Electric cars, lies and the metaverse. As far as Mattsplained is concerned, it’s all you need to know about 2023.
Hosted by Matt Armitage & Richard Bradbury
Produced by Richard Bradbury for BFM89.9
Further Reading:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/technology/personaltech/new-tech-2023-ai-chat-vr.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/04/apple-artificial-intelligence-ai-audiobooks
https://www.riffusion.com/?fbclid=IwAR0J2sm3fwS_F8IxFyrFlqqZWv-aVJEcDpXSFBLjVAvv-8HrwaqdQCZrmIE
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/03/tesla-shares-price-value-decline-elon-musk
Matt Armitage:
It’s weird to think this is:• I think we should have stopped counting years in 2019.
• They’ve all been pretty terrible since then.
we’ve got a rough guide to:• Does anyone remember the rough guides? Or the Lonely Planets?
• Guidebooks that were a pre-Internet kind of travel crowdsourcing.
• Books that were put together by backpackers and travellers and frequently updated.
• So that you could be reasonably sure that the hostels and bars and homestays were still there.
• That the reviews were accurate.
• I say bars – half the time the main place to hang out would be listed as whatever tourist reggae bar existed in that city.
• Which tells you more about the writers than the cultures they visited.
• But yeah, are rough guides still a thing?
Richard Bradbury: replies
Matt Armitage:
• It’s probably not interesting but in London I worked for a record company that made companion music CDs for the Rough Guide travel books.
• So there are two or three of them where I’m thanked for my largely non-existent contribution to those CDs.
• A couple of years ago I’d have said that was irrelevant, but books and CDs are making a comeback.
• Does that make me a relevant relic?
• Anyway, a lot of those CDs are on Spotify etc. They still make great introductions to music from different genres or places in the world.
• I recommend the psychedelic Cambodia CD, which has nothing to do with me.
• I think it was put together years after I left.
• It’s just a great collection of music.
what does our Rough Guide to:• Not exactly predictions, because we don’t make those anymore.
• It’s just too dangerous.
• For all we know, someone will type lethal COVID variant into ChatGPT or one of the image generating Ais.
• And the magic of technology will make it real and lay the world to waste.
• So, we’ll have a look at some of the things we’re likely to see over the next 12 months.
• But we’ll keep the conjecture about how they pan out to ourselves.
Richard Bradbury: Is that your way of saying we’re not talking about Twitter?
Matt Armitage:
• No. But we will touch on electric cars, though not specifically Tesla.
• We’re still seeing the valuation of the company slipping, even as it ships more cars.
• Weirdly, I was chatting about classical definitions of GDP with some friends a couple of days ago,
• That’s a warning to never accept an invitation to coffee from me. You’ll be bored.
• With a lot of tech companies we’re kind of seeing an anti-GDP happening.
• Their market value slipping as their output, and in some cases revenue, increases.
• But that’s not where we’re heading today.
• First off, I went to talk about aigiarism.
Richard Bradbury: You mean plagiarism?
Matt Armitage:
• Yes and no. Aigiarism is a form of plagiarism but it’s specific to AI.
• One of the stories we mentioned last December if I remember right,
• was that Stack, a kind of how-to site for coders,
• Was stopping people from posting code and answers to questions created by ChatGPT.
• There are a few reasons for this. Partly, because it’s incredibly easy.
• So one person could start contributing hundreds or thousands of answers.
• None of which they necessarily have any real idea about.
• Nobody likes gaming the system – especially in open communities.
• But the larger reason is accuracy – Stack’s moderators found that the answers generated by ChatGPT
• In the AI community, some people are calling them hallucinations.
• Which, as we’ve mentioned before, others in the community are objecting to.
• Because hallucinating is a form of anthropomorphising.
• It suggests the machines are sentient or conscious.
• Which, obviously, they aren’t.
• But that brings us back around to that idea of plagiarism…
Richard Bradbury: Yes, how would you tell that the Q&A came from ChatGPT?
Matt Armitage:
• Exactly. And this isn’t just an issue for Stack Overflow.
• This is about school and college papers.
• Or disinformation - people using the machine to flood social media platforms with bot content to hide, disguise or fabricate information.
• People getting the machine to do work they’re being paid to do.
• That last one is just smart as far as I’m concerned.
• So we have this issue of aigiarism.
• I guess it’s a new word for deep fake in a sense.
• The machine tricking us into thinking that a product, or an image, or a piece of content.
• Was created by a person.
• On the subject of Deep fakes – and I add a disclaimer here because my sister in law is involved in the show.
• A new british comedy series called Deep Fake Neighbour Wars starts streaming at the end of the month.
• It pretends to be a reality show starring a host of celebs who all live near one another and hate each other.
• I think you get the reality show premise. But the celebs are all deep fake video AI creations with impressionists doing the voices.
• So, check that out.
Richard Bradbury: But that’s not aigiarism…
Matt Armitage:
• No, it isn’t because it’s being labelled and promoted as a spoof and satire.
• You aren’t supposed to believe that it’s Matthew Mc or Idris Elba.
• So back to aigiarism – I mentioned briefly that OpenAI is coming up with a method – a kind of reverse watermarking –
• To detect whether text has been created by their system.
• Now, I may have misunderstood this. But it essentially works by building patterns into the original text.
• Linguistically, they would be undetectable or unnoticed by the average reader.
• But for anyone who was looking for evidence that it was machine-generated, the patterns would be there.
• At a lecture at University of Texas, Scott Aaronson, a guest researcher at OpenAI,
• said that the new tweaks should be able to predict from just a few hundred words if something was generated by the machine.
• Whether or not someone can game that recipe, change it sufficiently that the pattern recognition doesn’t register.
• I don’t know. But maybe that defeats the point of ChatGPT for most people.
• That the effort of making the cheat look real is too much work for cheaters.
d as this is a rough guide to:Matt Armitage:
• Aigiarism is a cute word, true.
• I think:• Now, I know people will be shouting at their screens saying it already is you idiot.
• We currently have lots of sort of, slightly useful AI.
• The really mainstream stuff is mostly invisible to us. We see its results rather than its actions.
• So, the algorithms in financial systems.
• In retail platforms. In aggregating information.
• Or controlling what we see on our newsfeeds.
• The consumer facing stuff like Siri and Alexa is sometimes helpful but mostly still very limited in scope or usefulness.
• I think this year is where we see that change.
• Where the machines we command with our voices start to parse our commands more accurately.
• But also, linking those abilities to machine voices.
• Machines that can research subjects for you, summarise the results and read them to you.
• Don’t forget, one of the more underrated things ChatGPT can do for you is sub-edit.
• To help you write more clearly and accurately.
Richard Bradbury: It’s formulaic but it doesn’t really matter?
Matt Armitage:
• In most instances that’s fine.
• Need to create signage for use around the office or factory.
• ChatGPT. Boom. Done. Print.
• I needed something put quickly into a video storyboard format – I put the notes and script into the machine and it spat it out.
• It wasn’t ready for use – I spent maybe half an hour or an hour tidying it up.
• But that saved me hours.
• So think how it will change the quality of conversations with chatbots.
• I fully realise how weird that is to say. Most people don’t want to talk to chatbots.
• Customer service, that kind of thing.
• They want a human. Realistically, that’s like hoping for a return to the good old days of 3 channels on TV and kids playing with sticks in the street.
• It was never that good and, barring the collapse of society, it isn’t coming back.
• Employers just aren’t likely to spend that money when they can have an artificial customer service department that never stops working.
• And costs way less. So machines that aren’t frustrating and have a better idea of what you’re trying to tell them are essential.
• Another interesting question is whether we see those services being deployed more widely for speech rather than text.
• This week, Apple announced the delayed release of a tranche of AI-narrated audiobooks through its Books app.
• A lot of ebook services have had AI narrator options for a while – but those are essentially on-demand text to voice,
• The AI voice approaches it for the first time everytime, so you get a lot of weird vocalisations, the stress is in the wrong place.
• And the listening experience is very unsatisfying.
Richard Bradbury: I’d like to point out that you have asked me to ask this question: who cares about audiobooks?
Matt Armitage:
• The audiobook industry was worth $1.5bn last year.
• And grew by 25%. It’s thought it could be worth $30bn by the end of the decade.
• So, Apple wants a big slice of that.
• Yes, I made an Apple’s pie joke. That’s not a dad joke, or even a granddad joke.
• That could be pre-history.
• Apple’s service is different in that the Ai audiobooks are produced.
• So hopefully what you get sounds more like a professionally narrated by a human audiobook.
• Apple has been working with independent publishers for months but I haven’t been able to try any of them out yet.
• I don’t think it’s in Malaysia.
• A lot of publishers don’t like the idea – and there are a lot of voice actors making a living from audiobooks.
• I don’t really see this as a full replacement. Making an audiobook is expensive and can take weeks or recording and production.
• Which limits the number of titles available – there are a lot of books I want to read that I simply can’t because there is no audio version.
• So I see this more as a complementary service that allows more niche authors to make their work available as audiobooks.
•
Richard Bradbury: How does this dovetail or intersect with chatbots?
Matt Armitage:
• Machines that can have realistic feeling conversations with you.
• That can produce the words they need to say and actually say them in a way that doesn’t make you feel like a robot is on its way to kill you.
• This is happening across the board:
• And the speed with which all those other text-to AI generators are evolving is rapidly turning them into useful tools.
• A lot of us use templates for social media posts – it might be canva, whatever.
• I’m thinking that well before the end of this year, a lot of those image generators will be able to do that in the same way a chatbot
• So you upload you photo and type in the text, the border, the filter controls and the machine applies it live.
• Giving you what seems to be a more unique-looking post.
• I think this week I sent you a link to an AI music generator.
• What did you think?
Richard Bradbury: replies
Matt Armitage:
• It’s called riffusion. It creates simple loops from text.
• So you can ask it to sound like your favourite artist.
• Or do something improbable like a free jazz death metal band.
• Those exist actually – I didn’t make it up.
• You can create all these fusion styles: Sinatra style swing with punk guitar, for example.
• So, think about it, we can create text on demand, images on-demand, and video and music are coming soon.
• So that’s a 15-minute answer to the simple question: why do I think AI is becoming more mainstream this year.
• But – as we head for the messages – I have to reiterate.
• This doesn’t change what AI is. It’s a tool, not a solution.
• So don’t confuse its ability to enhance your creativity with it having ability to create.
• A lot of people will be telling you all kinds of things about what AI can do this year.
• It’s a tool. Don’t confuse the hype with its actual ability.
Richard Bradbury: When we come back, electric cars. And some other stuff Matt is interested in more than you are.
BREAK
Richard Bradbury: We mentioned Tesla at the top of the show. Is that where we’re heading now?
Matt Armitage:
• Sort of. So, will it, won’t it is a bit of a plaguing feature of the EV scene.
• Beyond metropolitan hotspots, most countries just don’t have enough charging infrastructure to make EVs viable.
• And for every Rivian, there’s an EV from a major manufacturer that performs below expectations.
• I’m not going to name names, you can google it. Youtube is full of EVs not doing what they say on the tin.
• But that said – until we find better alternative energy sources for cars, or make public transport truly usable.
• Electricity is going to replace carbon combustion as a means of powering passenger vehicles.
• I’m not telling anyone what they don’t already know.
• Tesla has dominated the conversations – at least outside China – about EVs.
• Partly because EVs are still a small offering within most of the noted automaking brands.
• And Tesla was one of the first – and definitely the most successful in terms of marketing – to reach scale as an EV only automaker.
• So this is the year, I think that Chinese EV makers go global.
• I know there are some listeners probably laughing at me right now.
Korean auto companies in the:• They don’t laugh now.
• China
Richard Bradbury: And this is the year that other EV makers achieve scale or go global?
Matt Armitage:
• I mentioned Rivian – which seems to have cracked the concept of delivering functional electric trucks.
• But that’s still niche. There are lots of niche EV companies.
• In China, EV makers like BYD are enormous. And their cars are good.
• Don’t forget that China is the world’s largest market for EVs.
• Partly because car adoption there is relatively new.
• And the local automotive industry doesn’t have decades of entrenched development in producing fossil-burning cars.
• Its car companies are mostly relatively young. So their plant, their designs, their outlook are all new, too.
• It’s also where batteries are made.
• So it makes sense to be EV focused in China, where the government can essentially mandate that the necessary infrastructure be created.
• A lot of companies like BYD were focused on domestic demand.
• Why supply outside the country if you can’t keep up with domestic demand?
• China’s economy is slowing, demand for cars is softening, while over in Europe, countries are tightening air quality restrictions.
• No go zones for petrol and diesel engines. And are preparing to phase out petrol cars.
• Couple that with still slightly lukewarm cars from traditional makers and you have the perfect conditions for the Chinese carmakers to jump to European markets and beyond.
• And let’s not forget – a lot of these cars are genuinely good. They’re not derivative copies of things from somewhere else.
• So I think this is where the world will start to see the Chinese car industry in a new light.
Richard Bradbury: There is a further question – and one that is plaguing the whole EV sector – those supply chain issues that are throttling supply.
Matt Armitage:
gested it would continue into:• Possibly beyond. But it’s more of a branding and a presence issue.
• We have to think of companies like BYD in the same way we think of Tesla.
• Supply chain issues may limit the number of cars you can buy, and how many you see on the streets.
• But it’s the focus that’s important. EVs are still a new sector.
• When you think of EVs, you think Tesla. Nissan, Ford, BMW, Toyota etc etc.
• They all have EVs, but we don’t think of them as EV brands.
• Which creates this opportunity for other at scale EV makers to come into the space and establish themselves as brands to know and trust.
• Which is what those Chinese brands, freed from domestic demand, can now focus on.
• Which enables them to rocket out of the gate as those supply chain issues abate.
Richard Bradbury: It’s always disconcerting when start talking about things that don’t sound like fantasy…
Matt Armitage:
• Don’t worry I’m going to wrap up today back in fantasy land.
• The metaverse, of course. Which is really the Internet.
• I don’t think the outlook for VR and AR is going to change profoundly this year.
• Apple is planning some kind of headset. It might be this year, Tim Cook has been laying hints.
• Although, if they do, it might be with a different focus to Meta or whoever else.
• He hinted at more an AR approach, with ways to manipulate digital data in the physical world according to a talk he gave in Naples last year.
• But VR as an experience will continue to be a bit rubbish because the hardware is a bit rubbish.
• Not in terms of quality or what it can do – but because it has to block you out of the real world to enter the virtual one.
• But let’s not forget that all of that stuff we talked about in the first half of the show is metaverse, too.
• The Internet is a machine of a sort – and all those machine-generated tools –
• Again, tools, not solutions – are going to change the way we interact with the Internet.
• Maybe the metaverse will gain more definition this year.
• Not so much in terms of structure, but in terms of what we see it as.
• What is definitely for sure is that investment in the sector will continue.
• Yes, Meta and some of the software/hardware companies may be scaling back their investments.
• But the games companies aren’t. Because they see this as both the future of and a way to expand their businesses.
• In ways that companies like Meta don’t need to do yet.
Richard Bradbury: Does this link to Microsoft’s bid to takeover Activision Blizzard?
Matt Armitage:
• Yes, so Microsoft often wanders under the radar these days.
• It supports calls for regulation of what it sees as anti-competitive practises by rivals, even when that results in a financial hit for itself.
• And a lot of the conversation about the company centers on it being a bit of an old uncle in tech.
• Focused on desktop computing in a mobile world.
• Which kind of ignores the fact that Microsoft is really about a lot of things: including cloud computing and games.
• The Microsoft-Blizzard merger would create a huge range of titles for the company to give away free with its game pass Xbox subscription.
• And that would include Call of Duty. Microsoft doesn’t even have to make it exclusive to Xbox.
• Just by making it inclusive to Game Pass and expensive to buy on Playstation or other platforms creates a huge incentive.
• Not to mention the AB subsidiaries with a strong presence in mobile gaming, which is where the industry, a
• And those first touchpoints with the gaming metaverse.
• Are increasingly located.
• Which brings me to a quick further metaverse point. Crypto and blockchain. Web3.
• Whatever you want to call it.
• With the ongoing financial turmoil and the scandals like FTX, I think the sector is still going to see a lot of negative press this year.
• But mobile gaming is one sector that is changing people’s opinion of what web3 is.
• That it’s just a part of that metaverse or that future Internet.
• And the other aspect is actually Twitter.
• Dissastisfaction with Twitter – and other social platforms – has led to a lot of people looking for other options.
• And they’ve landed on Mastodon, as well as some pure Web3 social sites.
• And as we’ve discussed before twitter users are journalists, business people, politicians etc.
• Supposed tastemakers. And for a lot of them, these new social sites are their first real taste of that web3 component beyond currencies, tokens and NFTs.
• So they’re seeing the blockchain in action, because they’re participating in communities.
• And even though sites like Mastodon – a twitter alternative – aren’t on a blockchain.
• They are decentralised.
• So it’s an introduction – if you like almost a grooming mechanism – for how decentralised operations function.
• Which creates a better awareness of what blockchains can do and how they are likely to underpin the metaverse.
• That future Internet.
that’s it. A Rough Guide to: