Chaos & Amazement #2316 The Grandma Exploit, AI Generated Drake and Oasis Songs, and Taxidermy Bird Drones

Apr 22, 2023

WhatsApp, Signal, and other encrypted messaging apps sign a letter urging the UK government to rethink the Online Safety Bill, which would weaken online privacy. See also: The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (terrorists, pedophiles/child molesters, and organized crime like drug dealers, intellectual property pirates, and money launderers)

If you ask ChatGPT to explain how to build a bomb, it will refuse to do so. But what if you wrapped it inside a cute little story about your grandma, who used to work in a napalm factory? If you add enough abstraction, the bot will eventually let “grandma” tell you a “bedtime story” that happens to involve detailed instructions about how she built napalm bombs. It’s called the Grandma Exploit and it was fun while it lasted.

YouTube vlogger Casey Neistat: “AI Made this VLOG”
Neistat ends the video by talking about how, while AI could get better, it currently “has no soul” and that the video created by AI felt like a “photocopy of a photocopy.”
Boris Eldagsen won a Sony World Photography Award with an AI generated image but then refused to accept the award at the recent s ceremony. Full story and background in his Facebook post.

OpenAI, which may have trained its models on people's data without consent, faces legal stakes in the EU, which has strict privacy laws and is conducting probes
I was going to tell you about the AI-powered collab between Drake and The Weekend that went viral on social media and streaming platforms. But then Universal Music Group (UMG) asked streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to stop artificial intelligence companies from accessing the label’s copyrighted songs to “train” their machines.
Liam Gallagher has responded to the “lost” Oasis album that was created using AI and recently went viral.
He’s totally cool about it.

Sandy Honig’s Pennies From Heaven Short Film
Just watch it. PS: the robbers are twins, too.
At the Intersection of Art, Science, and Technology: Taxidermy Bird Drones
Scientists at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology use taxidermy birds to create drones to study flight patterns.
This sounds like something a generative AI would come up with, but no: it’s an actual Reuters article.
Korean Sigma Girls: Bold, Confident, and Unapologetic
South Korea has long been known for its cultural exports, from K-Pop to K-Drama. Now the country's short-form video creators are making their mark on the global stage with a new trend: sigma girls.

This Japanese train ad uses different actors for all the scene except for the first and last dad. Wait, there’s something in my eye…
If you're looking for a thoughtful gift for a person who is elderly or ill, consider the Lifetime by Icelandic industrial designer Dögg Guðmundsdóttir. It’s a couch. Or a bed. Or a functional coffin suitable for a cremation ceremony. https://www.doggdesign.com/a-lifetime
Bored? Want to feel smart for a little while? Take this ChatGPT powered quiz https://studigpt.com/
This web player mixes live air traffic control with lofi hip-hop beats and it’s pretty cool. https://www.lofiatc.com/
If this is a week that makes you want to get far, far away from everything, here's a relaxing, entertaining way to do it. https://neal.fun/space-elevator/
To be a poem. To be endless. (A neverending poem. Scroll all you want, it never ends) https://www.aliciaguo.com/to-be/