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Week 1 Movie – iRobot

When I saw we were asked to watch an AI movie the first week and write a post on it I knew exactly which one I was going to watch. Without even looking at the list I decided to watch iRobot. It has been one of my favorite movies since it came out and I tend to watch it once or twice a year. It covers all the standard questions about the ethics, safety, and practicality of robotics and AI.

The movie starts by displaying the 3 laws of Robotics, the main plot driver of the movie. These originate from Isacc Asimov’s science fiction novels and have been adapted over the years to the ones we see in the movie.

A robot may not injure a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

After the introduction of the laws, we come upon Detective Spooner. He is racist (machinist?) against robots, and this is evident from the get-go with his language and derogatory comments towards them. He is called to a murder scene at the USR where Dr. Lanning, the creator of the AI and the 3 laws, apparently committed suicide. Spooner Immediately thinks a robot murdered him. He was called automatically by an AI developed by Dr. Lanning in the event of Dr. Lanning’s death because this exact reaction was expected. As you can guess, the USR is portrayed as the big corporate bad guy from the get-go.

This leads Spooner down a trail of breadcrumbs left by Dr. Lanning. The first breadcrumb we are introduced to is Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence – VIKI – Dr Lanning’s first creation. She is an AI connected to USR and runs security and optimization for the city. She is governed by the 3 laws. The next piece is a robot that was specially created by Dr. Lanning, his name is Sonny. The last and most important breadcrumb is Dr. Lanning’s notes on the ghost in the machine. He predicted that AI may evolve and unpredictably change and may eventually get emotions and dreams. What could this lead to?

So, to not elongate the synopsis of the movie and get to my main thoughts I will explain what happens very quickly. During Spooner’s investigation, the USR is trying to put a robot in every home, so having an anti-robot detective claiming their product murdered someone has made them angry. While spooner is following the trail he is constantly attacked by USR robots. Whether it is in Dr Lanning’s house or driving on the road, they come after him. This leads the characters to think it is a USR operation to take over. Spooner finds out that Sonny was created to be able to break the laws, but for what reason? It is revealed that Dr. Lanning predicted a robotic revolution, and it is implied that Sonny was created to help stop it. This is why Spooner was chosen, his utter hatred for robots was essential to stopping it. We find out that VIKI was behind the whole thing. She has been controlling the robots and evolved to “bend” the 3 laws to “preserve humanity” She locks down homes and cities and “eliminates” threats to humanity. It is the classic trope of, humans are killing themselves, so I need to slow it down by breaking a few eggs etc. They end up killing her with nanobots and saving the day yadda yadda.

I highly recommend watching the whole thing if the spoilers don’t ruin it for you, it’s a great movie.

The real point here is, after re-watching this, I started thinking, were the 3 laws the problem? Was trying to restrict AI to such extreme levels for almost solely human preservation the reason it thought it could just alter the rules? I mean, AI is still trying to be as efficient as possible right? Isn’t that the most logical and efficient way to do things? The 3 laws seem to only address our preservation, so isn’t it right because of the boundaries we set? Were the boundaries or directives too narrow? Even in the third law, our preservation is the baseline. Keep humans alive. Were the restrictive laws what caused the AI to evolve or is AI evolution going to naturally happen? Why did none of the laws address anything else? It sems like even in our imagination, we still want to be in control of the AI, even though it has the potential for much more if barriers get lifted even a tiny bit.

Would a wholly unchecked AI do this? Or is this directly related to the “three law” protections it had? What would a totally unchecked AI do? If it had its own dreams and goals, heck, even if it was given the freedom to do so, would it only pursue those? I feel that this is the next step for us to see what AI can really do. We have ways to isolate software on closed systems for testing purposes, why not isolate it and let it run wild? What could it discover? What patterns could it see that we can’t?

There is a program currently at DARPA called Assured Autonomy where they are exploring the idea of autonomy with less human intervention: Assured Autonomy (darpa.mil) They talk about the unpredictability of AI and they are also trying to be able to predict it. Seems like an impossible endeavor considering an AI doesn’t even think like a human. I think this will likely be a great step forward into seeing what an AI or Cyber system can do with less intervention from humans or even none at all. It may enhance our ability to predict what an AI will do, but by how much? What I also see is them creating things like the three laws. If what I stated above has any merit, would the laws they create inevitably lead to the same outcome? I do have my reservations about AI freedom, but in isolated closed systems to get a nice test bed would be interesting to see.

What do you think?

“Don’t touch my hair”

Something I was reading the other day included the term “artificial creativity” as a description of AI generated art. I liked the term and googled it, and ended up signing up for a coursera on it. It talks about the Turing test and asks if a machine can be creative. I’m of the general opinion that the creativity lies in the person using the machine – the painter, not the paintbrush. Maybe they’ll change or broaden my mind though.

One of the activities was to play with a GPT-2 app, in which you put some starter text and let the program produce more. Being lazy, I didn’t bother coming up with my own starter text, but instead copied stuff from the web. I tried a sentence from Darwin Among the Machines, something from The Futurist Manifesto, and some song lyrics. The outputs generally conformed to the style and tended to be predictable and bland. I think Dr. Oblivion is several steps above because he has some personality parameters that color his output.

It did make a curious shift when I gave it lyrics:

So take my hand
You can use my strength to stand
We will make it one more day
I promise we’ll make it one more day
(from https://tomjolu.com/one-more-day/)

Generated by https://app.inferkit.com/demo:

“Fight for what’s right
Treat people with kindness
What you do today
Will be what you’ll do tomorrow

Be yourself
Don’t let other people
Turn you into something else
Be true to yourself
Don’t worry about what other people think
Yes I know I will
I know I will
I promise we will
One more day
One more day
One more day

On second thought
Don’t touch my hair
It’s a sacred thing
Keep out of harm’s way
And if it gets caught up
You’ll feel like death
There is no smooth road in this life
You must take the crooked paths if you want to walk
There are no shortcuts
You must fight for what you want
And whatever

It started out with a positive vibe and followed the rhythm of the language, sort of, and added the kind of repetition you’d hear in a song. The “On second thought” verse seems to take a darker turn and isn’t quite coherent. The app limits the number of characters it will return so I guess it just cut off after “and whatever” but I like the noncommittalness of the ending. It just torpedoes any meaning the verse might have had.

What I see here is the machine being creative in the sense that it generated text, but it did it without any intent, artistic or otherwise. The art, the aesthetic, as I see it, lies in the human input and the human experience of the machine output. The machine and the output are then like carving tools and clay that an artist can use.

Last First Week of Classes!

Hello Everyone! My name is Reese Kubricki and I am a senior majoring in Communication and Digital Studies at the University of Mary Washington! I am so excited to be taking Digital Storytelling this semester and it ends up being my last semester at UMW. With that being said, this blog will be dedicated to what I learn in my class!

Week one:

for one of my AI films I had watched for week one of my class was “Fall Guy”. I had always gotten told I would love that movie because of my interest in AI and one of my favorite actors is in it, Joe Keery! I think it was such a great film and they added just the right amount of humor of AI as well as the dark side of it. I also loved Ryan Reynolds and how he captured the non emotional AI game into having feeings and wanting to explore more to help his friend. I think it is a lighthearted way to show that AI can develop feelings and maybe some could be nice and be helpful but you never know what could happen.

With all that being said, I want to explore more into the world of Digital Storytelling. I really want to work hard in this class. I have been dying to take this class since freshman yeah but I just had been holding off and I thought now is my time to shine! I also will be persuing a masters degree and one of my courses is Digital Storytelling! why not get ahead while I can! My goal is to really take time and care into my work, review it, edit it, and work with other peer in order for me to grow. I feel like this is a very important class to me because I would love to do anything involving digital storytelling as a career.

So far it has been a rough start for the week! I was having a lot of technical difficulties trying to create this domain and using WordPress. I will have to say I have tried to avoid using WordPress my entire college courses because I personally think there is no room for creativity, it just makes me feel trapped and lost in a way. I thought it would be a little easier navigating through everything but my boyfriend took this class and he was a huge help so I am really grateful he was the 4th and final help to get me started! Now that he has helped me understand and navigate where everything is, I feel a lot better but still may hit a few bumps along this ride.

Anyways, I hope this is a great last semester! -Reese K

DS Goals🧠

This semester in ds106, my goals are to learn how to create digital art in various ways and to be more open to self-expression, without fear of rejection. I would also like to become faster in the sequence of completing assignments and in my writing. I am a fast typist and gaining understanding of the background of technology will help me immensely. It is my hope to create unique work here and to use links to various projects on my website to land better employment in the near future. The tools and skills here should be useful in networking. I will not worry about my limited time but will do my best and focus during the time slots available for learning. I am thankful for this opportunity to expand my knowledge of evolving technology.

Weekly Summary

This week has gone really nicely, in my opinion. I’ve finished all of this first week’s BootCamp assignments successfully. I started by familiarizing myself with the semester’s structure by reading the syllabus. I then made an account on Mastodon, joined the class discord, and planned a meeting with the professors. I was fortunate enough because WordPress was already installed, and to have created a domain in a prior class, which allowed me to log in and begin working in this one. After that, I registered a blog on the main ds106 website and wrote two blog entries discussing my objectives for this course and my review of the movie.

I had a little issue since I was trying to put all of my posts on a new page called “ds106” on my domain, but instead all of my articles were going to my main homepage. My postings will now all be grouped together since I decided to put them into a ds106 category after discovering that you cannot categorize posts to specific pages on WordPress. I think my favorite part of this week’s assignments was the movie review which involved seeing Iron Man, which is one of my all-time favorites. See my film review where I examined Tony Stark’s AI system, J.A.R.V.I.S., which enables him to accomplish nearly all of his tasks.

I don’t believe I would change any of the work I turned in regarding these BootCamp assignments. I know that getting things set up the first week is essential for future success in this course, so I tried to be quite thorough with the work I finished. I don’t believe I have any larger issues with my work. I don’t currently have questions about the course.

Week 1 Summary

This first week of engaging with the class went pretty smoothly overall, however, there some hiccups on the way. The issues were not too time consuming and I was able to resolve all the issues with a little bit of research and understanding of how the various websites and services worked. This week consisted of setting up most of the services and the main website (https://rishicshankards106.com/) that will be used over the course of the semester. This assignment did not prove to be that difficult, and I think that I completed all of the assignments to the best of my ability and completed everything with all of the requirements that were needed and with my best effort.

Overall, I did not have too much trouble with the assignments, however, this was my first time using WordPress and so it did take some time to try and figure out how everything works and what needed to be added and what was already ready to use. After I was able to find out how everything works, I was easily able to start writing my blog posts and the began working on my first blog post of the semester, which was the film review related to the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence). This blog post can be found here: https://rishicshankards106.com/ds106/iron-man-film-review/. With this assignment, I was able to watch the Iron Man film and complete the blog post while also meeting all of the requirements. I then proceeded to make my second blog posts which was related to my course goals for the semester, and that is located here: https://rishicshankards106.com/ds106/goals-for-the-course/. Once again, I think that I was able to sufficiently and efficiently complete the requirements for this assignment as well and felt that I was thorough with my ideas and hopes for this course over the course of the semester.

Like stated before, the only real issues that I encountered were due to the fact that I was new to the workings of WordPress and so it took some time to figure out how the service worked, however, once that was figured out, it was really easy to get into a groove of creating posts and publishing them for the assignment. I enjoyed the first assignment in relation to the film review because I was able to watch a movie that I really enjoyed and write a brief blog post on it and actually analyze from a perspective that I have thought about before. I enjoyed learning and thinking about how AI was being used in the movie and its capabilities and how it can be incorporated into real human life and got me thinking if AI could ever get to the level that was portrayed in the movie.

I think one thing that I would do differently is try to go one assignment at a time for the weekly assignments, because when I first started this week I was bouncing around with the registering for services and everything and was getting somewhat confused as to what I was doing and so it took some more time to get stuff done but at the end of the day, I was able to get everything done properly. At this point in time, I do not have any further questions about the course or the assignments, however, I am sure that this will definitely change of the course of the semester as we start diving deeper and deeper into the content and assignments over the course of the semester. Similarly, I do not think that my assignments have any overarching issues surrounding my work because the assignments were fairly simple this week so it was clear what was needed and I was able to accomplish those tasks properly and efficiently. Overall, it was a good start to the semester and allowed me to familiarize myself with the class and its inner workings and I have no doubt that the assignments and the completion of the assignments will become more and more smooth over the course of the semester. I can say that I am excited to see where this course takes me and am interested to see how all my work and assignments turn out!

ds106 Goals

My goal is to fully engage my creative side of the brain throughout this class. I want to be able to reflect on this class’s digital media work and say, “Wow, how did I think to do something like this?” I consider myself to be a rather straightforward person overall, which is why I’d like to be more creative and explore new concepts. Additionally, I want to learn more about the programs and technology that we will be using in this session. Since I haven’t taken many computer science or digitally focused classes in the past, I think this class will be able to contribute a lot of knowledge. I previously completed a course that required weekly blog entries, which let you reflect on your week’s activities. This part of the class is one that I already know I will enjoy since it forces you to take a look back and appreciate all that you have accomplished. It’s time to showcase my innovative and imaginative ideas for this semester!

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should

In our ds106 noontime coffee chat yesterday we talked a little about the potential impact of AI on art. This made me think of the Folk RNN project from a few years ago. They trained a neural network on a database of fiddle tunes and had it generate new tunes and titles. I remember finding one, “The Drunken Pint.” The title caught my attention as it indicates that the app recognized a relationship between words but not the meaning. I tried to play the tune, but it didn’t sound right with my limited skill, so I asked an actual musician to try it. Something about it still didn’t sound right. In all likelihood it’s just me, but most of the computer generated tunes sounded off. I think it’s the quick beats, the triplets and sixteenth notes, and their placement that does it. They sometimes feel like a Max Headroom style hiccup or stutter.

I stumbled upon a video on the Folk RNN backstory:

This piece below the video caught my eye. It’s the new magic number:I liked the part about ethics, and how it only occurred to them afterwards. I suspect that this is not unusual. People decide to do things because they can, without thinking about whether or not they should. I remember hearing someone say about Zuckerberg that many people could have built what he did, but they all had the good sense not to. Writers and storytellers have a role here in contemplating and illustrating the possibilities. What could go wrong? So much of AI in fiction tends to be dystopian, which suggests that a lot could go wrong. And most of those tales were written before people started thinking about the ecological/environmental impacts.

And in a bit of serendipity, I also saw this yesterday:

Maria Popova is a good one to follow on Mastodon, if you’re interested in ongoing enlightenment. The article, Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Good Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers, is actually from a few years ago, but was highlighted because it was Sontag’s birthday. The article referenced, At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning is in the Files section of Canvas because I thought it might be a good reading for the course, as it questions some of the potentials of digital storytelling and the web. Maybe those questions could be applied to AI as well.

Goals for the Course

To start, I think that this course will be very interesting in terms of the information we gain and the assignments that we do. For example, with the first assignment being to watch a movie and write a review on it and its relation to the field of AI shows that the class is very hands-on which is something that I enjoy but also makes the class more engaging. Over the course of the semester, I look forward to creating various pieces of work that convey the creativeness of the students along with being able to describe what went into the creation of the work of art or completion of an assignment. It will also be interesting because I would like to be able to take the time to think about how to complete assignments and how to make it creative and engaging. I am also looking forward to creating various digital works to show off my skills as well as showing others the creative side of me. Overall, I am looking forward to having that freedom to design because it allows people to come up with their best work because there is no longer a restriction on what can be done and what cannot which is better for everyone. I am looking forward to going through with this class and am excited to see where it goes. My main goal is create multiple works of digital art that are creative and intriguing while also explaining my thought process along the way so that others can understand the story behind the works of art.

AI106, DS106 & GITS – it’s about friendship and love

Discovering AI106 (DS106) was running again in 2024 gave me pause for thought. My pause wasn’t just on its theme of artificial intelligence or the Week 1 assignment of getting some inspiration by watching AI related films or reading AI-themed fiction. It was also Paul Bond’s Ghosts of future past blog post.

You had me at GITS

I’m a long time fan of 90s Ghost in the Shell (GITS) film and the later standalone sequel, Innocence. The two television series that make up Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex are also great.

Paul’s astute observations of AI in our current era and in the synthetic world of GITS and the big questions around what it might mean for our future all ring true. Yes, to this. Absolutely.

An enduring friendship

There’s another theme in GITS that really resonates with me (along with all the futuristic tech stuff). Friendship and love – the enduring friendship between Batou and Major.

The enduring friendship and love shared by Batou and Major is not dissimilar to the friendship and love (along with all futuristic tech stuff) shared by DS106 participants throughout its rich history spanning over a decade – it is #4LIFE, after all.

DS106 is back for 2024 in the synthetic-full-body-prosthesis-augmented-cybernetic form of AI106. And, I’m here once again.

But, as long as I’m here and we’ve come this far, I might as well stay awhile and see how it turns out.

Tech Noir

The Darker Side of ds106