I’m primarily interested in tech stuff but I am not a programmer or developer. I use #MacOS and #Linux but am not an expert in either. Unfortunately I am finding that as I grow older, a lot of the things that used to be fun and interesting no longer are, and tech stuff just seems generally more difficult.

I’m somewhat #liberal but if you go on rants about people who eat meat, or think Americans should give up their cars and ride bicycles (even in the dead of winter) or some similar nonsense, then you probably won’t want to follow me. I know climate change is happening, but there are solutions that people will accept and solutions thet they won’t, or that are just plain impractical for many people.

I’m mildly interested in #spiritualality. At one time, years ago, I would have identified as a Christian but not any more. I’m not sure if I left Christianity or it left me, but I’m very over and done with that, but still have the emotional scars!

  • 1 Post
  • 3 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: March 1st, 2023
  • Lunatech@infosec.exchangetoTechnology@lemmy.world•AI-Generated George Carlin Drops Comedy Special That Daughter Speaks Out Against: ‘No Machine Will Ever Replace His Genius’
    513·
    1 year ago

    @L4s I will not comment on the ethics of this, but I will say that if I had heard this without being told it’s AI generated (and the do tell you, at the start and again at the end) and if I didn’t know Carlin was dead, I would easily have believed it was him doing this bit. Now I was never a big Carlin fan (I pretty much only heard what could be played on the radio, and most of his stuff didn’t fall into that category) so maybe someone more acquainted with his material would have noticed differences, but to me it was a scary good impression of him.

    I have to wonder if the daughter doesn’t like it because she realizes that she’s (I assume) still getting some small amount of payment when people buy his older stuff, but as much of his material was topical I’m guessing those payments are ever diminishing, and she may fear that AI impressions of him will diminish the sales of his older stuff even further. Either that, or possibly it’s unsettling to her that a machine could come that close to making a spot-on impression of her father. I guess if someone created an AI of my dad saying things that he never actually said when he was alive, I would also find it somewhat unsettling and maybe even a little creepy.

    I’d also be interested to know exactly how much of the creativity behind this (the script) was created by the AI and how much work there was on the part of humans to make it sound natural. I get that AI can make the audio, that’s pretty much a given now, but where did the script come from?

  • Lunatech@infosec.exchangetoTechnology@beehaw.org•Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon
    4·
    1 year ago

    @jherazob I don’t get the comment about Discord being frictionless, at least for anyone who values their privacy and/or doesn’t want to be tracked. I have tried several times to sign up for Discord using a desktop computer (I am old; I don’t use a mobile phone for interacting with social media because it is too difficult to type a message on those things) and every single time it has demanded a phone number, which is a big NO for me. I’ve never had a working Discord account because of that damn phone number thing; perhaps it does not require that from everyone but it always has for me even when I’ve had an invite code for some community.

    But also, I just have to say that I am really turned off by the weird cartoony artwork on that site. I think whoever did that art must have either been higher than a kite, or trying to appeal to 3-year-olds. It’s like something Dr. Seuss might have drawn if he’d been taking psychedelic drugs. So, to me Discord never really came off as a site for serious discussion.