The Braindump Blog

Watched season 2 of The Capture 📺.

Another pretty gripping season of this thriller, following DI Carey now she’s been promoted into the shadowy S015 organisation she fought against in the first season.

I didn’t love it quite as much as that season - perhaps because it felt even more implausible and confusing at times. A part of that might also be that some of the ethical issues it raises are less novel to me.

I did enjoy the extremely blatant references to Cambridge Analytica (but in reality I think this stuff is far less effective than portrayed here - thankfully!) and tech companies like Huawei, alongside a reinforcement of the idea that modern-day politics is so much about presenting an “acceptable” image.

Listening to The Unraveling of PUPTheBand by PUP 🎶.

One of my favourite albums of 2022 so far, from the Canadian punk rock band PUP.

I think I read somewhere that the piano interludes were added just because they might annoy their fans, although I can’t find the source for that any more. That sense of just having a fun time doing whatever nonsense you feel like doing makes the album extra compelling to me. I mean, how can you not love any album that contains a love song written from the point of view of a robot?

I went back and listened to their other 3 albums - PUP, The Dream Is Over and Morbid Stuff. Each one was a good time.

Watched No Time To Die 📽.

2021’s James Bond film, containing most of the classic Bond tropes enacted in big fun implausible style, still managing to surprise here and there. The sexism has been dialled down vs some of the older films, but not in “preachy” way. I enjoyed it.

It’s long enough that I ended up having to watch it in parts, which often spoils a film experience - but this one worked just fine.

Incredible to imagine that if the Lib Dem motion to disallow anyone from becoming Prime Minister if they’ve been found guilty of breaking the law whilst in government gets through then the 2 current favourites for next UK PM - Johnson and Sunak - would both be disqualified.

So the lettuce won.

Liz Truss finally decided to quit as Prime Minister, after 45 days in office, acknowledging she can’t deliver what she promised (thankfully).

She’ll likely be the shortest ever serving PM. The next shortest is 1827’s George Canning. He died of tuberculosis 119 days in.

I was curious what % of the UK electorate is a member of a political party. Turns out just 1.5% of us are members of 1 the big 3 - Conservative, Labour or Lib Dem. This is actually ~2x the 2013 figure of 0.8%.

The SNP attracts a mammoth 2.5% of its potential Scottish voters.

And here’s the figures in terms of the number of people involved. This adds up to a total of around 850k party members.

So the UK has yet another new chancellor - Jeremy Hunt - thanks to Liz Truss' latest enforced u-turn.

Unfortunately the Conservative party continues to apparently be playing a game of randomly selecting economic strategies from a bag of policies totally unsuitable for the current economic situation, as we’re likely heading back into a time of deliberate austerity.

It should not be forgotten that not only do unfathomable cuts to public services cause misery for the population - think for example of the 7 million people currently on waitlists for hospital treatment - they also kill us.

Austerity policies naturally affect a lot more than healthcare expenditure, but it’s perhaps there that their deadly effects can most clearly be estimated.

Last year researchers did their best to quantify the causal impact of constraining expenditure on social care, public health and healthcare in the period of austerity between 2010/2011–2014/2015. Their mean estimate was that the decrease in expenditure when compared with the trend for the 8 years before led to an extra 57.550 deaths (albeit with a wide confidence interval - 3,075-111,195).

In modelling this, they concluded that an 1% increase in:

• healthcare expenditure reduces mortality by 0.532%;
• social care expenditure reduces mortality by 0.336%;
• local public health spending reduces mortality by 0.019%

A different paper from 5 years ago also attempted to look at the impact of us constraining healthcare and social care expenditure during 2011-2014. That group estimated an extra 45,368 people died (95% CI 34,530-56,206) compared to trends before 2010. They suggest that investment in care homes and nurses are two important factors that could mitigate this.

Ever since learning about the prevalence and progress of AI-generated art, mainly via such a piece having won an art competition, it’s not left my mind for too long. I was kind of confused how best to think about it then, and it’s only got worse as time goes on. Herein are some further ramblings.

As a reminder, these are systems where you type in a prompt, e.g. “Picture of a juggling elephant” and out pops a picture of whatever you asked for. Right now the results aren’t always great, hence the new vocation of “prompt engineer” - someone who knows what phrases to give to an AI for best result. But they’re often certainly good enough to be used commercially and beyond.

There exist several famous such systems, including DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. Importantly, the way they work is dependent on them having processed vast arrays of existing, presumably human, art. This is typically sucked in from the internet without explicit permission from its creators. No-one really thinks computers just became innately artistic in the traditional sense; but rather that we developed algorithms that allow a computer to translate an arbitrary text string into an image output based on what it’s derived from all the art and contextual information it’s already seen.

This Guardian article gives a quick overview of roughly how these systems work. The below video goes through some slightly more mathy details.

Given the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see more and more usage of AI art over time. The systems are already perfectly usable by almost anyone who can use the web, and will only get cheaper and easier to use over time - for an individual end user even now it’s often free. If nothing else, we can be confident that the capitalism’s invisible hand typically pushes us towards the immediately cheapest - often meaning most generic and least human-skill-requiring - solution to any perceived need, no matter the external cost. You’d basically need some kind of world-wide usage ban to stop it, which isn’t going to happen.

Perhaps there’ll be a set of people who are dead against the technology. It may well never replace human artists in their entirety. But it’s going to - and perhaps already has - replace a good number of them. In doing so, it’ll inevitably change what the world looks like for the rest of us.

After all, even if it turns out that the very ‘best’ art is somehow only ever possible via human production, there’s a ton of current use cases where fairly mediocre art is acceptable to businesses and individuals. Particularly when it’s extremely cheap to produce.

Automation replacing people in jobs is very much not new, but it’s traditionally been seen un jobs with perhaps less visible output, considered more rote, and unfortunately probably thought of as being of lower status or worth than the typical romantic perception of the artist. Being an artist is aspirational, if sadly unobtainable, for many folk. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of unpleasant, tedious, ill-paid and abusive artistic jobs. Maybe it won’t be terrible if some of those disappear, as long as the people involved are cared for. But the trait of being “artistic” is often seen as a very human, and desirable trait. Those considered to be near the top of their game are widely admired and honoured.

Whilst access to AI art generators is somewhat restricted or at least niche at present, that’s inevitably not going be the case for long. Microsoft Office, that most unexciting and ubiquitous of workplace software, is gearing up to add a “Microsoft Designer” component that generates illustrations based on the sentences you type. Their promo video shows someone creating a poster for their bakery business based on typing “Cake with berries, bread and pastries for the fall”, no graphic designer needed. I guess this is the modern day version of clipart.

Stock photography as a business might also be on its way out, at least in terms of how it works today. Already there are stock photography sites that offer to generate you an AI-created image if they don’t already have something that meets your satisfaction. That’s one less human photographer or artist receiving credit and payment for their work. In fact one of that site’s dedicated tools reads your blog post text to create you an appropriate cover image. I might try that on this post just for fun when I’m done.

Update: I did just that. Here’s the image stockai.com generated when fed with the text from this post. It was free and took maybe 45 seconds.

That’s an example of how the technology could be additive rather than substitutional. There’s no way I would have commissioned an artist or even browsed stock photography sites for this humble blogpost. No-one lost out (at least not directly, certainly the consequences of participating in shifting norms are debatable). But it also seems very unlikely that many profit-focussed companies who currently invest in some kind of artistic output will keep spending the money they currently do if they get idea that they don’t need to into their heads.

The Atlantic magazine already got into some controversy over using an AI generated image to illustrate one of its newsletters. The Economist used an AI to design one of its covers. I’m sure there are many more examples, whether we know about them or not. Let’s also remember than an increasing number of the more mundane stories you read in certain publications are written by AIs - the automated journalism trend, so it’s not only visual creativity at play here.

But worrying about people losing jobs due to technology is seemingly not something society tends to do in earnest. The Luddites who literally battled the industrialisation of the textile business in 19th century England didn’t win; they became an insult.

Sentiments along the lines of “don’t worry about it, they’ll just get better jobs right away” or “but this will make things cheaper which will benefit everyone in the end” abound. Sometimes they might be true. Oftentimes probably the former isn’t, at least whilst many of us live in societies that tend to see unemployment as a problem that must be solved by the individual rather than the system that caused it, whilst appearing to have little respect for article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But in theory we could deal humanely and generously with unemployment of all kinds.

What is less obvious to me is what a shift to most “art” we see day-to-day being generated by AI might do to harder-to-define concepts like creativity. The pictures that come out of these AI machines are “new” for sure, in that they never existed before. But they’re all based on some black-box manipulation of existing, human-powered art for now. Some of this is very clear, such as prompts that explicitly request the combination of 2 human artworks that haven’t previously been combined - such as “Kermit the Frog in Blade Runner 2049”

“A still of Kermit The Frog in Blade Runner 2049 (2017)” #dalle pic.twitter.com/CxyWFRJETc

— HeavensLastAngel (@HvnsLstAngel) May 31, 2022

In other, more abstract cases, it’s much less obvious.

But in any case, the machine needs feeding.

One might consider that human artists are also inspired by what they’ve seen. To what extent is a human’s art also a black box “generative process” based on all the artistic inputs they’ve seen in their life? There’s an way in which this has to be at least partly true within a certain scope, given “movements” exist in art - think Impressionism, Modernism, Neo-Classicism, that kind of thing.

But something starts those movements. What I don’t know is whether that’s something qualitatively different to the kind of generative process that the crop of AI art generators we might expect in the next few years could do. Or am I putting humanity on too much of a pedestal? Do we know that human creativity isn’t deep down based on a not dissimilar process? Disclaimer: I haven’t actually done any research into creativity really. There may exist very simple answers to these questions.

But if there is an insurmountable difference, or simply if market forces et. al. result in AIs being attuned towards a diminutive and limiting goal like “optimise your output to please the most amount of people today” then perhaps something will be lost, or at least delayed. Will future historians note a moment where the world got artistically stuck in some sense?

It’s of course possible I’ve gotten this the wrong way round. An AI playing the game of Go beat its human opponent with moves so novel and unexpected that they’ve been described as ‘alien’ and ‘from an alternate dimension’. Maybe one day AI art generators will show us something valuable we’d never otherwise have imagined.

Perhaps some of the more concerning “getting stuck” effect has already happened to some extent via a different algorithmic use case. Witness for instance how Netflix has changed its once acclaimed artistic output based on what it’s algorithms say will sell well. Look at the truly bizarre output that sometimes populates social media at present, where potentially artistic output gets optimised for engagement above anything. It might result in fascinating, important, meaningful new art forms. It can also result in a spate of videos of people eating out of toilets because at some point someone did it and the resulting video went viral.

It’s not clear how “new” this is; I’m sure art has always been driven by incentive. It may just be that accessibility and access to an audiences improved. It’s much easier for me to share a video of myself eating ice-cream out of a toilet on Facebook than it would be for me to paint some kind of Mona Lisa-beating painting and set up an internationally renowned art gallery to show it off.

It’s often easy to forget that just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it’s “better”. That sentiment is often a metaphorical barrier used to prohibit less privileged sections of society making inroads into whatever sphere the existing powers-that-be want to protect for their own selfish purposes.

A little less dramatically: should my blog go without illustration because I don’t have either the talent or resources needed to go to art school? But also, if I’m not prepared to pay or credit an artist then do I really have the right to use an illustration that was overtly non-consensually derived from work of many other people? As these systems work by ingesting incredible amounts of other people’s art, a whole set of rights issues exist.

Being popular with the current AI art community is not necessarily a blessing for a human artist. Greg Rutkowski is an artist known for fantasy landscapes. But his style is liked enough that his name has apparently become a common prompt for people using Stable Diffusion or Midjourney to generate art, with tens of thousands of images being generated by typing in phrases including his name.

An example shown by the MIT Technology Review used the prompt “Wizard with sword and a glowing orb of magic fire fights a fierce dragon Greg Rutkowski" which produced this:

Now when Rutkowski Googles his name he gets art that isn’t his. And he has no rights over the AI-generated images. So if some entity wants to use some work that an AI explicitly created based on having ingested hundreds of his images without permission then they’re presumably free to do so. This has understandably left him with the opinion that “A.I. should exclude living artists from its database”. Which prompts me to additionally wonder about if there’s any ethical considerations of note surrounding the possible AI exploitation of a dead artist’s work.

For now though, if the artist’s images are on the internet then they’re considered fair game. These systems don’t ask artists to opt in to having their work included, and it’s not clear that they even have the ability to opt out them. Some tools that at might at least let you know if your work has been used to train these AI systems have started to appear, including Spawn’s Have I Been Trained?.

To what extent this is different from a human artist enjoying Rutkowski’s pictures and later creating something in a similar style is something that perhaps still needs to be thrashed out. After all, the ingested pictures were on the publicly accessible internet in the first place. But the big difference here is of course accessibility and scale. The new part is that is that a single person or business with no art knowledge or skill can generate hundreds of “original” Rutkowski style pictures a day with no artistic ability and little-to-no resources.

This opens up new possibilities for the masses, which could be a positive thing - see the optimistic possibility Wired presents of “dramatically expanding the number of people able to generate and experiment with art and illustration”. But left without consideration, it may also result in a pretty devastating exploitation of people’s hitherto highly valued work. And potentially a world where it feels like we’re immersed in some kind of Borges' style Library of Babel but for whichever genre of art is algorithmically popular or convenient, with a possible plot twist of any remaining human artists being accused of being AIs.

A friend informs me that the Daily Star is running a livestream of a lettuce to see whether it can outlast Liz Truss' premiership.

There’s an 8 days left until total lettuce decay. Hard to predict the outcome.

Current status:

Channel 4 created a show where they purchase artwork from “controversial” artists such as Pablo Picasso (misogynist), Rolf Harris (paedophile), Eric Gill (sex abuser) and umm…Hitler (I surely don’t need to explain this one). Then the audience gets to vote as to whether a comedian destroys their artistic output with a flame thrower.

I’m not convinced this is exactly a force for good. I guess it did teach me that Picasso had some pretty unpleasant views about women.

In an event that definitely isn’t straight out of a Stephen King horror novel, a huge flock of vultures has inexplicably descended upon the small town of Bunn, North Carolina.

These are some big beasts, also known as buzzards in American English, with wing-spans of 5-6 foot. They destroy houses by pecking out the bricks, and pulling off roof tiles and caulking. They ruin cars, scratching the paint, cracking the windows and ripping off the windscreen wipers. Their acid poo also just eats through any paintwork. Finally, if they feel threatened, they vomit all over you.

For a while the town was firing a cannon at them regularly to try and scare them off. It didn’t last; they’re back. Not even hanging spooky effigies around the place is doing the job.

A new paper examining the links between the average daily step count (as measured by Fitbit) and the health outcomes of ~6,000 people reinforces the idea that being more active is good for our health in many dimensions.

Steps per day negatively correlated with obesity, sleep apnea, gastroesophageal reflux disease, major depressive disorder, diabetes and hypertension.

One takeaway I’d have is that in general more is always better, at least up to the thresholds displayed on the chart. There’s nothing special about the (in?)famous 10k steps a day goal in many of these curves. So an increase in physical activity is likely worthwhile irrespective of whether you’re going from 2,000 to 3,000 steps, or 9.000 to 10,000.

That said, being observational, the study cannot truly prove that the increased steps is what caused the better health outcomes, although the authors do attempt to reduce the risk of reverse causation (i.e. good health leads to more steps) . Studies like these also cannot truly control for every possible confounder.

Nonetheless, whilst the conclusion isn’t exactly surprising, it’s nice to see a study that looked at a reasonably high number of people over a reasonably long time frame - the median step-monitoring period being 4 years - and made an effort to control for various external confounders.

Watched season 1 of The Capture 📺. A thriller in which a man is first freed from jail thanks to video evidence, but then re-captured on the same basis.

It’s hard to say much more without spoiling it all. But whilst some of it might be a little fantastical, I think the issues it raises are something we really need to figure out how to deal with in the real world, sooner rather than later. A couple of recent product releases from Meta and Google make me concerned that the show actually dramatically underestimates the potential mess we’re heading towards.

Finished listening to: A Special Place for Women by Laura Hankin 📚.

Somehow I’d gotten the idea that this book was a detailed critique of girl-boss culture based on a true story. In reality I don’t think it’s either; perhaps a bit of the former. But it is a fun read, with enough mystery to be very compelling. I enjoyed the informal, very relatable, tone.

Otavio Cordeiro just released an Obsidian plugin called Micro.publish that lets you post directly to blogs hosted at micro.blog (like this one!) from the excellent Obsidian note taking software. It gives you full control over which blog, tags and so on. It’s great.

In a piece arguing that the start of the ‘current era’ began with the dual inventions of the iPhone and Facebook, Matt Locke succinctly summarises up how the challenges facing those of us who work with data have changed.

The problem of measuring the audience has been inverted - instead of having to use complex maths to extrapolate tiny data sets to represent huge audiences, we now use complex maths to reduce huge data sets until they represent tiny audiences.

On my way back from a very enjoyable New Scientist Live show, the first IRL one I’ve attended since the scourge of Covid started.

Below are the names of the talks I attended. Plenty of fascinating material in there to inspire future posts, as well as a problematically large number of related books I now want to read.

• The dark history and troubling present of eugenics, by Adam Rutherford.
• The pattern seekers, by Simon Baron-Cohen.
• Making sense of screen time, by Dr. Karl.
• Believing the unbelievable: the science of paranoia and conspiracy thinking, by Nichola Raihani.
• Black holes, by Jeff Forshaw.
• Ultra-processed food, by Chris and Xan van Tulleken.
• A new force of nature? By Harry Cliff.
• The geological record of climate change, by Christopher Jackson.
• DNA family secrets, by Turi King.

Sir John Betjeman, poet, as immortalised in St Pancras railway station, London, having campaigned against its demolition in the 1960s.

Pictured in a flustered state, anxiously checking the departures board in the hope he is in time to get a seat, like the rest of us.

The Truss administration’s obsessive and damaging focus on reducing taxes, particularly for the wealthy and corporations, at any cost has led to her policies being eviscerated by all sorts of organisations and individuals, including many people from her own party.

The irony, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, is that the average household will actually end up paying more tax overall, due to the Conservative’s stated policy of freezing the thresholds at which we start to pay income tax for four years, alongside many other tax and benefit related thresholds.

Of course due to inflation - and we have a lot of that at the moment - keeping the threshold at which tax is due to the same nominal amount means that more people reach that threshold without them having achieved any additional real spending power. But “quietly freeze things as they are” is a much less attention grabbing policy than “make wild cuts to specific things” so the effects might not be as well-known as other parts of their catastrophic mini-budget.

The IFS analysis suggests that by 2025-2, 1.4 million more people will be paying income tax, costing basic-rate tax payers an extra £500 per year.

1.6 million more people will be paying higher-rate tax, which will cost them about £3,000 extra per year.

An extra 125k people will be affected by the benefit cap, and 500k more families will lose some or all of their child benefit.

…on average for every £1 households gain from high-profile cuts to rates of income tax and National Insurance, they lose £2 from the freezes and policy roll-outs.

Whilst literally every income decile will see negative effects to their income, it nets out in a regressive way with the poorest section of society seeing a 2.8% reduction of income, vs 1.1% for the richest.

Just to add further confusion to my plastic recycling dilemma, the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management has responded to the claim of “a lot of your plastic recycling ends up in the Asian sea” by claiming that’s misinformation, as under 3% of UK plastic recycling is exported to that region and almost none goes to India or the Philippines.

Everyone agrees though that the most effective measure is to not create the waste in the first place.

Just after I’ve upped my plastic recycling game after reading a book about the horrors of excess plastic, I read an article suggesting that it might all be even more in vain than the book suggested.

The way “rich” countries like the UK often deal with the waste they’ve collected for recycling is not to actually recycle it themselves, but rather just palm it off to any other poorer country that can be exploited to accept it. Then the receiving country has to figure out how to actually deal with it.

But some of these countries are not all that fastidious at ensuring the waste goes where it should. Thus a lot of this plastic we think we’ve sent for recycling actually ends up littering the environment, particularly the sea, anyway.

The author cites a model that suggests that 6,000 of the 37,000 tons of plastic packaging the Netherlands exports each year, mostly to Asia, actually ends up in the marine environment.

Apparently British landfills are fairly good at keeping in what’s deposited in them, if nothing else. So perhaps the real choice we have is between putting waste plastic in the recycle bin knowing that a good amount of it will end up polluting the sea anyway, vs putting it in the general waste bin knowing that it’ll be stuck alongside vast mass of landfill forever - but that’s a relatively “safe” and contained place.

I’m not really sure which the best option is! Both the afore-mentioned book and this article reinforce it’s far more effective to reduce the amount of plastic that’s created in the first place, as opposed to keep making it with the hope that it’ll be recycled.

Finished reading: A Book Of Secrets by Derren Brown 📚.

Philosophical meanderings on how one can frame the ups and downs of life so as to best cope with the journey. It extolls the development of a universal sense of absurdity and melancholy, alongside an appreciation of the growth that coming up against friction can bring. And that there’s really no point in trying to hide the facets of ourselves we don’t like.

I’d think it may be especiallly poignant for anyone going through something like a mid-life crisis - if nothing else to understand that even extremely famous and successful people have the same feelings of doubt, frustration and maybe even horror that the rest of us do. It’s a very universal experience.

Finished reading: Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex by Angela Chen 📚.

A fascinating dive into the experiences and struggles of the people identifying as the “A” in the famous LGBTIQA+ acronym. Despite a much-needed increased focus on some identities in recent times, I haven’t seen a lot of material focusing on people who don’t experience sexual attraction who must nonetheless live in a world infused with “compulsory sexuality”.

Watched The Last Witch Hunter 📽️

Val Kilmer is an 800 year old witch hunter, cursed to eternally walk the modern day world eliminating the pesky witches that secretly live among us.

I found it rather mediocre, tho to be fair I was only half concentrating on it at times.