Is Anyone Out There?
It seems a fair enough question, as it's 7 years since I last updated this blog, so I'll be interested to see (from the viewing stats and any comments that may come in) if anyone actually sees this post. I've been far from idle in those years - I've had 5 more books published by Springer and another 5 by Icon Books, as well as writing over 70 magazine articles - mainly for How It Works (where I've contributed to almost every issue for more than four years now) but also Fortean Times, All About Space and even (my most "up-market" moment) BBC Science Focus magazine. I never actually stopped blogging, but only in the form of relatively brief announcements on my writing blog.
I've recently become a great fan of Bing's AI tools. For example, just now I typed in "A humorous UFO or alien themed cartoon that could be captioned Is Anyone Out There?" - and was presented with the picture at the top of this post. I didn't ask it to include a speech bubble, but it did anyway (its spelling was a bit off, but all the right letters were there so I just had to rearrange them).
Although I've drifted away somewhat from Forteana in the last few years, I still contribute to Fortean Times occasionally - including an article about AI and creativity in July this year. That was also the subject of the longest post I've done on my other blog, as well as a guest post I did for Kid Robson's comics blog. I was very grateful to Kid for the chance to do this (together with another guest post showing off some of my 1970s Marvel comics) as it started me thinking about the possibility of resurrecting this blog.
When I came to dust it off today, I was embarrassed to see no fewer than 18 comments (spread over the last 7 years) still awaiting moderation. I assumed the system would automatically notify me of these, but apparently that's not the case (I've now belatedly found where you have to tell it to do this in the settings). So apologies to all those people who had to wait years for their comments to appear!
7 comments:
Thanks to still using an RSS reader, I have read your post, so putting my hand up to be counted. The AI cartoon looks very professional, but to me demonstrates AI's limitations as yet - I can't say I found it humorous. It would be interesting to know how it mangled the speech bubble and to speculate as to why this was the case? Perhaps it thought that constituted humour?
Thanks for letting me know, Brian, and it's good to hear that it's still showing up in any RSS feeds that people may have set up. You're right that the cartoon isn't "humorous" in the sense of a visual joke, but it's a quirky art style which is probably the best you can expect from a machine. To be honest, I was surprised to see it put words in the image at all, which I haven't seen before in Bing-generated art. It gave me three captioned cartoons, this one saying "IS ANYONE OUT HIR?". The other two (which were less good drawings) said "IS ANYYONE OUT?" and "IS ANYYONE OUT HERE" - both with a double Y. Before you ask, I really did write "there" and not "here" in the prompt, so I've no idea why it decided to switch to "here", or why it misspelled it as "hir" in one case and missed it out altogether in another. In a way, though, it's spookier for the AI to mangle the words than to simply copy and paste them.
Perhaps it thought that aliens couldn't spell...
Welcome back to the world of blogging, AM, and thanks again for doing your two guest posts on Crivens! Shouldn't be long before Colin Jones shows up with a comment or several, as he was quite a fan of your blog.
Thanks Kid - and thanks also for reinstating the link to this blog on your sidebar. Hopefully I'll be able to entice Colin and others back to reading the blog ... assuming I can think of enough to write about, that is. My main task for this afternoon is to come up with a list of possible topics!
Hi, Andrew - Kid has just informed me that your blog is back (but I already knew you were considering it) so obviously I had to leave a comment! That AI cartoon is pretty good in my opinion - it has often occurred to me that WE are the aliens to those who happen to live on other planets so the cartoon's message appealed to me. I'm rather amazed that a fully-formed cartoon can be created out of thin air by a machine with no brain or consciousness!
Thanks Colin - looks like I've got three of my regular readers back already! Yes, I find these AI-generated images rather scarily good - even more so given that the machine understood what I wanted from a fairly vague 15-word prompt. And you may have provided an answer to Brian's comment, if the AI's "joke" is that aliens may be asking exactly the same question that we are.
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