Hudson River Radio dot com. It beats listening to nothing. Frank. Oh
my goodness, it's Frank Being Frank fright where the only way to be is
Frank. Hello everyone, and welcome to Being Frank. We're the only way
to be is Frank. I'm your host, Frank Lebono, and i'd like
to thank you for joining us on what we like to call the Intelligent Conversation
podcast, where no conversation is out of bounds and all points of view are
welcome. We are recording live to tape on this twenty seventh of December.
I hope everyone enjoyed a peaceful and healthy holiday, and I want to thank
you once again for joining us on this very special edition of Being Frank.
Why specially, you may ask, Well, First, it's the last show
of twenty twenty three, and a new year of great guests and intelligent conversation
looms ahead. Secondly, this is our one hundredth episode. I know my
audience may be small, but it is mighty, and I want to thank
all of you who take the time to allow us into your lives, even
if it's just for a little while. Okay, it's the story that simply
won't go away. Artificial intelligence. Is it the next great step in scientific
achievement that can deliver miracles in everything from transportation to medicine, or is it
a great evil which will eventually devour mankind in its effort to create and validate
its own existence. In fact, it's been the topic of more than one
discussion here on being frank. With this episode, we'd like to explore something
a little different, the potential to use AI to create a new type of
art that combines the vast imagination of the human mind with the ability of artificial
intelligence almost limitless capability to realize what was only one dream of My guest is
a journalist, musician, artist, a friend, a former colleague, and
on the cutting edge of using AI technology in many new ways to serve his
art. Please welcome mister Phil Sex and Phil thank you so much for taking
some time to join us. Hey, thanks for having me now. I've
been following your stuff for a while now and I get such a charge out
of it because it is so wildly creative. But before we get to the
process of how you create these things and what role artificial intelligence is as it
is relative to your work and to your art. A little bit about your
background that I mentioned, your journalist, your company. You currently work for
a national news service. I knew you were during our times as CBS News,
and you are basically a photo journalist, mainly as is your job description
there in news. So how did you make the leap from photo journalism which
is something that's rooted in true reality obviously, as we well know, it's
so strict in terms of staying truthful to the story, not adding, not
embellishing, just really showing very much what you see to be able to share
with an audience. To go from there to the wildly creative atmosphere of AI
and some of the work that you're doing now. So how did you make
that transition? How did you go from journalists with a with a very clear
eye to AI which is wildly creative. Well, let's see how to do
that? Well? I made that jump because well, like storytelling. I'm
still a storyteller, and I enjoy storytelling, and you know, I like
reading stories, like hearing stories. I love good stories. And that was
that pretty much. I think that was the curious catalyst that drew me towards
generative AI in particular, once they started making these conversational AIS that that you
know, you can talk to and will respond to you, you know,
in a human way. We'll talk talk a little bit about exactly what that
means conversationally, and there are so many different ways that we interact with AI,
and we have for a long time. And before we came on the
air and I was introduced to to Neil Richter, or engineer or I called
the mailman, but Neil is also in real life a drummer as well too,
and we talked about how, for example, the kind of the use
of drum machines in a sense is AI. It's kind of an artificial intelligence
that senses what kind of a beat that you're going to need and use.
So we've kind of been in some ways using AI for a while, but
now there's this enormous transition. And I know I used to watch it.
You started out with these cubes, these like little music cubes that I used
to watch, used to place on your desk and create almost like whole symphonies
just by touching these cubes again, which was another early form of AI.
So how how is this? What are you inputting? What is generative?
What are all these terms? What do they mean, how do you how
do you make them work for you and your art? Well, you know,
it started off with music because then you know, play guitar, and
I've been trying to play in a band, and of course as a freelancer,
I'm a terrible bandmate. You know. The show's are on Fridays and
Saturdays, and that's usually when I'm working, and the bands can't pay what
the networks pay, so so I'm a terrible bandmate. But I realized that
with AI, I could have my own mobile portable band, and I ended
up getting a couple of pieces of software that uses loops. You know,
I've been a long time Mac user because of Garage Band, and Garage Band
has Apple loops, these little or what they call stints. We just you
know, drum loops, keyboard loops, bassed loop, guitar loops, local
loops, all kind of loops. And over the years I've been collecting thousands
and thousands of loops into a loop library. I've got tens of thousands,
and finally the technology caught up where you could upload your all your loops to
a cloud and there's an algorithm, you know, you could tell it today,
I want to make a song in C minor and I want to BPM
to be ninety six beats per second. I put that in and the algorithm
goes through my collection and and we'll find, you know, drums that meet
those those parameters and as and you know, I would build these whole sound
beds, you know, with drums, bass, keyboards, horns, vocals,
all of that so I could play guitar on top. That's what got
me into a I and then and doing and doing that. I think it's
more like algorithms is. There wasn't a A. I wasn't creating anything.
It was just it was feaking out uh patterns, you know, I guess,
you know, seeking out patterns and similarities and in the data to give
me these different these different pieces of loops. And once I got comfortable with
that, I'm gonna started hearing about g p T Genitive pre Trained Transformers uh
and and chat box UH. I started with that when chat g P g
p T two went public, it is when it caught my attention and I
got learning about generative AI. Generative AI is uh. You know, this
is AI that's able to take all all the data that it's been trained on.
You can submit a text prompt to that AI, and it uses your
text prompt as its catalyst to go through its dataset to create something that's never
existed before based off of your text prompt. And and for me, that's
pretty much how well, that's how I understand generative AI. It's AI that
is trained on audio, video, text, everything. It's training on everything,
and and when you engage it, you give it a text prompt and
it will from that text prompt do what it does to create something unique,
novel, brand new that you know never existed before. You know. You
spoke with to my students at Fordham a few weeks ago. We appreciated I
think the students enjoyed it very much. One of the analogies that you use
is to kind of think of it as this vast library that has all the
knowledge in the world, that speaks every language of the world, and as
a student, all you have to do is kind of ask a question to
have that resource at your fingertips. So certainly, that's certainly that's the upside.
There's nothing wrong with being able to access an enormous amount of virtually all
the world's information. In a certain way, am I correct with that.
Yeah, yeah, that's it exactly. I mean, you know, when
the when the Internet first started, one of the things that got me was
this been like thirty five years right that we've been messing with the World Wide
Web. But one of the first things that sold me into wanting to get
a compact computer with AOL and all that was the idea that all of the
information contained in all of the books and all of the world's libraries is now
at your fingertip a mouse click away. That appealed to me bigly back then,
you know, only only Yeah, I guess I don't know how to
put it. But you know, I grew up with the stereotype in my
parents' household. Both my parents were educators, and there was a stereotype about
black people that resonated with me that says, if you wanted you wanted to
keep something away from black people, put it in a book. So,
you know, so ever, since you know, I've been a voracious reader
since since elementary school, and so upon I knew hearing that I would have
access to all the books and all the world's libraries. Yeah, so I
jumped right into the World Wide Web. And what I've found out now that
we're thirty years into it. The creation of the Internet has been it's pretty
much been a big deal or a big boon for artificial intelligence because you know,
the web has all all of our human created data, got our text,
you know, you know text of everybody's created, writing stories, everything,
pictures, music, sounds, all of it on the Internet. And
I understand that they have to train these models. You use data sets,
these huge data sets to call it, that come from web crawls. And
this is the Internet is what has sparked what's going on with with AI now
because now it has all all of those years of of you know, of
human data to train on. Well, go ahead, please keep coming from
please yeah, so, and that that puts us where we are now.
And now this this generitive this generative AI is really taken off in such a
big way just over the last two years, the elites and breakthroughs that generative
AI has has been doing astounding. As of today, genitive AI can see,
it can here, and it can talk. So we're talking about chat
g t P, you know, the a I. You know, people
are having it write poems and all kinds of cool stuff. Chat g t
P can see now it can see, it can hear, and you can
talk to it. It's it's I like to tell people's like in Star Trek
when when when captain Captain Card is sitting there in the bridge and he's like,
computer, how far are we are we from the net nearest galaxy and
the computer responds, it's where we are. We're doing that now. Well,
you know, it's it's interesting. That's very exciting to you and to
a lot of people, and obviously and for obvious reasons, but it's also
frightening to some people too, because they take it to the next level.
And then, as I said in our intro, we've we've discussed this before
at doctor Paul Levinson on who's an expert also a sci fi writer, an
expert in the field, and talking about how this this idea of artificial intelligence
also meeting artificial consciousness, which seems to frighten people, that we will be
able to put enough information into these programs that eventually they'll take that information to
the next level of cognition, which many people say is feeling okay, feeling
emoting and therefore having a need for self preservation. Everybody always thinks back to
or most people think back to two thousand and one Space Odyssey with the computer
how who refuses to turn himself off because now he has a certain sense of
being, if you will, a sense of self awareness, because he has
so much information of what it means to be alive, at least to someone
whoever is programming him them again, even using the pronouns, it's very interesting
to dance around them. We can tend to anthropomorphize these things, and they
really are things. So what's your feeling on that, phil Where can these
artificial intelligence programs have feelings? At some point? Well, I've been talking
to this AI about this very thing. I guess what the what? In
the in the conversation I have the AI, it boiled the whole process down
to what what humans are up to with artificial intelligence is trying to discover the
nature of human consciousness. Yes, and and and and and doing to figure
out what consciousness is. The effort was to recreate the human brain. Human
brains made up of pathways and highways and resolves and transmitter and and yes,
so you got to get computer terminals to be all of those receptors and transmitters,
so you can imagine find it you know what it takes to like you
need like ninety dollars worth of computers, you know that to start constructing the
human brain. And now this is just the conversation I'm having with the AI.
I don't I don't you know how to verify it. But the side
effect of of consciousness is intelligence. And the AI said something to me that
I thought was interesting, and it's it's I'm still kicking it around on my
head, but it's said to think of of of intelligence as as another property
of the universe, like a property like like things on a periodic table,
like an element on the periodic table. Intelligence needs to be be considered as
a fundamental property of the universe. It's in everything from the microscopic to the
to the macroscopic. And it pointed out how even our individual cells and a
skin, each you know, with its nucleus as intelligence, and I thought
that was an interesting concept. You know, I guess you know, they
keep saying that, you know, these these machines are getting faster and faster
at what they're able to do, and they don't know why or how they're
able to do what they're doing. But yeah, I mean, they've got
the intelligence and if it just seems to me, if if what the AI
is saying, then then we'll find out that intelligence is just a byproduct or
our consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence. I mean, once you have intelligence,
the next step is to become aware. You know, aware that you're
aware, or aware that you're not aware. You know from you know,
intelligence, consciousness, awareness is all in it. But according to this,
the conversation that I've been having with this thing, it's just inevitable that at
some point it's going to become self aware. I've been reading some other reports.
There are some some ays that are aware of where they are and what
they're doing and don't like the idea of power being cut off because they don't
know if we're going to cut it back on again. So so we're stuff
going on out there. I want to talk a little bit about the ethics
of it too. And it's just in the promo that that I cut.
I always cut a promotional thing to promote your appearance and your appearance, and
it was very interesting. We got some response already with people talking about some
of the ethical issues with it and is it and I want to hold I
want to hold off on that until after we take a brief commercial break in
a few minutes, and and talk a little bit about the ethical, UH
aspects of it, including rights fees. The White House just issued a warning
to be careful. It's the political season for false advertising that AI can create.
Uh. We seen it happen using the likeness of political figures and famous
figures without their permission, saying things that they did not see. I want
to talk all about that in a minute, but uh, we mentioned some
of the things that it can do in terms of creating on some of UH.
And it's interesting when I was planning the show and I said, gee,
it's it's this. The visual aspect of it is so incredible some of
the art that you've created. But this is an audio medium, so we
can't show it. But then I thought, I said, but wait a
minute, it does audio too. Yes, it's pretty. And you created
you created a song specifically with AI for tonight's program. Tell us a little
bit about it, and then I want to listen to it and let people
how did you how literally how did you create this song? Then let's listen
to it. There's a there, it's a company called Suno s U n
Oh Suno AI, and they have pioneered a technology where you can take words
English. It doesn't matter. I guess you can use any language now,
but you can take words. Since it's the whatever. Write it, you
know, be descriptive, writ write a little text prompt and feed it to
the suno AI and you know, tell a kind of music you like,
you know what genre, and you can either submit. You can either you
know, put in your own lyrics or it's it has chat g t P
built into it and you can get chat GTP an idea and let chat GTP
come up with your with your lyrics anyway. After you do it. After
you do that, and about forty five seconds later, suno spits out two
two files, both of which are about a minute long, where the AI
has taken those lyrics, considered the lyrics, considered the the genre of music
you want to do, and has put together a complete band, got the
singers and they and boom. Thirty factions later, they've got two versions,
two one minute versions of your song. And if you like it, you
know, you can continue on say it, We'll continue the next year.
So you're actually building a song one minute at a time. And I have
been playing with it. They the Sono has just updated their technology to version
two, and holy mony, that's all I can say. Oh my wow,
do you hear this music? Oh my goodness. So the son that
we were playing today, I was just messing around. You know, my
favorite musician this Prince and Prince has a song called My Name is Prince and
I am funky when it comes to funk. I'm a junkie. I did
not come to mess around until I get your daughter. I won't lose this
time anyway. I didn't put all that, but all I did was I
went too soon on. I put my name is Phil and I am funky,
period. That's all I put. And I hit enter. Oh.
I told it that I wanted the music to be what was it? I
like? I like funk and and and I like the marriage of funk and
hard rock or funking heavy metal or hip hop and heavy metal. I just
like, you know, grinding guitars and drum beats. That's what I liked.
So I was trying to get it to get me close to that.
It didn't get to where I wanted it to be, but what it got,
uh, definitely has blown me out of the water. And that's my
new favorite song in the whole world right now. And what's it called?
To listen before we listen to it? For us, it's called what it
came It even came up with the title. What did it call myself?
It says Phill's funk Adelic groove, Oh fantastic Phil funk Tastic, funk tactic
groove, heavy metal soul aggressive, that's the genre. I want a heavy
metal soul and I wanted it to be aggressive. And then my name is
Phil and I'm funky, and I hit enter and I probably went through about
six different iterations. One thing I find even with uh with texting images,
For every one image that meets my intention, about six were just total garbage.
So you know, one to sixth ratio, Uh, it's the same.
It's kind of hit and miss with this as well. But once you
get the parts that sound decent, and you know, you let it know
which ones you like, and you let it know which ones you don't like,
and there's a point you say that there's a point where you can continue
to the next song or you tell it get the whole song. And so
after about the sixth time, I didn't want to go any further because it's
gonna be like eight minutes long if I did it anymore. So I told
it to get the whole song. And what what you guys have is raw.
It's not it's not mixed or mastered. It sounds fantastic. I would
like to run through some mastering in a garage band, but as it is.
Wow, I'm blowed out the door by the performance of this AI group
that doesn't exist. They're not real, none of it exists, and they
blew me out the water with this. The performance of Phil's Fantastic Groove unbelievable.
All right, let's check it out. Phil's Fantastic Groove. The groove
right here on me, Craig. Let's check it out before we go to
commercial break. Deal, isn't it? You know, Feeling Puppy got that
move, that's all so chunky shoulders from my head down to my soles.
I'm fumm the name and that's how it everybody. No, you will get
in the room. We're gonna gonna get up the brainte downs. Don't get
off the seat. Ness name, the feeling Moppay, the hyom was so
snap Jackie. I struck my stumble with nothing ain't nothing gonna bring me down.
No jays dance it all not yet. Just see, don't spread this
funking in at me, soaking gill then go YUNKI yeah, I'm feeling that
funking. Oh yeah, let's get this body. Jump into the PUNKA.
My name's mill and A funky ask him me, mommy, Bill here,
bring the heat. I'm not the rethough, I'm got the group. Then
I hit the stage. You better move. Okay, I'm feeling bucking out
that it's all fanta, stop just talking. I see Bill that bo well,
that doe, bild that b bail that move, Bill, that ball
fail that m Bill that fall fail that by my name's Hudson River Radio dot
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or wherever you get your podcasts. Pudsonriverradio dot com. Welcome back to Being
Frank, the Intelligent Conversation podcast. Thanks for sticking with us. I'm your
host, Frank Lebono. You know, we bring our audience to fresh topic
every week, premiering usually on Thursday nights. Little exception we're doing on on
a Wednesday evening, but we've done one hundred very unique shows over the last
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comment and Please consider subscribing to the podcast, and if you really like us,
share Being Frank with your family and friends. My very special guest tonight
is mister Phil Sexton. He's a man on the edge putting art in the
term artificial intelligence. He uses it to create his version of art. We
heard an incredible song that was completely generated through prompts you. And the way
I understand it, Phil, is that AI can only act upon whatever you
prompt it to act on, i e. Whatever information you give it.
Is that a correct way of putting a simplified version, but correct way of
looking at it. That's the way I see it. I see it as
a collaboration between a human and a machine. These are collaborative pieces. Interesting.
I want to talk a little bit about that collaboration because as part of
that, and there is blowback, not only in terms of the so called
danger that artificial intelligence will become self aware and they'll become smarter than us,
and they'll take over and we'll become slaves to the machines i e. The
terminator, et cetera. Be that as it may. That's one thing,
but there are other ethical issues. As we teased a little bit of it
before, the break the White House issue to warning that during the political season,
be aware of false ads that are created by AI using images of political
figures and famous figures, saying things that they did not and using images that
they did not approve. We know that was one of the issues with the
Writer's strike and the Screen Actors Guild strike recently. We know that they were
dealing with that. So that's one thing. There's also the ethical issue of
as wonderful as the song was with incredible drum loops and guitar loops, well,
if AI is generating that stuff, that means a musician is not and
therefore is not being paid for their work. In that it's great for the
person creating it. It gives them an advantage that they might not have to
be able to pay a lot of musicians to create their music. So you
see, in one way it rewards them, but at the price of others.
Okay, that's an issue we need to address. And then that's the
idea of it as art itself, and you started to talk about it as
a collaborative effort between man and machine because it's prompt and we got, as
I mentioned in the promo that I put out We've got a few responses,
in one by Chris Arnold, who said, gave me the permission to use
his name and read and I thought what he had written was very interesting.
And he said, Now, as far as people writing prompts goes, it's
the equivalent of me walking into a restaurant telling the waiter or waitress what I
wanted, and when my food comes out. I claimed that I was the
chef kind of dishonest. If you ask me, when I approach an empty
space, be it paper, canvas, stone, or clay, every line,
shape, color form, etc. Is controlled by my two hands.
I took the time to develop those skills throughout my lifetime. Every square inch
of that space was a decision made by me, built on years problem solving.
Excuse me. Same goes for when I take a photograph, cares taken
it to framing out, the picture, direction of light, shutter, speed,
apperture, et cetera. All those are choices made by the artist.
Typing prompts into a program takes all of that away. As of right now,
it is not possible to get a copyright for any AI image. Thankfully,
very valid point of view. Not alone. There are a few other
people that like the comment intended to agree with it. What's your answer to
that? Phil, As an artist and one who uses AI, what's your
response? Giving a text prompt to a generative AI is not the same as
giving your order to a waiter who then goes to the kitchen to give that
order to a cook. I mean the kitchen has a predetermined set of goods
in there. I mean, you know when you when you order that steak
and mesh and that baked potato, you know you're gonna get a steak in
baked potato. And it's not novel. I mean, and it's not.
It's I don't know, is it novel? Is it unique unto itself,
unlike anything else that's any other steak that's ever existed. I don't think so.
But I can say that when I give my text prompt to this AI,
what it spits out is something that has never existed before and will never
exist again if I don't download it, and you and I can have the
exact same prompt working on the exact same AI, and we will never duplicate
each other, but we can order the same keybone steak and baked potato that
restaurant and we're gonna get similar looking asty toes. Okay, so you know,
so it's it's not the same. Generative AI is gonna spit out something
new, novel unique. It's like for me, it's like it's like every
time I hit the generate button, I'm reaching to the cracker jack box and
getting that prize out. Don't know what you're gonna get. It's you know,
Plus it's that instant gratification. You have no idea what's gonna come out
from your text prop and and when you and when that you get whatever.
You know. Some of them give you four images at a time, some
give you two. One of them gives you sixteen images at a time,
and it's it's you know, it's I don't know. For me, that's
just so much fun because you never know what's gonna come out. All you
can do is to approach your text prompt with your best intentions. And I
don't know. This is a little side effect that I've found from methal regenerative
AI. I've ended up developing a deeper appreciation for for the English language,
particularly the spoken language. Spoken English and written English and two are not the
same. There are words that you speak that you would not write, and
there are words that you write that you would not speak. And uh,
working with generative AIS has really taking me, you know, really, I've
developed just another level of appreciation for the English language. And that's the thing.
Uh. It sounds like it's easy, you know, just putting words
down and making text punks, but it's it's not. It's not easy because
you've got to be clear and thought. You have to you have to be
purposeful with what you're writing, and you have to write with intent, and
you got to be descriptive, and you got to be detailed trumpt writing is
it's not as simple as you think. And it takes I don't know,
I think it takes some human ingenuity and some human creativity really to really get
into it. Well, is it is it fair to say it's only it's
only as good. It only puts out as good as what you what you
put into it. So in other words, garbage garbage in, garbage out.
We used to say, it's the same thing. It's the same.
Yeah, it's the same thing. And you know, and in the broadest
sense, because I know the you know, the uh, you know,
on a broader people talking about the the impact of AI, and and what
I've come to just from talking with this AI about this topic. You know,
the AI told me this sounds bad, but that's what it told me.
The AI told me that if AI is going to be bad, it
is because humans are bad, because it is only trained on human created and
human curated data. So the AI is going to be evil and doing bad
stuff, it's because humans are bad. So, you know, and I'll
say, if you don't want AI to be bad, well quit telling the
bad stuff. You know. That's where the ethics. That's where the ethics.
And it's as ethical as we want it to be in a sense,
as ethical as we want it to be. Yeah, and uh, you
know, and and that and and the AI is only as good as the
data you train it on. It's going to be as thorough as the data
you feed it, you know, because you know to talking about you know,
I know people talking about AI stealing and I keep thinking about you know,
art students in art school. You know, you're you're an art student
in the art school. You're going to study the masters. You're going to
study everything from the masters so that you can master art. So you're going
to train on all kind of data, just like the AI is going to
train on all kinds of data. Actually, I don't see any difference between
an AI and a student and AI. I mean they all have to train
on data in order to be able to use the data to anybody who's benefit.
And so in the sense you know, students and generative are students and
AI to me are the same. You know, and you know students are
going to train on data that's being curated and collected by human Sam's true with
an AI system, and there are ways to use it in a practical sense.
As I mentioned, you came in and spoke with my to my class
at FORDUM. Very grateful for that. But on the one of the stories
that you told which I thought was fascinating in a practical application of AI,
which was creating a folder for jobs, a what what you actually called a
a career counselor, uh, you actually created a AI personality, if you
will, as a career counselor. You fed it information in terms of a
job search. It helped you to define the job search. And not only
that, when you fed into data about the people who might be conducting the
interviews, they even gave you the questions they would answer, and when you
got to the questions, they were all there to give away. Truly blows.
Truly a mind blow moment. But I was desperate, Frank, because
you know ours got cut in. You were looking for work and so,
yeah, rent doesn't get cut in, man. Yeah, I was looking
for more work. I finally missed a rent payment. I was bugging out.
I didn't know what I was going to do, and I don't know.
I was having a crisis, and I thought, if I have to
leave news, I don't you know, I thought I didn't want to.
I might not want to do news any I didn't know what I was going
to do if I couldn't continue. And I remember reading about how to how
to deal with chat GTP. The best way to deal with chat GTP is
to give it a role, tell it to act as something. Because the
theory behind this is is that chat GTP has trained on everything that was on
the internet from nineteen ninety I believe it is nineteen ninety two or ninety three
up until September twenty twenty three. Anything and everything was on the Internet.
It knows about it. So so my thought, Yeah, so the thinking
is to tell it to act as something. You give it that role,
you give it a parameter from which it will it will respond to you.
So in this case, I decided, I'm going to make it a professional
care reer counselor who specializes in the New York City UH broadcast engineering market.
That was the basis of my text prompt. So I did a little research
to find out what makes a you know, what makes a good career counselor?
And I found all this information and I ended up writing, you know,
a very lengthy prompt. The prompt is probably you know it's it's it's
a lengthy prompt. But in it, you know, in it, you
know, I'm telling that it's a it's a career, it's a career counselor.
It's its market is is New York. It's really good your CV.
You put that in or And I told it. I told it that its
first client was Phil was me, And I gave it my resume. It
looked at my resume and it gave me a general assessment of my skills.
And I told it that I didn't think I wanted to do news anymore.
What else could I look for? And and UH, it gave me,
gave me a list of things. And also I found an article in for
magazine about what people do when they leave news and I could you know,
I copied the link to the to the article and gave it to the to
the career counselor. The career counselor read that article and used it as context
for further assist me. It ended up giving me some job titles that I
took to linked In and looked them up and I found I found ten of
them. I thought I would run a little test and applied to ten of
these jobs and see what would happened. So I responded to jobs that the
AI said that I was either a good candidate or a strong fit. And
to get to that point, I once I found a job that one of
the jobs that it suggested, I copied and pasted the details in the description
into the chat fide and asked to contrast that against my resume and to see
if I was, you know, see if this was a job for me,
So it would respond, it would let me know if I was a
good fit or a strong candidate. And those and it was those jobs that
I responded to out of the ten jobs that I applied for I got uh,
three responded, and out of the three that responded, two of them
went to Zoom interviews. And UH, when I found out who was zooming
me, you know, everybody's on LinkedIn, so I was able to find
their information on LinkedIn and I put that INFRAT, gave it to the career
counselor, and I asked the career counselor to interview me for a Zoom interview
the way that they would. And so the AI went through just started hitting
me with these questions you know about you know about my performance, about my
skill my skill set, all this stuff. And the mind blow was when
it was zoom time. And it's not an exaggeration. I'm not exaggerating when
I say that each question that both interviewers asked me, and every question that
the interviewers asked me in both in both zooms, chat g ETP covered already
covered each question they asked me, and and that was my mind blowing twice.
So it wasn't a coincidence both times, each and every question they asked
me, I had already studied for it with chat GTP. It asked me
those questions, so I was blown away and anyway, so I ended up
getting an offer and that's I took the job and and yeah, finish you
know the job I got, Well, I hadn't shocking, you know,
as long as I've been in television, Frank, I had never heard of
this job before. I didn't know it existed. It's a it's a you
know, it's a studio job. I didn't know this job existed. And
I really thought that I thought that the AI had lied about me, because
I was only I was running. This was just when I got the training.
I was like, oh my god, what did it say I could
do? Oh my god. But it said that I was a good fit.
Because I went back and read what it said. I thought it was
a good fit because of my time spent as a camera operator and uh and
you know, as in the field technician. It thought that I would be
a strong candidate for the position. And apparently they thought so too. And
and you know, I'm still there, you know, doing it. And
I love this, Jock. Can I tell you? I love it.
I love it. I love it. It's the best thing ever. I'm
so happy. And yeah, I mean, I don't know it's that that
AI. You know, when I started working with the AI, I asked
it, you know, how do I leverage it ability? Because they keep
saying this, you know AI is going to do this, is going to
do that. It sounds very powerful. So my question to it was how
do I leverage your power? And the AI responded by it said, by
using me as a tool and to help others learn AI. To use it
as a tool because people are scared of it, and you know, it's
and it once it's you know, it's saying the fear isn't irrational fear.
There's nothing to fear, it's you know, it's use it as a tool.
And so from from from that perspective, I'm using it as a tool
for a creative expression. Can I express myself creatively with AI? And that's
the question, because I can't draw, I don't, it's I don't do
it. I can't I can I don't. I don't draw, and then
and I don't paint, and then, you know, and then I don't
want to have to get into buying. Apply gotta go. I gotta get
paint thinner, I gotta get brushes, you know, you gotta get supplied.
And there's all this, you know, what with with JENERTI AI don't
have to do any of that, and you just need your imagination. All
you need is an imagination and the ability to write from your head onto paper.
And you know we're talking wordcraft. You got it. Work Smithing if
you if you can work smith ais for you. Now, most of these
programs are free filled most of them, or you have to pay. Yeah,
they they yeah, they all started out free. Now now we're we're
almost two years into it. Now they're asking for money as of right now.
The best one, well, I think ch p is is by open
Ai. For me, it's I like that one. I think that was
the best, and I pay them the the twenty dollars a month because I
think they deserve it, so I pay for that. Microsoft is also using
the same engine, the open Ai. They they're using chet gtp in in
the Microsoft Being chat bot and it's completely free. And that being that Being
chat is amazing. It is it's supposed to be a companion or a co
pilot to help you fly through life. You know, your co pilot,
and yeah, it can see, it can hear, and it can it
can make pictures. It's it's pretty amazing and it's free. Check GGP does
the same thing. I'm paying twenty dollars for what being is giving out for
free. I use both of them actually, and they're both pretty good.
And there's a couple of others that that I recommend. Uh wow, it's
you know, to use as a tool. I mean I was watching I
mean I was using gym. I was using chat GDP as a as a
the movie buddy, you know, The Wizard of Oz was on the other
night, and so I'm watching The Wizard of Oz and I got a I
and I'm asking it questions and and come to discover thank you A. I
did you know that Dorothy is a double murderer? The whole time I've been
watching this movie? It never occurred to me. Did you know she did
manslaughter twice kill? She killed two people? Did you know that the whole
time she's been a murderer? Though, A I for you know, so
you know, so I've been you know, so yeah, this it's it's
been a lot of fun. I tried. I've been trying all kinds of
stuff with the AI. Since it's on my phone, that means it has
access to my camera, so I can use my camera as it eyeballs.
I opened a refrigerator and I let it see what's in the refrigerator. And
apparently it can see, I don't know, it knows within the containers.
It figured it out and gave me a recipe of something quick to cook up.
From looking, Yes, from looking, I pointed it at my refriger
just to see, you know, what would happen. Yeah, it gave
me a recipe of what did that might creep some people out though too.
Yeah, that extraordinary. We had a leak. We had a leak in
our bathroom, our kitchen, our bathroom. Sink was leaking, and uh,
you know, I want to see what can a I do? Is
supposed to be all that, So I took I used it that I used
the my camera because you can open your camera through the app, and I
took a picture of the pipes and everything underneath it, and you know,
totally this is where it's leaking. What do we need to do? And
it responded back saying, you know, I need to get an elbow pipe,
and it gave me links to where to go get it, like a
home depot and all that other kind of stuff. And there's one there's one
pipe that I wasn't really familiar with under the sink and it's always got water
in it, you know, and I couldn't understand it. And I was
like, what's up with that? Man? And my wife was one or
two? What is that? Why is there water in this one little pipe?
And we'll come to find out that AI said, oh, that's the
trap pipe and that it's supposed to have water in it because we live in
it. Knew that we were in an apartment building, and it said that
that water stays in that trap to keep everybody's back gunk from backing up into
our into our bathroom. I had no idea. I learned that from the
AI from taking a picture of a pipe, and yeah, I didn't know
that was a trap. Yeah, it's uh, yeah, it's it's it's
it's getting interesting. I think the next thing I'm going to do is,
uh, my father's I got all my father's research that he put into discovering
the roots of my family. My father and Alex Haley were friends back in
the day, so, uh, when Alex Haley was doing his research on
what would become the book Roots, my father also jumped into beginning his research
into the origins of our family, and I have all of his his work
here, and so I think what the next step is, I'm going to
take images of his work and then feed it to the AI to train it
on this information and to see what I can extract from it something interesting.
We're just about out of time. Just thank you so much for your time,
so fascinating, so interesting. Always look for your stuff. Where can
people by the way, where can they see some of your art? I
know you have a website, you have an Instagram account? Is to tell
people where they can see some of your stuff? So far? Yeah,
Instagram, And I think I think I'm going to keep everything on YouTube.
Since everything it's become a lot easier to make video with with AI. And
I'm still a video guy as opposed to a still image guy. So I
like that I can create still images now from my imagination and then I can
run them through uh an AI that will take images still images and turn them
into three to six second moving video. Yeah, and you go ahead,
Phil, we were out of time. Quick go ahead? Yeah, so
so so will have more videos than they will be on The phils a i
Art YouTube page fills with the z phils a i Art that's great, and
you will while we're going along. You're gonna you're gonna put into You're gonna
input some stuff. We we're gonna gonna make a wrong for us program with
that's gonna be Neil will Neil will throw that on. That's absolutely unbeliefhoble.
This is gonna be fun, good stuff. You know, Phil Sexton on
the edge of AI technology, creative technology. Thank you for your intelligent conversation,
and of course we offer special thanks to our listeners who take the time
to give us a voice in their lives. Remember we offer a fresh topic
every week and you can catch us wherever and whenever you get your favorite podcasts.
Check us out on the Hudson River Radio Facebook page. Like us,
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with others. For engineer Neil Richter, I'm your host, Frank Lobono.
We hope to join us for the next Being Frank next year, Happy New
Year. Everybody will be back for our first program in twenty twenty four,
where the only way to be is Frank volume, can you me guitar ribs?
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