-founded Macro3D – our 3D printing and robotic construction company. I regard myself as his apprentice – he’s not even half my age, and he is teaching me so much. He is a true renaissance man. He’s not just a software developer; he’s also a mechanic, welder, concreter, and expert in mechatronics. Much of which is self-taught – University would have slowed him down. He has unicorn blood and works crazy hours – he literally did 18-hour days while we were 3D printing our first building in South Australia. Much of it, he did on his own. On top of that, he has a keen business sense and is calm under pressure when things go awry. Ok – enough of the Bromance for now.

What we are doing next is going to be a world first. And I’m calling it now – it will be a global viral sensation.

The world’s first house which has been entirely created by AI. The concept, design, code, build… everything. The picture above is our design inspiration. We’ll be building it on my farm in Geelong in the space below and creating a video of the entire process, demonstrating how AI was the catalyst. Heck, we’ll even use AI to do the final video edits. I’m excited.

And here’s why we are doing the AI House – it will generate attention and give us the platform we need to show our Government that we can design and build houses 50% cheaper and faster than traditional methods. We are part of the solution to the housing crisis in this country – and we really want it to help us raise capital.

If you have a spare $5 million in your swear jar, be sure to sing out!

The only gap we have in our plans for Macro3D is a visionary investor. We already have orders for $6 million worth of robots and 300 houses our first client wants to build. I have no doubt that young Tom will grace the front pages of business journals and newspapers very soon as he builds an incredible business, using technology to solve societal problems. I’m just glad to be coming along for the ride and help a little along the way.

If you want to be taught and inspired to create a different tomorrow, then it might be worth listening to someone with less experience, wisdom, and all those things that adults are meant to have.

Keep thinking,

Steve.

Listen to Steve read this post (8 min audio) – with bonus off piste commentary – give it a listen!

Union membership in Australia is in steep decline – it’s now less than 15 per cent of the workforce compared with 60 per cent in 1960. The dramatic decline has been great for many industries, corporations, and investors; not so good for the middle class and wages.

It’s pretty easy to tell how powerful a union is when their members go on strike. I can remember strikes by posties at Christmas, nurses, teachers, dairy farmers, railways, and bus drivers, to name a few. We noticed because they caused genuine disruption to our lives.

But here’s a strike that hasn’t really disrupted our lives, even if we have noticed – the Writers Guild of America Strike (WGA) in the USA.

A total of 112 days has passed in the WGA strike and yet, every night when I sit down on the couch, I am drowning in a tyranny of choice in what to stream. The only tiny miss is John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight.

While this strike action might seem a little irrelevant to Australia, it’s the shape of things to come, because AI is coming for the creative class. For more than a decade now, the narrative has been: efficiency is for robots, creativity is where humans shine.

But now there’s a revised and better assumption:

If a human can do it, so can Artificial Intelligence.

To be sure, creative output via code will be different, and not always better, but you can be sure it will be cheaper.

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*Bonus – Want some advice on how to use AI in your business or career? Reply to this email for a 1 on 1 half an hour of power with me – first 3 only.

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Wrong Time, Wrong Target

What the WGA is asking for is pretty standard: improved pay, conditions, superannuation, et al.

But there are two things that aren’t standard.

Firstly, they want a minimum number of writers in the writers’ room, which seems kind of insane. (Who gets to just have more people because they want it in any industry?) And secondly, they have demands about how AI is handled. They are requesting that AI can’t:

• write or rewrite literary material.
• be used as source material.
• have material used to train AI.

So far, the studios have rejected the demands, and it is difficult to see them ever agreeing.

AI is essentially a gift-wrapped present for the studios and big tech, a pause button allowing them to recalibrate their spending in the midst of the streaming wars.

In 2022, streamers spent a whopping $US26.5 billion on original content production, a 45 per cent increase on 2021. That’s the kind of cost increase no sane business desires. And now, 2023 looks like it will see a decline in spend for the full year, given all the production that has been paused.

Meanwhile, the number of streaming accounts hasn’t declined at all; in fact, Video on Demand (VOD) as a category is expecting an increase of 65 million subscribers in 2023.

What we can assume is that the past 100+ days have been filled with live AI experiments to see how good AI-based production could actually be. Another thing the Writers Guild seems to have forgotten is that the biggest investors in their services also happen to be tech companies—yes, those building the AI technology that can replace the writers and even the actors.

There’s a lesson here for all forms of creative work.

Embracing AI

Fighting a technological tide is never a good strategy for workers. A better approach by the creative class would be to figure out how to share the upside of AI-generated creative content. What they should be demanding is royalties from what AI can generate, especially since the effectiveness of the AI machine is purely a function of the training data it learns from – i.e. the writers’ data. This should take the form of asking for protection of their “digital twins”—their biometric output, licensing fees for any content put into AI data sets, and of course, residuals from any “original” AI content resulting from output that was trained on their creative works.

The big problem, of course, is that with billions of parameters in every AI database, it is very difficult to align original content creators and divide up revenue where there is enough revenue to go around. This has been big tech’s greatest hack. They add a layer of innovation by aggregating small pieces of content, all of which have little value on their own, but extraordinary value in aggregate. For a very long time now, big tech has gotten most of its raw materials for free; this is just the next chapter. No wonder they have been such financial juggernauts.

The only viable path would be that they are paid for database inputs, not outputs.

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This month I’ll be heading to every state in Australia, Indonesia and Mauritius to do  my new Keynote on AI  –  This was quote from one a did this week:

“I just wanted to say how enlightening and entertaining I found it. Just a great presentation all round…. I’m getting started on my AI journey…”

It’s time for some Sammatron at your next event – Get me in – Don’t miss out!  

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Database Wars

The streaming wars might well be replaced with the AI database training wars. And it isn’t just limited to high content creation, as we are seeing in the US writers’ strike. Anywhere, any type of content or information is put into a system and published, an AI is on the other end being trained to replace the people populating that data set. Something as simple as saying ‘yes’ to a phone call being recorded by a service provider now forms part of the AI aggregate. It’s only a matter of time before most industries in Australia, and globally for that matter, arrive at their “AI Writers Strike” moment. And we do need to find a path forward that makes sense for all economic participants, as AI will and should be embraced everywhere it is possible.

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Keep thinking,

Steve.

pic above from home page of DreamGF.AI

Listen to Steve read this post (10 min audio) – give it a listen!

A colleague and good friend of mine was the Chief Marketing Officer of the world’s biggest brewer in the 2010s. He had challenges aplenty. The rise of craft beers, fragmentation of brands, the decline in alcohol consumption…. But when I asked him who his biggest competitor was, his answer surprised me: Tinder.

He went on to say that dating apps like Tinder are a very clear substitutes for pubs, clubs, and bars. Many patrons have traditionally gone to these locations to meet people. And while they may not like to admit it, when they enter the club, they look around at the options available and say, “Yes, No, Yes, No, No, No, Yes.” They immediately make a judgment on who they may like to engage with. And this is exactly what happens on Tinder, as people swipe right, left, right, left, left, left, right. You could even say that Dutch courage, or ‘beer goggles,’ have been replaced by on-screen filters that make everyone look a little bit better than in real life. No need to leave the couch to find a potential partner, just sit and swipe in your comfy tracksuit pants.

Digital interactions imitate the real world.

Finding Love Online

Online dating is very big business. We’ve come a long way from the dating videos from the 1980s – a place where mostly awkward people, and mostly men, sat in front of a camera in cable knit jumpers. The market size is over $US10 billion globally in revenue. The entire mating process has changed more radically in the past 20 years than it did in the previous 2000 years. We now expected that people in a relationship met online.

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Bonus – Listen to a radio Interview I did with Dwayne Russell to discuss AI’s impact on AFL and other sports

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AI Substitutes – Deep Fake Love

While we are all familiar with Deep Fakes being used in politics and business, emerging from the same servers are AI girlfriends. And I’m not just talking about a text based chatbot people can flirt with. Things are now much more real than that.

AI-generated girlfriends now boast continuous AI-generated video, which has an almost no-noticeable difference from a live video chat with an actual person. The voice is hyper-realistic, and the ‘bot’ will have the exact look, identity, behaviour, and personality the end-user has designed for it, all generated by the customer via simple text prompts. An AI girlfriend who is there for her “partner’s” every beck and call, giving him (and it is mostly men), the kind of response he wants, every – single – time. We’ve now entered the era of designer partners – something no plastic surgeon could possibly compete with.

This is not nearly as niche as we may imagine. The list of tech companies providing what they call Virtual Companions is very long indeed: Eva.Ai, PicSo.ai, DreamG.ai, AI girlfriend, Myanima, Intimate – AI Girlfriend, RomanticAI, CoupleAI – Virtual Girlfriend, Replika: My AI Friend, Smart Girl: AI Girlfriend, My Virtual Girlfriend Julie.

Many of these are funded by respected venture capital firms and the estimated number of people with ongoing AI-centric relationships is in the many millions. Subreddits already exist where people discuss their AI companions like they would a football team.

What happens next is easy to imagine. Adding these AI personalities to soft robotics where a fully formed physical likeness of an AI is built and sent to the customer. Just imagine the Sophia Robot, with a Boston Dynamics-like exoskeleton underneath it. When this happens, AI will exit the screen and enter the world just like Hiroshi Ishiguro has imagined.

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This month I’ll be heading to every state in Australia, Indonesia and Mauritius to do  my new Keynote on AI  –  This was quote was from my client after yesterday’s keynote:

“It wasn’t just insightful, it was very funny as well – I didn’t expect that”

It’s time for some Sammatron at your next event – Get me in – Don’t miss out!  

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The AI Girl on Call

The business model is just as you’d expect – to get started is mostly free. But the more engaged the end user becomes and the more human one makes the AI, and the more the AI interactions which are had, the more the money it costs the user. The companions, of course, send frequent messages to their end user, prompting more interaction and more money.

This is where it gets dangerous, especially give these interactions are so social and intimate. Our DNA is so heavily geared towards relationships that the human mind has a very difficult time delineating between real and online interactions. This is why people develop quasi-kinships with media personalities. In psychology, these are known as para-social relationships. We know the person so well, and in our mind, we believe that they too, know us. It’s also why celebrities are frequently and effectively used in advertising.

We don’t need to be psychologists to imagine the potential behavioural implications:

• Men designing and controlling women.

• Young people developing unrealistic expectations of what a healthy relationship is.

One could easily postulate these kind of AI relationships quickly devolving into simulation of violence, and even, paedophilia. It’s a veritable minefield of long-term social issues waiting to happen. All of which the AI companion providers claim they have guardrails against – of course, we’ve heard this before.

Disruptive Implications

The biggest technology disruptions are usually accompanied by simultaneous social changes. Just think about how the web changed the way we live. Likewise, we should start to think seriously about how AI and robotics will change the nature of human relationships. It may well be that dating apps get disrupted by transhuman-AI relationships. You may remember the movie ‘Her’ from a decade ago where the protagonist fell in love with his operating system. Well, we are already there; it’s just happening in dark corners of the internet.

What we ought to be prepared for are changes that are fundamental shifts in humanity. An era of transhumanism. It is foreseeable that cohorts of society will push for transhuman marriages. And if you think that sounds strange, just imagine how gay marriage or transgender people would’ve sounded to anyone a few hundred years ago.

As AIs enter every single realm of society – we’ll see changes that makes the past 30 years seem incidental. Fundamental shifts of human and computer interaction that change the human dynamic, creating a kind of techno-symbiosis – a species-level shift. It’s not just intelligence that’s up for redefinition, but possibly humanity itself.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve

Listen to Steve read this post (9 min audio) – Includes bonus ideas – give it a listen!

Up until November last year, when the first useful ChatBot – ChatGPT – was released to the general public, almost everything on the internet was essentially ‘us’: human-centric content. Articles, posts, podcasts, chat forums, videos, images — all created, posted, described and tagged by people.

This 30-years or so of deep and wide content which populated the internet has been the perfect training ground for Generative AI. All the breadth, nuance and insight of creative humans is what enabled the output to be so ‘human-like’ – even if it comes off a little dry at times. And in less than a year, the internet is starting to morph and change its shape.

Generative AI Ingredients

There are three key ingredients that have made the generative AI revolution we’ve just entered possible:

1. the AI models, most notably the arrival of Large Language Models, which are the neural networks;
2. the chips and processing units that can cope with such a large compute across many billions of parameters; and
3. the data sets that populate the LLMs and get processed.

Of course, without all of it, there can be none of it, but the latter ingredient – the data sets – are vital, given that is what the AI models learn from and use to predict what we want and essentially provide the ‘generative content’.

The AI Internet

Just reading the web in recent months, and we can already see the shift. Social media is increasingly besieged with newly AI-generated content or, content telling you how to create AI-generated content while technology firms and digital media are making cutbacks in staff in a move to create automated content.

Both the demand and supply of AI-generated content are skyrocketing, with the most common job posts in the content realm requiring ‘AI work-withs’ to accelerate output to 100x of what a mere human could produce.

In mere months, the digital landscape has transformed itself. Sites once filled with human insight and opinion are now flooded with AI-generated text, audio, images, and video. Some AIs are even starting to quote and cite each other, creating these echo chambers of misinformation. The internet is going through a hyper-scaled AI industrialization. In a meaningful way, the internet is becoming less human.

While much of this is anecdotal, some research is starting to emerge which demonstrates these changes.

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Bonus – Check out my Robot literally 3D printing a building – Visionary Investors wanted!

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Experiments in AI

A study emerging out of a collaboration from the University of Oxford, Cambridge, Toronto, and the Imperial College of London found the type of data in the models is all-important. They concluded that if you train an AI system on what they call ‘Synthetic Data’, that is data generated by another AI system, it causes the models to degrade rapidly, and ultimately collapse and fail to function. It may well be that data is a little bit like food. That which is generated naturally by humans, or ‘organically’, is different from the manufactured type.

This is where things get interesting, even a little strange. Given that all LLMs are trained on huge bodies of human text, it seems logical that we’ll need to update that corpus or continue to add human content. And already, that requirement is being compromised by the AI era of the web.

This research is essentially saying that if enough of the internet is output from Generative AI models, then the models will stop working – AI could well eat itself. But we don’t know because most of the training sets are not live and rely on pre-generative AI internet training data sets from 1-2 years ago. Although Google Bard and Microsoft Bing are starting to add live data.

Dead Internet Theory

The Dead Internet Theory is a quasi-conspiracy that has been around for a few years. The general idea is that the internet has largely been taken over by bots – with Statista claiming it is almost 50 per cent of web traffic. Given that generating attention and making money has become so algorithmically driven and a contest for SEO, likes, followers, and fans, a way to win the game is to be releasing bots to generate content and populate your feed or desired political message. Theorists posit that the internet will eventually be a battle of bots against bots, with humans mere bit players.

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After doing 600+ keynotes in 40+ countries  my new Keynote on AI  – is my best ever… but don’t take my word for it – This was quote was from yesterday at an AI Seminar I presented at:

“It was Steve Sammartino and daylight – no one came close. He made the entire event worthwhile”

It’s time for some Sammatron at your next event – Get me in – Don’t miss out!  

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The Other World Internet

This, and the potential for Generative AI consuming itself, have dramatic implications for the internet. The power of the internet has been derived from human nuance, and insight. If it becomes predictive AI giving average insight from a world of statistical averages The internet could become a kind of other world – where nothing is really ‘human’ – or really ground breaking. If, and it is still a big ‘if’, AI becomes a circular reference tool with degrading data, any advice it provides would just become a loud echo chamber worth avoiding.

An alternative thought is that Generative AI starts to create it’s own emergent behaviour and ideas- thereafter developing deep insights humans would never arrive at.

It’s a live experiment – it will be worth watching this one closely.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.