Week 7

With the passing of week 7, I'm now officially wrapping up my first two courses at CSUMB. This went by leagues faster than I expected it to. The last major project to consider is a research video project. Both the videos' links will be part of next week's post. Honestly, I didn't expect the whole process to go as smoothly as it did. With a large portion of the research being handled by my teammates and video editing, my contribution to the project was mostly in the form of providing the voiceover work for the videos. For the longest time, I had always had the idea of trying my hand at voice work. More or less for the fact that I had often been complimented in middle and high school for my voice. When you're told that your narrating voice compared to that of Morgan Freeman, of course the idea is going to start sticking around in your skull. I'm still working out whether or not I was surprised when the project's video editor messaged me on our discord server saying that it sounded like a professional voice over. Not a bad show, considering it was not just first time, but first take. 

This week's module had a couple videos, one of which is a podcast from Harvard on AI's promises and perils. As someone who follows other Youtube channels that focus on technology news, much of what the podcast went over was already known or at very least heard of by me. It makes complete sense that people would be very concerned about AI and its rapidly expanding capacities. I've seen plenty of jokes and memes about the whole AI art thing. The one there that really resonates is based off of a scene from an older Disney film, The Incredibles. "When everyone's super, no one is." The line the film's antagonist, Syndrome, taunts the titular family with before walking off to enact his master plan. The joke from the meme is that, with generative AI, anyone can create high quality artwork, in any style, at the press of a button. Then there's voice synthesis, use of AI to replicate the voice of a character, or person. Real or fictional. Although I do enjoy videos where characters have conversation they otherwise wouldn't have, like the mercenaries from Team Fortress 2 discussing the factions from Fallout 4 or the cast of Mortal Kombat having conversations with one another outside of the context of prefight banter, I also see just how dangerous that sort of technology can get if its misused. Finding the balance between regulation and freedom to create with AI assistance is going to be a difficult venture to say the least, but I do very much see it as possible. We've opened a very dangerous tin of worms with the invention of generative AI and it'll be a fool's errand to try and close it back up completely

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