Eyes Wide Shut?

Charlie Simpson of Scottish Rugby put this previous Sunday Column into AI software to show how the technology can now automatically create an original two-way avatar conversation on any piece.

It produced this.

 

As someone who has worked in disruptive tech for 25 years, I’m no longer prone to excessive surprise or OMG, but what absolutely freaked me out about this is the very idea of two non-humans having what is a fairly decent fake discussion on something I myself wrote. 

That rugby Column, hopefully like all of these essays, was long, complex, meandering for effect, full of unscientific bombast and opinion, and, I’d like to think, very recognisably written by me. So to hear two robots discuss it, very convincingly, hits rather hard. An “oh shit” moment. 

Others seem to agree. 

Just listened to the AI summary of your rugby Sunday Column Rog. Holy Feck, the role of the pundit could be obsolete in no time. 

Andy Nicol, Scottish rugby legend and ex-pundit.

 

Wait till it happens to you. 

It’s destabilising.

Sure, the robot conversation is superficial at a macro level, and has neither the nuance nor the detail of the didactic prose. It also doesn’t catch the intended humour or hidden Easter Eggs.

But it is not bad, and enough to allow one to see the future. Some already have.

The very insinuation that AI can be coded to replicate very quirky and unpredictable personalities, like myself and Grant Williams, and is then able to riff an entire GOG show without script?

Yikes. If that is the case, humanity itself, never mind the world of content and entertainment, has some very big dilemmas to solve.

You see a comment like this from a young person, with deep education in this area, and you can not help but let your mind and imagination go on a trip.

 🎶 Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream 🎶

Today’s Sunday Column is therefore exactly that. A trip down-stream, likely leading absolutely nowhere.

Probably just a subconscious desperate attempt to write something that the fucking robot can’t yet get anywhere near. A show of human defiance that we are still original. 

So analyse this, M’f***er.

 

Conspiracy Theories are the best “trips”.

Being attracted to conspiracies theories is either viewed as the domain of the truly insane, or good evidence of a curious or contrarian mind, open to more than just the obvious answers. 

Occam’s Razor is a principle often attributed to 14th–century friar William of Ockham that says that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one. – New Scientist. 

No surprises that I’ve never been a fan of Occam’s Razor. It’s the boring predictable answer.

Where’s the fun in that? 

These theories have mushroomed in recent years, one reason being the rise of social media and citizen journalism; all of which offer a more transparent reality on some of the things our governors are capable of getting up to. And would prefer to hide.

This stuff happens and always has; we just never knew. 

Or didn’t want to know, as it distorts what we have been told to believe about a comfortable established world of good and bad guys. Fact and fake. 

When I showed my “Sport’s Perfect Storm“ book to an editor, early doors, he took one look at the chapter, called “The Murky World of Finance” and declined the gig. 

I can’t work on a book about “alt-finance”. 

Immediately labelled as a bit off the beaten track and risky (aka “crazy”).

But the world, and finance, is indeed very murky. You just need to have the courage and curiosity to wonder…

…and 60 years of life has taught me that almost all people are very very happy with the blue pill!

With Occam’s Razor. 

 

My advice is to never stop at Occam. 

You should go down as many rabbits holes as you want, and engage your brain. And maybe also reflect on how often these theories in time reveal themselves as being anything but conspiratorial. 

Occam’s Razor once told us the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it. Guys, like Columbus and Galileo, didn’t buy that.

Happy anniversary Cristoforo. 

Conspiracies are everywhere, and frankly they expand the mind. Previous generations listened to Timothy Leary, used LSD, and wrote “Tomorrow Never Knows”.

Now we can all gorge on the YouTube videos of the “crazies”, explaining the virus, climate change, Muammar Gaddafi killed to maintain the dollar as reserve currency, 9/11 and Building 7, David Kelly and Saddam’s WMD.

Kennedy and the industrial military complex. Here the “crazy” is Oliver Stone. 

“Why?”

Tomorrow, indeed, never knows. 

 

The King of the Conspiracy. 

Stanley Kubrick is, perhaps, the greatest and most important film director of his generation, and these days, for some reason, he seems to dominate my newsfeeds.  Given his filmography, that is not necessarily a positive.

We live in dark times. 

The dystopian social decay and violence of “A Clockwork Orange“. The geopolitical posturing around nuclear mutual destruction in “Dr Strangelove”. The exploration of “mental health” horror in “The Shining“. The electioneering propaganda fanning the culture wars of gender and “male toxicity”, with Full Metal Jacket.

All linked to the over-arching idea of a cabal of elite puppeteers, corrupted to their core, engaged in secret evil and human sacrifice.

The “list of visitors” to Epstein Island, or those getting invited to P Diddy parties, is right in front of our eyes. If we care to look.

“Eyes Wide Shut“, the perfect title, is in many ways the Bible for conspiracy theorists, and often considered more documentary than fiction. The 20m of the film Kubrick was forced to remove against his wishes. He dies very shortly after, suddenly, and with no illnesses.

Nothing to see here, keep moving along.

And of course the grandaddy of all such theories, around Apollo 11, asking if we really did land on the moon. Some say Kubrick faked it. Debated here.

 

2001: A Space Odyssey!

The common theme in today’s Column on Kubrick obviously is AI.

It is always said that artists see the truth much earlier than the rest of us, and Kubrick was absolutely a true artist. In the movie world, his eclectic and groundbreaking body of work is similar to that of Bowie in music. Certainly as impactful. 

This is more than an elite film director, and Kubrick’s peers all know the reality. The reverence is apparent.

The big bang of our film-making generation. Spielberg

It’s beyond a movie — it’s a spiritual experience. Di Caprio

And especially for today’s Column…

The best, most involved and intelligent depiction of A.I. that’s ever been in a film or any kind of narrative. – Garland

Today, with AI front and centre, is exactly the right moment to revisit 2001, a film so unique and profound as to still remain a total enigma. Few very words are spoken, yet so many are conveyed. 

 

HAL (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic).

One can not take part in any serious current analysis or debate about AI without knowing HAL, Kubrick’s AI computer. 

Friend or foe? 

The computer is unable to resolve a conflict between his general duty to relay information accurately, and the orders specific to this project requiring that he withhold from the crew the true purpose of the mission. With the crew dead, HAL therefore reasons, he would not need to lie to them. – Wikipedia.

So many of today’s worthy papers/posts on AI ethics and protocols are just pallid imitations of what is said, or not said, in 2001: a space odyssey.

Kubrick’s film really is a masterpiece, and utterly prescient. 

 

So can AI really replicate “personality”?

Other artists and AI experts seem to see a similar future to what Kubrick predicted in 1968.

The idea of an AI assistant that not only will have its own personality, but who will proactively adapt it, to fit yours. Such that you can, and will, fall in love. The human can, and will, be seduced.

Here, with the (disputed) voice of Scarlett doing the seduction, we can see the lines of reality and AI already becoming very very blurred, and a legal minefield.

If all this is even remotely possible, the entire industry of IP, the star system, content creation and entertainment needs to question its own future, and indeed its own existence. 

Sure, the opportunities for cost savings on talent and writers are endless, and every media company today should be seriously assessing the things that could be changed.

But the implications go way beyond a better Profit and Loss account.

 

What is left for the human?

A week ago, an analyst called me for an opinion, free consultancy, on “the current market for sportbiz content, podcasts, and conferences”.

Since I like to think that AYNE and Albachiara have been pioneering in all of that, longer than anyone else, my ego won over and I replied.

This was the answer. It’s a hard opinion, but not gospel.

Sports conferences as we know them are struggling, and all the exit interviews from the Sport Summit Como say the same thing. The big names don’t enjoy these events, sick of being constantly sold to. So the idea that you can put these people on stage, and forever sell tickets against them, is an “optimistic” business model.

What we introduced at Como in 2022, as a limited number of top invitees, no entry ticket, for a totally secret discussion, has now seemingly become de rigueur, and often copied. The traditional conferences instead are arguably evermore middle management and DEI focussed, corporate credit card financed, and somewhere that the box office “headliners” would in reality prefer to avoid.

Most people will tell you they now only go to these things for the meetings around the event, rendering today’s conferences little more than an efficient gathering-place to meet several people in one pop. Zoom would say that is the very definition of their own product. Just a lot cheaper and time-efficient. 

Sportbiz podcasts are now totally oversaturated, and frankly most of them are utterly interchangeable.

Didactically all me-too, hosted by journalists who have never been decision-makers in this industry, scraping together knowledge to re-package, all with homogenous guests who will not say anything outside their media-trained corporate PR.

That is not a fertile soil from which to grow a business. If a podcast is instead just marketing, to sell some other service, you need to be very clear exactly what that other product is, and how it will make money? 

In all this, with Goal Own Goal and these Sunday essays, I have always remained rather smug in the belief that the only winning differentiator was human “personality”. Our content was safe because the host personas were strong, volatile and pretty unique in background.

I took comfort in seeing that this was the market direction. Roy Keane hard opinions; Micah Richards laughing like a clown; the bubbly cheeky-chappie excellence of Ally McCoist; the wit and sarcasm of Marina Hyde. 

So people can either love or hate AYNE and the Albachiara Columns, but they would always find them very difficult to ignore.

Personality would always be beyond the reach of AI replication.

 

Today, alas, I’m not so sure. 

You and Grant avatars doing improv podcasts, on topics of THEIR choosing. And I bet they will be good. 

The lad is usually right.

But when AI can do a GOG, you will find me long gone, having retired to a small rustic villa overlooking a cove in North East Sardinia. Watching the sunsets change colour with those famous island winds.

Raffa and I will be fine. Salute!

But can someone clever tell me what happens to the 7.5 billion humans who will at that point have no meaningful utility to offer society? But who are still consuming 95% of the planet’s resources.

That’s a bad equation. A robot (like HAL) will look at the maths and coldly, but logically, conclude that the obvious answer is to cull the superfluous, ideally without them even knowing.

Devise some smart whizz to get them to take a vaccine that will slowly kill them. Or provoke wars that will allow for a full reset of humanity, as the elite hide in their fancy bunkers till it’s all blown over.

Luckily, folks, that last paragraph is only a conspiracy theory, 😊.

Right?

To end, let’s really test the power of AI insight, with this tweet from ex AYNE guest Brent Johnson, a top finance guy managing serious money. You will never see a more accurate post.

The truth about our world is in plain sight, and yet we prefer not to look, as Cutter concludes. We are too lazy and complacent to think beyond Occam’s Razor.

So we stumble into our future with Eyes Wide Shut, and therefore we will deserve our fate.

 

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