The Ai thread

[dada_dave]

17 cringe-worthy Google AI answers demonstrate the problem with training on the entire web

From dangerous medical advice to extremist disinformation.

www.tomshardware.com

AI may kill us all just not in the way you might think. It’ll just be people blindly following its advice on how to glue your cheese to your pizza, how many rocks to eat, and generally spreading conspiracy theories and satire as though they were real.

I can’t wait for it to be trained on our forum and to have an opinion on the correct use of “thusly” in the context of computing.

 

[dada_dave]

Maybe the post below about the potential privacy concerns of the new Recall feature for Co-Pilot AI's would've been better suited to the AI thread than the Nuvia thread:

I was wondering where Recall would pop up. Hilariously, I've started dual-booting Linux (rather than use a VM) for the first time in two decades, because of this announcement. Just using Mint rather than Yellow Dog, and on an AMD rig rather than my PowerMac.

Longhorn on Recall:

Recall: random notes about the security model – random blog

 

[Nycturne]

Longhorn on Recall:

Recall: random notes about the security model – random blog

It’s really easy to get off topic here, as there’s just so much that can be said about the Windows security model. It’s also hard to separate discussions of Recall security from that security model when it comes to third-party actors.

Ultimately, it’s more that Microsoft with Windows has increasingly become user hostile. Improve Windows’ security model to reduce the impact of vulnerabilities? Nah. Harass me into buying OneDrive or some other recurring service? Yes. Try to use Windows as an ad platform? Yes. Recall is just another feature I don’t want, pushed because AI is the new thing that needs to be shoved into everything. I’m just tired of it.

I’m not expecting to abandon Windows immediately, but may as well see how much progress Steam has made with Proton.

 

[exoticspice1]

It’s really easy to get off topic here, as there’s just so much that can be said about the Windows security model. It’s also hard to separate discussions of Recall security from that security model when it comes to third-party actors.

Ultimately, it’s more that Microsoft with Windows has increasingly become user hostile. Improve Windows’ security model to reduce the impact of vulnerabilities? Nah. Harass me into buying OneDrive or some other recurring service? Yes. Try to use Windows as an ad platform? Yes. Recall is just another feature I don’t want, pushed because AI is the new thing that needs to be shoved into everything. I’m just tired of it.

I’m not expecting to abandon Windows immediately, but may as well see how much progress Steam has made with Proton.

I’m waiting on Apple’s take on AI on macOS and see how their desktop approach will be different than Microsoft’s Windows.

iOS should also influence some of new Ai abilities available in macOS 15, since they share the same kernel.

 

[dada_dave]

Nvidia announces Project G-Assist, an AI assistant for gaming with GeForce GPUs

The best strategy for beating that high-level boss might be to ask your computer for advice.

www.tomshardware.com

With Project G-Assist and a compatible GPU, gamers can access a large language model (LLM) linked to a game knowledge database as they play a supported game. Using voice prompts or text inputs, players can query the AI assistant for advice on how to proceed in a game.

SAG-AFTRA Approves AI Voice Acting For Video Games

The union's agreement with AI voiceover studio Replica is being called out by some of the industry's top voice talent.

www.gamespot.com

So I don’t know the details of this deal (and apparently neither do the voice actors which is not a good look for their union). But I can see AI voice acting being okay under specific circumstances. This isn’t the only one but the main one I can think of which I think has been mentioned in this thread by others: imagine a massive sprawling RPG like Baldur’s Gate where human writers and an actor have been paid for a huge number of lines to create a compelling character one with an arc or even multiple arcs based on your choices in game. Then imagine being able to interact with said character by simply typing (or speaking!) your lines. Maybe you can still have prompts to trigger their preset responses but even so the AI is trained to reply (and act) as the character and where they are in the story so far. Human creativity for both voice acting and the lines (animation/mocap too) is still being paid, a necessary element for creating a strong character (so far, AI has its limits), but the freedom of expression for the player goes up tremendously. Now there may be other examples where AI can extend human creativity in this space rather than be a shallow imitation of it (and the business/ethics of the former compared to the latter for writers, actors, and animators), but I think that’s certainly the main area.

Windows Copilot will add GPU support in a future release — Nvidia details the advantages of high performance GPUs for AI workloads and more

Firing up a GPU versus an NPU will still create a massive drain on your laptop battery.

www.tomshardware.com

Also announced today is the new Nvidia RTX AI Toolkit, which helps developers with AI model tuning and customization all the way through to model deployment. The toolkit can potentially be used to power NPCs in games and other applications. We've seen examples of this with the ACE demos mentioned above, where the first conversational NPC demo was shown at last year's Computex. It's been through multiple refinements now, with multiple NPCs, and Nvidia sees ways to go even further.

One example given was a general purpose LLM that used a 7 billion parameter LLM. The interaction with an LLM powering an NPC provided the usual rather generic responses. It also required an RTX 4090 (17GB of VRAM) to run the model, and only generated 48 tokens per second. Using the RTX AI Toolkit to create an optimized model, Nvidia says developers can get tuned responses that are far more relevant to a game world, and it only needed 5GB of VRAM and spit out 187 tokens per second — nearly four times the speed with one third the memory requirement. More importantly perhaps, the tuned model could run on an RTX 4050 laptop GPU, which only has 6GB of VRAM.

This will not replace the need for human writing (for the foreseeable future) but as I said can aid in providing more flexible responses to player inputs and remove some busy work writing which is already boilerplate (think NPC responses like “but then I took an arrow to the knee”).

 

[dada_dave]

Interesting reversal of the usual narrative

 

[Eric]

Ai watermark FTW.