Eric Brown: 0:05

You're listening to the Audit presented by IT Audit Labs. Welcome to the Audit, a podcast by IT Audit Labs. Today we're going to talk automation and AI with Eric Pesek, who's joining Scott and Nick myself, and Josh is on with us today too. Josh is a music producer. We're going to hear a little bit about some AI in the music producing world, and Eric is an attorney and is going to show us a presentation that he worked on that was entirely done with AI.

Eric Pesik: 0:42

So you know the way it came to be is, as we all knew, there was a whole lot of press right in January or so you know, beginning of February, where ChatGPT 4 came out and people were super excited and people were talking about oh I asked ChatGPT to do this or that for me. And internally so I'm a lawyer and I work within a larger legal team and one of the questions that somebody asked I say well, will chat, will artificial intelligence, replace lawyers? Because there's this. There was this fear that artificial intelligence is going to replace programmers. You know graphic designers, you know all those different tasks, and those are the tasks that people usually attribute to. You know, this takes different tasks, and those are the tasks that people usually attribute to. You know this takes creativity. These are the things that no AI, no computer is ever going to replace. And yet here we were in 2023 saying you know your job as a programmer, your job as a graphic designer, your job as an artist is going to be replaced.

Eric Pesik: 1:41

So within my team, somebody just randomly said do you think the AI will replace lawyers? And so I thought, hey, I'll do a presentation, I'll do some research on chat GPT, I'll put together a presentation online like I would normally do. You know normal PowerPoint presentation and we sometimes do like a Friday brown bag or we haven't done it a lot, but we'll do these. You know interdepartmental presentations, and people come. I thought that's a great topic for all the lawyers to say, hey, is your job going to be made redundant? And people did.

Eric Pesik: 2:11

Everybody started signing up and so I started drafting the presentation and the way you might do it. Do some research on chat GPT and I got I don't know about halfway done and I thought why am I doing this? I'll just ask chat GPT write a presentation for me on whether AI will create, will replace lawyers. And it did. And it was, I don't know, like maybe 70% aligned to what I was already writing. It didn't, it wasn't fully fleshed out and there was a couple of weak spots, and so in those areas I said explain, why X? So the GPT responded with something that was sort of superficial perhaps, and I just asked it to explain and then it fleshed out various answers and so I thought, hey, this is great, I'll use this as my presentation. And I started like I would normally. I started putting together slides to go with the script that it had written and I thought well, wait a minute.

Eric Brown: 3:06

Why don't.

Eric Pesik: 3:06

I have a different AI. Do the graphics for me. So I went to Dream Studio and I just took keywords from the presentation that was written by chat, put them into Dream Studio and said you know, draft not draft, but you know, draw me some art in this style. And I think I picked different styles, but using these keywords, and it came up with all these images and at that point I thought, okay, we're gonna go all in. I had already used for some other I forget some other project that I had. I'd already subscribed to an AI text to voice generator. I thought I'm not even going to present this in my own voice, I'm just going to have AI do the text, do the content. I'll have AI do the images. I'll have AI do the voice.

Eric Pesik: 3:56

And then I started putting it into PowerPoint. And that's when I remembered that even PowerPoint has a I can design this slide for you feature. And I thought, okay, this is a perfect demo, I'll put it all together. I used all four of those steps. I used either AI or kind of a I don't know what the PowerPoint equivalent is, but the PowerPoint auto designer and then I just recorded it and, instead of me giving the presentation. I gave the presentation to the team as a pre-recorded video the day before my presentation and at the presentation I just said, hey, go watch this video first, come to the meeting and we'll discuss it. And it was one of the better attended meetings that we've had. People loved it. I kind of explained to them more or less what I'm explaining to you about how it came to be. And, of course, you know we had a lot of lawyers on the call, as you might imagine and you know. The bottom line that both I have and the AI came up with is that we're probably not going to replace lawyers at any time soon, which made everybody feel a little bit better, but it was, you know, by the time I was done, I thought, hey, there are a lot of applications you know, even this kind of tongue in cheek type of applications where you could do this. You could seriously do this. Throw in a little bit of human intervention to fine tune it where the AI is, you know, just not as strong and it could be a really powerful tool to use for lawyers. So a lot of what lawyers do like.

Eric Pesik: 5:25

If you're just doing legal research, you imagine it's like any other research. You're just researching stuff on different topics. Typically there'll be like a case that sets a precedent and you'll say, okay, well, what are the cases that follow this? Does that precedent still stand? That's the kind of thing that AI could probably do really well. That's a really boring part of being a lawyer, but it's also part where it takes some creativity, because you're looking at other scenarios where similar facts might arise or overlapping laws that you remember as a lawyer. That might apply.

Eric Pesik: 5:59

But the actual research and kind of writing the results of your research is very tedious. Like any other, you know, kind of writing a big report can be very tedious, but that's where AI could help lawyers and, of course, anybody else who has to write or has to come up with some creative solution. I thought this would be a great, almost a muse for you. Right, it can do your first draft as a human. You'll have to finish that draft. But if you've ever had writer's block and you're thinking I just can't get started, well, here's a quick shortcut Tell AI to do it for you, let them get started, and then you're in the mode of editing and correcting and fine-tuning and rewriting. But at least you've got some content to help you get started, and that was, I think, of all of our meeting we kind of came up with.

Eric Pesik: 6:55

That answer is that one is it's not ready yet, it's close, but even in the current state, it could probably be used to do really good first drafts of things that lawyers do today. And so lawyers will probably be the lawyers that are doing those first drafts right now. Yeah, their jobs might be threatened, but they're the ones that they could co-opt that by use. They're the ones that should be using the AI today to help them do their first draft before they submit it to their, you know, their senior partner or whatever it is, and that's that's kind of the story of how this came up. And then, after I presented it to their senior partner or whatever it is and that's kind of the story of how this came up and then, after I presented it to my team, I just said, hey, there's nothing confidential in here, I'll just upload it to YouTube and see if it gets any views. And, like I said, I've got eight since February Not a lot, but and probably two of those at least two of those are my own, I would imagine.

Eric Brown: 7:39

And you did voice.

Eric Pesik: 7:47

You had it speak in your own voice, didn't you? Well, it's not my voice. So I used it's just a, I would say, a generic ai voice generator and you can pick different voices or different. And in fact I could let me just share my screen really quick, sure? Why don't I tell you what I'll start at the very beginning. So you know, here's chat gpt, here's dream studio that I use. In fact, this is my background right now. I think if you but I have in my background, um, this is the voice generator that I use and you can see, hey, I want you can pick different voices. Hey, I want a young adult, I want a middle-aged man, you know I want a, you know another middle-aged man. You have all these choices and it will in fact generate something that kind of approximates. You know different people and you know it will try to, you know, approximate different accents. But what I did was so I would go into chat, right, so I'd say, write me a presentation and you just pick about.

Eric Brown: 8:35

I mean, you guys pick a topic scott, where did you used to, uh, be a mountain ranger or climb or hike or whatever it was you were doing out west?

Scott Rysdahl: 8:45

Yeah, how about? Yeah, Yosemite National Park. I like that it knows it's a presentation so it has to introduce itself. It's probably scraped every TripAdvisor posting that's to date.

Eric Pesik: 9:01

So it has a good training set, yeah, and so this is more or less what I did, and let's just say, suppose it, um suppose. So here is, in terms of safety, it's important to know that wildlife note, be aware of wildlife and follow park regulations. Suppose, in your presentation and this is the other thing I did I said, hey, that's too superficial. So I just said, hey, explain more about safety, to get a little more detail. I don't know, maybe that was enough, but maybe you wanted more. Let's get into some things Wildlife safety, water safety, road safety.

Scott Rysdahl: 9:38

Yeah, all very good tips that. I have said myself as a ranger out there.

Eric Brown: 9:44

Anything, Scott, that comes to mind that we could try asking it. That maybe is more insider information.

Scott Rysdahl: 9:52

Yeah, let's ask it how we get a hiking permit for Half Dome. They require those nowadays and they can be very competitive.

Eric Pesik: 10:02

Nice apply for a permit. So this is interesting. One thing I remember about at least ChatGPT is that it doesn't search the internet immediately. It's really just going on older results. I know there's other chatbots that can also search and get updated information. I don't know how far back it goes, but I assume this was at least updated at one point goes, but uh, I assume this was at least updated one at one point I think chat gpt was.

Eric Brown: 10:29

Its date is indexed from like september 2021.

Eric Pesik: 10:31

So this, this really is what I did. I. I just asked her to write a presentation where I wanted more information. I said explain. And then I, you know, I went to dream studio. Well, first I tried to go right right into PowerPoint and start putting it in there, and I've got a PowerPoint instance up somewhere, demo presentation. So what I would do is I would go to the visit and I'd say, okay, well, here's my script, right? So maybe I'd have a slide for the first script, so I'd put it in my speaking notes, right? Good afternoon everybody. I'd like to talk to you about visiting yosemite national park. And then I thought, remember, I said I, I thought I'd have ai do my artwork, so maybe I would pick a keyword from here and then I'd pop over to here and say you know, my prompt is just yosemite national park. It seems like a good one. And then now there's a couple more options you can do, but let's just let it. Let it uh mull over that one is this a free?

Eric Pesik: 11:26

tool so this is a paid tool. I've got 543 more credits and it costs ten dollars for a thousand credits, I think. So you can see here's how many credits it's using 10 credits out of my 500. Um, let's scroll to the top. So here's grab. It's made some art for me, so maybe I might download one. And then you know, this is I'm going to drop it in here as my background. And then, you know, because this is a presentation on Yosemite National Park, we'll make whoops, we'll send it back, put that in front, and I, you know, I did do a little bit of of. Oh, that's right, I forgot, I'll leave it. Let me just leave it as is.

Eric Pesik: 12:12

Then here's what we did. Is we let the designer pick for me? You can say, okay, well, here, let PowerPoint decide how this is going to be displayed. Here's a slide with the artwork direct generated by AI, the content that's going to be displayed. Right, so here's a slide with the artwork direct generated by ai, the the content that's going to be presented. Um, maybe we can add this as the subtitle here. Right? One of the most breathtaking, iconic national parks, united states. So I've already got my first slide right.

Eric Pesik: 12:39

And then I just kind of repeated this almost like assembly line. So, like today, I'm doing it one by one. But once I realized what I was doing is I just sort of set up a like assembly line. So, like today, I'm doing a one by one. But once I realized what I was doing is I just set up a little assembly line process where I took the whole text and I went through one by one, generating images. Let's just say this is going to be our second slide, so I put this in the text part of our second slide, and I pick something. What would be the topic? Let's talk about why you should visit. That sounds good, why you should visit, right, and then why, okay, let's, we'll just drop this in here, don't for stunning view beauty. We'll just say, okay, we'll just turn these into bullet points because we're lazy, right, and then we'll grab another picture, and then again I could try to do something else.

Eric Pesik: 13:21

Or I could just pick one of these and here's, you know, here's some general. This one looks pretty good, kind of got the camera in there. A little the content there. I could try to do something else. Or I could just pick one of these. Here's some generative. This one looks pretty good. It's kind of got the camera in there. The content there. You've got your script. You've got at least your first two slides right. So here it is, a couple slides all into it, and then you just repeat the process, slide by slide.

Scott Rysdahl: 13:39

One thing that immediately comes to mind as a security person is how this can be used for social engineering attacks. So right now, something that's pretty common is sending an SMS, say, to a bunch of employees saying, hey, this is Eric Brown, I'm in a meeting, I can't talk, but I really need you to go buy me $500 in Best Buy gift cards and enter them in manually to this website or whatever. It made me get a drone when you're over there at Best.

Scott Rysdahl: 14:06

Buy yeah yeah, yeah, I'm running out of drones, but if that could be like a voicemail delivered via email that's generated in somebody's voice based on some reasonable amount of training data, it takes it to a whole other level, right? All of a sudden it's your boss's voice in your ear telling you what to do, and I would guess that would be way more successful. Or even a Teams call right, we've got audio.

Eric Pesik: 14:33

I can't do the pass-through audio, but if I figured that out, maybe I could impersonate Eric Brown right here, live and say hey, I'm reaching out on Teams because this is an emergency. Please go again Best Buy or Walmart and pick up these cards.

Eric Brown: 14:46

I was reading somewhere that Microsoft is working on an AI voice generator that it can train to sound like somebody's natural voice with just three seconds of sample. It's too scary, yes.

Eric Pesik: 15:02

Yeah, so then you just need the deep fake voice, the deep fake face, and your CEO, your CIO, is going to be sending you off to Walmart again.

Nick Mellem: 15:15

One of the things that comes to my mind, not IT related, but people and college students are probably using this technology as well to write papers. At what point do we, or what's your thought on potential plagiarism right? If it's generating this, is it giving a new paper every time, or is it somewhat similar or canned?

Eric Pesik: 15:35

So you know, just like me, sort of thinking hey, we should use this to make your first draft Right. If I was a college student, or, heck, if I was giving you know creation whether I'm a lawyer turning in a presentation, it wouldn't take much to edit it, to make it your own. It's for the really lazy student who's just going to go out like. The same person who's just going to buy a research paper online is not going to bother editing it. I think it's probably pretty unethical. That being said, I did read where they're trying to figure out some way to watermark it. The same way you might watermark a video or an image. So if I go and do this image they could watermark.

Eric Pesik: 16:15

I'm not sharing anymore but they could watermark one of those images, and I'd never tell Now how you watermark a text file. What they were saying is that they might deliberately use words that are not commonly used and that would be sort of red flags. But I think that's tough though, because you think of, like, a college student is probably also trying to deliberately use words to make them sound more professional or more scholastic or whatever it is. And I I seem to remember reading an article about somebody who was at least he claimed was falsely identified as having used ai to generate the article, and he said hey, I'll show you my research. Um, but I don't, I don't know. I didn't hear the rest of the story, but they were talking about how they were battling with a professor to say I've got my research, I can prove that I. That being said, obviously they got pinged by something. So how are you going to detect this? I have no clue Because, again, it's just a text file.

Eric Brown: 17:13

There is a.

Joshua Schmidt: 17:15

If I could just jump in. Yeah, just, I'm aware of Winston AI detection, which is being used by educators and publishers to detect AI-written content up to ChatGPT-4. So I think they're kind of staying along with this, you know, to protect academia and the amount of money coming into those institutions. I think they're kind of on top of this, looks like. From a quick search, I've kind of heard that on a few other YouTube videos as well.

Scott Rysdahl: 17:49

That said, I know you can, as Eric was doing. You can take GPT's output and say, hey, could you rewrite this in the style of Ernest Hemingway? You know, and it'll do it, and I wonder how much like how many iterations of that process it would take to really fool some of those you know likely ai-based detection tools, right?

Eric Pesik: 18:11

or even you know, do what you know google does for google maps, right, they'll throw in an error. So you as a, as a as a student, you know, throw in some extra errors that a student would likely make and then say you know, chat, gpt would not have made this mistake. I obviously made this mistake. I apologize, but at least I can prove that I did it right.

Eric Brown: 18:33

Yep, I wonder, though, you know we're kind of entering that era where the technology is taking a new path and, rather than fighting against the technology, should we be embracing it and looking at higher operators that we could work at as humans? Because, you know, going through college, you know back in my day, to use that colloquialism you'd go to the library, you'd research your stuff right before the internet. You'd find what you were going to write on. But really, what did that really teach me at the end of the day, like, what value did that bring me? Maybe it brought value of, like.

Eric Brown: 19:17

You know, I could find something in the library, or I could know how to take a collection of information and put it together in a paper. Will that have any value for future generations where, back in the day, we used to take the rugs outside and beat them, but now we have vacuum cleaner? Right? Is the actual research of the paper going the way of the beating of the rugs, and could we operate at a higher level as humans? Yeah, the technology is going to be able to search terabytes of data in nanoseconds and synthesize those thoughts much quicker than any human ever could, and then how the human applies that information is probably the real value of the human brain versus the actual grunt work of doing the research.

Scott Rysdahl: 20:06

An analogy, there is something a friend told me about how China's kind of tech sector operates, and that's that. So China's a tech leader, obviously, especially in manufacturing, but they didn't do a lot. But they don't have a long history of research and development in these highly technical areas. So they beg, borrow, buy or steal a lot of this intellectual property and then they just plunk it down in their factories and churn out the iPhones or whatever right. But if that tap got cut off and all of a sudden they didn't have that sort of history, that legacy of research and development and intellectual property, would they even be able to continue functioning as a high-tech economy? And I think there's good arguments to be made for both sides. But I wonder if the same thing might happen in this case, where after a couple of generations of people who didn't do the research in the library, like Eric's saying, maybe we do sort of lose the faculties to even come up with you know, content that's interesting to humans and it just all becomes kind of recycled, regurgitated AI, you know garbage.

Eric Pesik: 21:14

Well, you know, I think it works both ways, right? So we have some people in my house doing some remodeling and they're using nail guns right. They're not using hammers right? I wouldn't say we've abandoned hammers, but for most framing jobs, you're going to be primarily using a nail gun, right? We use that, we embrace that technology.

Eric Pesik: 21:33

On the other hand, we're still teaching children to do their times tables in third grade, and we're still teaching children to do their times tables in third grade. And my mind still relies on that, even though I have a calculator, I have a computer. But in ordinary conversations, this, but the next time somebody asks you and you just need to sort of really quickly figure out whether something is in the same order of magnitude as something else, having that innate knowledge of memorizing your times tables or memorizing your powers or whatever it is, still comes in handy. So there are things that we still want to keep doing, and yet we don't make the framer guy use a hammer, we say, and yet we don't make the framer guy use a hammer. We say you know, go and embrace the technology, use that pneumatic nail gun. So some things, I think, will you know, ai will replace and it would be rightfully so like the first draft, or, you know, doing basic research, or maybe even I don't know maybe there's some low level sort of cognitive creativity, stuff that AI can come up with that we as humans can then go take and build upon. You know, I was.

Eric Pesik: 22:44

I was just reading an article earlier this week about some ceo is complaining. All my employees are working from home. They use, you know, chat bots to create their answers. So I'm going to increase the workload by 50 times or whatever. He said something ridiculous about 56 times and my first thought was you know why? Do you care what tools they use to get their job done? Right, you shouldn't punish them for doing that. But after a second thought I thought but use that nail gun example.

Eric Pesik: 23:13

If people are using hammers and then they switch to nail guns, you're not going to say, hey, keep doing the same work at the same speed that you were doing when you had a hammer at your disposal. When you're really using a nail gun, of course you're going to expect your framers to get stuff up faster. So for that CEO now he was probably way out of line to say, hey, you're going to do 50 times the work. But for the CEO one is don't object to your employees using AI. Tell them, hey, I to your employees using AI.

Eric Pesik: 23:42

Tell them, hey, I can tell you're doing so much more work. That's wonderful. I'm going to officially authorize you to use that AI to do that work. Now will you get more work out of your employees? Sure, but don't punish them by saying oh, you know, 50 times the work for you, you know, hit them with the rug beater. That Eric was talking about, right. So on one hand you don't want it to be punitive, but you know it will take over and it will make our jobs faster and accordingly, you know the threshold requirements will probably creep up to match and the nail gun does not know where the nail needs to go.

Joshua Schmidt: 24:14

True.

Scott Rysdahl: 24:14

There's still a human in the center of the work.

Eric Pesik: 24:18

Yeah, that's the framer downstairs. With like 30 years of experience of knowing, you know how the building should be framed up and where to put that nail and you know using that nail gun as a tool to you know implement it.

Eric Brown: 24:31

There's paperwork that we come across in our daily lives and jobs that is not hard to fill out but sometimes tedious, right, when you think of the proofreading that you have to do or the multiple iterations that you have to go to to generate this content for very little return. Right, if you're writing something that somebody's going to look at once, or maybe never, and toss in a drawer, spending intellectual capital on that. It's not a great use of time. So you know, eric, I like your idea and I've taken it and done it in reverse, where I come up with the initial concept you know myself of. Like you know, here are a couple of thoughts that I want to put together and then use ChatGPT to clean it up and write it in a business, professional tone or kind of whatever tone you know would suit the audience that it's being delivered to, and I've found that just in responding to RFPs as an example.

Eric Brown: 25:36

So an RFP a request for a proposal, which is just an arduous mountain of paperwork, that it's kind of a rite of passage where you've got to fill out all these long documents in order to work with an organization that already wants you to work with them because they've invited you to participate in the RFP. You could spend dozens of hours responding to these RFPs, or you could spend a little bit less time, frame up the idea that you want to deliver. Let ChatGPT generate the paragraphs of content and copy-paste it in, which I found to be a pretty valuable resource, because you don't even know if you're going to get the contract, and why am I putting 30 hours into this thing if I may not even get the work?

Eric Pesik: 26:23

Computers have always been good at doing certain types of things, like repetitive, thankless jobs, like filling out an RFP, and I remember reading one quote where somebody's talking about when they said, hey, ai can now generate art and replace all these graphic designers. And the quote was yeah, I don't need AI to replace all these graphic designers. Sure, it's great, but what I need is AI to fill out an application for a passport or, you know, incorporate my job, my resume, into your job board without me having to retype it again. You know, again, let AI do all the tedious filling out paperwork forms, you know, for us, so that we can get back to doing the real creative work that we want to do.

Eric Pesik: 27:03

And you look at your systems. You probably have them internally in all your systems. There's a lot of bureaucracy that we human beings have to wade through that maybe AI would be really good at bypassing, once they get to know the basic requirements that is required by your bureaucracy and also get to know you, to the extent that AI can, so that it knows hey, this is all I need to meet this requirement. I can do that for you. I'm an AI.

Scott Rysdahl: 27:28

I'm thinking income tax prep. That is my first application for.

Nick Mellem: 27:32

AI. Oh my goodness. Yes, that's probably the best idea, yet.

Eric Pesik: 27:37

Yeah, I mean you pay a couple hundred bucks for somebody to do that and it's mostly, it's just a ministerial task. You know, pick numbers from here.

Eric Brown: 27:45

That should be something AI should be great at Right you could upload all the documents and then it could pull it all together.

Eric Pesik: 27:51

Yeah, you know you'll get resistance, so that's a good example. I mean, the tax return business is a perfect example. Because they resist. The IRS has offered hey, we will make the easy form available online for free. Just go online, fill it out and go, and we'll do that. It's it's the tax preparers who have prevented that from happening, because they're protecting their jobs. Same way, you know, every time a new technology is going to put somebody out of business, there will be people that are going to fight it, not because it's bad, just because they're trying to protect their industry.

Joshua Schmidt: 28:26

They're going to need a great disclaimer for questionable write-offs, so you don't end up on an AI-generated write-off list An AI audit.

Scott Rysdahl: 28:36

Yeah, that's an AI audit.

Eric Brown: 28:44

Or it could tell me why investing in all those meme stocks that ultimately led to loss is a bad idea.

Eric Brown: 28:51

I was going to say they used to have that burger flipping robot. I think it was the KUKA robot, and there's a pretty cool video of this KUKA robot that they use in manufacturing and it's playing. I think the person's name is Timo and he's a professional or Olympic table tennis player and the KUKA robot plays against him and does really well. So it's this robot holding a paddle playing against him and does really well, like so. You know, it's this robot holding a paddle playing against him, and and that same kooka robot I think was used or there was some trial use in fast food restaurants to do like dip the fries in the oil, flip the burgers, assemble the burgers, whatever it was.

Eric Brown: 29:40

But it could just be that the cost of entry for that it's probably a half a million dollar device that requires maintenance and whatnot. The barrier to entry is cost where it's easier to have a human do those things, to have a human do those things. The ROI on it would be too great, even though that's probably a perfect application for AI. Where you have somebody working in this task, where they're doing repetitive things and maybe it's not the safest, where you're working around hot oil or something. Or maybe take a foundry application where you're working with. You know hot molten liquids that the robot would be much better for than a human. You wouldn't have to condition the environment for the human, so to speak. But you could probably operate these environments differently if they were designed with automation from the ground up, where you wouldn't need lights or other. You know air conditioning to some extent, or heat to some extent, um, where a lot of these things that are there for the comfort of the human or just to accommodate the way that they have.

Eric Pesik: 30:50

They have to stand there, they have their arms right, and so you get that, that robot that comes in and so it uses those same physical characteristics of a human. But if you designed it outright, where you know, the burger just maybe goes to this thing and there's a, you know, I don't know how I'm just making it up, but like flips it, this way you reduce the cost of having all that articulation because you're just trying to imitate the human instead of, you know, automating the process, instead of automating the person at the alaska airlines lounge I think it's in Seattle, if I'm recalling correctly.

Eric Brown: 31:21

but they have a pancake maker that the you know. You say you want a pancake or whatever in it. The batter's in this pouch and the pouch, kind of you know, the batter goes out on this conveyor belt type of system and 30 seconds later the pancake just rolls off the end.

Eric Pesik: 31:39

And it's really the coolest thing One of my first business trips overseas, I went to Tokyo and at Tokyo Narita Airport they have a beer pouring robot and I don't know if you've ever seen it where it tilts the glass to the side right, pours it down because it puts a little foam, perfect foam, and I remember thinking I don't really need a beer, but I need to use this. I need to use this beer pouring robot, right.

Scott Rysdahl: 32:01

Yeah, and that's maybe a good. Two examples there of the line between where there's human value add and where there's not. With pancakes, I don't really care how it came about, I'm just going to eat it. It's going to be good, it's refined carbs the best kind, but with a bartender maybe there is still that human value add, the, the, the human to human contact, the. How do you like your drink made in a way that turns into a conversation that ai maybe isn't quite yet ready to, to pretend to be?

Eric Pesik: 32:31

yeah, it's novelty, right, like I wanted to get the beer because that was really cool, but like, are you going to hang out in a bar that just pours beers? That way, I mean, maybe you would, but like it's not going to have the same feel as, like you know, a bartender that has, you know, the feeling for do it, for doing that, I think you know good, good idea. Like we think of ai, like, okay, as ai progresses, people compare it to like the iq of a dog, the iq of a child, the iq of I don't know a teenager, right? So you're thinking of, okay, this is we're trying to improve the iq of a dog, the iq of a child, the iq of I don't know a teenager, right? So you're thinking of, okay, this is we're trying to improve the iq of ai, when maybe the real threshold is the eq, right, when you get that emotional, you can, you can, you know, maybe it's not fake, but where you can somehow digitize that emotional experience, where somebody recognizes you, they are the AI is genuinely glad to see you again. The AI maybe is insulted or feels a little bit miffed when you cut them off short.

Eric Pesik: 33:26

That's when you're going to get that real passing, truly finally passing, the Turing test, which reminded me when they were complaining about AI making mistakes, what they call halluc hallucinations right, like I was thinking that's the most human thing that it does. Right, it makes a mistake and then it, you know, can, like it still gives you the answer and it acts confident in its mistake and, yes, at some point, you know, you say, well, a true leader or a true professional owns up to their mistakes and you know and you learn from them, but a lot of humans don't. And it's a very human thing to do is to make a mistake and then be confident in your mistake and double, you know, really double down on that. So it's, you know, very genuine, you know, sometimes tragic. Look at the MyPillow guy, like he must know that he's made a mistake about the election and here, you know, after he's been having to pay what? $5 million for, like, being disproved and yet he's done this very human thing I'm going to, I'm going to double down on my mistake.

Nick Mellem: 34:26

Well, in this whole AI thing is also what China has been doing for a bit now. Maybe I'm mistaken, but aren't they using it as a social grading, right? So if you want to buy a house, you want to get a new credit card, you're trying to buy a car, they have all these cameras all over the place that are grading how your behavior is, what you're posting on social media, how you talk to somebody on the phone, right? So it's kind of the same thing. Yeah, it is the same. Yeah, that's you know that's a whole topic.

Eric Pesik: 34:54

Talk for hours on that. But yeah, they're doing it today. You know, grading people on their behavior within society. How good of a citizen you are, according to the People's Republic of China.

Nick Mellem: 35:05

Instead of how you've spent money in the past. How likely are you to pay it back? Did you?

Scott Rysdahl: 35:13

jaywalk yesterday. How many party meetings have you been to?

Nick Mellem: 35:19

Exactly.

Scott Rysdahl: 35:20

I just dropped a link in the chat. It's a New York Times article about actually Minnesota and nursing homes here and how robots and AI embedded in them are starting to be used for care of the elderly. So there's that EQ, that emotional piece. We can't pay enough people to go hang out with the elderly and provide them company, so here's a place that AI can come in and fill, you know, literally empty chairs.

Eric Brown: 35:45

And Josh, as a music producer, you're seeing AI come up in the creation space too, aren't you?

Joshua Schmidt: 35:53

Oh yeah, we just had a very lengthy Slack conversation about that with my agency, my composing agency. It got very emotional and a lot of opinions coming out about it. There are already AI-gener, ai generated um scores, music composition tools, um. For example, one thing that I I've been using for years I don't know if this, this is on the cusp of ai, I don't know if this is technically ai um is a drum avatar where you know you can put in the style of drumming that you want, because drum drumming is such a tedious task in the studio and audio world. It requires a lot of space for the drum set, it requires a lot of talent and a lot of microphones, yada, yada. So this avatar, you can put in a style, a tempo and it will automatically generate a drum section for you. But that's even gotten crazier over the last few years, where it humanizes it. A lot of electronic drums are on what's called a quantized grid, where everything's locked into a tempo grid. Well, this will humanize it and kind of create little micro millisecond mistakes where you can rush the beat or slow the beat down. That's been going on for a very long time, but now we're getting into full-on scores.

Joshua Schmidt: 37:13

I did see Google's working on something that you can put in. I want a laid-back reggae song with a male singer and it will spit out a piece of music. So the temperature is kind of like how much time do we have? Is it getting red hot? Do we only have a few more years or is this pretty terrible music to listen to still? And you know, one thing I was thinking about we're talking about flipping the burgers is you know, there's the nuance. You know things can be technically done correctly, but you know, when you're cooking they say you put your foot in it. Well, in music you put your soul in it, and I think there's always going to be that human element until AI gets so incredibly powerful that it can imbue that into what it's doing. What's yet to be seen is if that's something that can be programmed or can be made into an algorithm. Know the humans will enjoy to the extent where it really moves them, makes them cry. You know, makes them feel that kind of transcendental emotion that you get from a really great piece of art or music. Um, I did see that there was, you know, just recently a ai generated photograph had won a contest. I can't remember where that was. So we're getting there with the visuals.

Joshua Schmidt: 38:36

My hot take was, like we have maybe five years as composers but then, like what you were saying, eric, is maybe you're kind of editing, maybe you're being a curator of AI generated ideas and, you know, incorporating that into some real instruments. So it just cuts down the workload. You know, because if you're talking about doing an orchestra or you know a live band, a seven piece jazz band, things can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. Things can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. So if these systems can kind of get to a place where the fun part of hearing the music and kind of editing the music is snapping fast, maybe they'll cut down on some of the costs and the workload.

Joshua Schmidt: 39:22

Of course that gets into another conversation about where do the copyrights lie. If you have a Django Reinhardt-sounding guitar part, does Django Estate get a slice of the pie? If the pancake maker at the airport is making my daughter a Mickey Mouse pancakes, does Disney get a royalty from the pancake making machine? So that's kind of where I'm looking at, you know. That's where my interest lies and I think a lot of this will be settled kind of on the legal battlefield, so to speak.

Eric Pesik: 39:53

Um so, eric, I think you're on the front lines there for a while, just like you, maybe five, ten years, I think a lot of our jobs where where previously felt pretty safe music, you know law, where AI is proving that they can cut, take a little piece of it. But again, maybe it's. Maybe it's just going to make our jobs easier because it's going to take the tedious part out of it. And you know it's not going to replace live music, at least not anytime soon, until you have the physical manifestation of AI. You know the people. I'm sure there's other aspects of it, the holograms. I just got through a. We're doing a negotiation and there's teams of lawyers and both sides have multiple business people on there and we're locked in rooms talking to people. And while I was thinking about this AI thing, about whether AI will replace lawyers, it's not going to replace that type of negotiation. It's not going to replace that type of negotiation. It's not going to replace people getting face-to-face and saying I want you to do more of this and I'm not going to be able to do that and we can't comply with this rule and my lawyer is going to explain it to you and while the AI might be able to look up whether you're right or wrong to what the law says you're supposed to do. It's not going to change the negotiation between people, so there's always going to be a rule or a role, I should say, for, you know, lawyers.

Eric Pesik: 41:15

In that situation, just like, probably, for music generation, as clever as ai is, you know, would ai, you know, turn back the clock a couple decades, would ai have come up to say, take a rock and roll, you know disco, and would have come up with rap. Would have come up with, you know, the same type of you know completely new music that came out of. You know just people playing around with you know, jamming at some point and you know throwing in something and you know, like a new song. Every now and then you'll hear a new song. You'll think, wow, that's just amazing. Now will ai come up with something like that? The way I was just reading about a chess move, you know they said ai was playing chess in a way that no human ever would. So ai will come up with something new music wise, but still the same way. A bunch of guys jam into some song. You know that they're writing on the fly.

Joshua Schmidt: 42:07

Uh, they'll still come up with something new that ai would not have come up with absolutely, I think it will further make those sub genres into fractals, so there'll be even more mini genres and there'll be more sub genres within those genres. It'll be up to us to decide what we want to consume, right? But, um, you know, I think where kind of the the value will be placed. More will be the gatekeepers and the tastemakers because, um, you can take, I had a friend that took a beatles song and you know the guitars were slightly out of tune and he tuned each guitar string so it was perfectly in tune and kind of, you know, fixed the problems with this with the helter skelter and he said it ended up sounding like a bon jovi song and it just wasn't the same.

Joshua Schmidt: 42:56

So I think a lot of that nuance, and then the taste and the aesthetic, and how much does the uh, how much does the ai culture integrate with the human culture and where's where's kind of the borderline of that? That's kind of where we're exploring right now.

Nick Mellem: 43:11

I think we're seeing the same thing with photography. One of my biggest hobbies outside of work is photography. I've been basically my whole life and I think, josh, what you're saying it's the same thing. And that contest, I believe, was national geographic, because I did see it was a picture of a cheetah, if I'm not mistaken. So. But then there's the other part. You take it right. National Geographic or these companies are spending all this money to send somebody to do a remote place in Africa to take a picture of that cheetah closing down on a you know whatever their prey. So you've taken the danger out of it, the cost. But at one point it's kind of going back to the argument of well, film was dying, then digital came around, and then there's people now that are going back to film because of the art of it, and so now AI is taking over digital, so now digital shooters are going to become the purists versus the AI. You're right. So both your points, it's what's the balance?

Eric Brown: 44:10

what's the balance? There's a show, I think it's, on Netflix called AlphaGo, or a movie about the AlphaGo, which is the game of Go, and then, just like Deep Blue, which was IBM's Watson computing system that beat Kasparov a couple decades ago, well, with AlphaGo it played the best Go player in the world, lee Sedol, who's like a 9th Dawn player, and during the match it showed how the AI made a move that humans just couldn't conceive of. And you think, well, from a chess perspective or at least this is how I thought of it was, a computer is able to calculate chess moves much faster than a human can. So you make one move that computer can calculate moves that it could make that have a high probability of winning. And because the chess game is smaller than the Go board, apparently the compute resources needed to calculate the same moves for the Go game are just not possible today. So their artificial intelligence has done something else to to come up with the, the, how the alpha go works. But anyway, it said that during the match.

Eric Brown: 45:37

Um, and you could see during the match they showed the, the, the footage of the match, where the human, lee sadoli, was sitting across from another human who was making the moves, but he wasn't able to really read that person's emotions because that person wasn't the one coming up with the moves. Um, and it was, you know, the computer that was doing it, and you could see that it really took its toll on on lee over the course of those those four games or so. Um, but I think one of the commenters made made the comment at one point in time this move that we saw could be like a 10th dawn move, which is, you know, like there are no 10th dawn humans, there's only, you know, I think nine is the theoretical highest. So that that was really kind of cool to see this application come to life. And, you know, like, like you were saying, josh or Eric, with music where rap came about from other musics that we've had, potentially AI could invent something really cool that we've not seen yet.

Eric Pesik: 46:40

Or heard.

Eric Brown: 46:42

Or heard. Yeah, and Nick, was it a? Did the AI just generate that photo of the cheetah, or was it? Did it enhance it somehow?

Nick Mellem: 46:54

so I I was mistaken, I did look, there was national geographic did create an article or a post that showed a couple pictures of a cheetah to see you could pick out which one was ai versus actual, you know, photography or digital. But there was a contest where the person that won and I put the link in the chat where he won the contest with his generated picture and it's really an old looking you know film, 30 old 35 millimeter film, look right from I don't know when, a long time ago, with a couple, um, elderly females in the picture here, and it looks like it's old film that was developed in a dark room. Right, you can see this. Imperfections and the ai built all that in right, and when you look at it at first glance maybe if you get right up onto it, you can maybe tell it's a little too perfect. You know to be real. Right, it's generated, but at first glance it's shockingly good.

Eric Pesik: 47:52

Because cheetahs don't have fingers.

Nick Mellem: 47:54

That's what AI hasn't mastered yet.

Eric Pesik: 47:59

Well, I know, even today, Dream Studio the one I was using you can tell it what level of detail you want and, like when I was showing you earlier, there's a charge for the computing power that you use. So if you say, hey, I want you know so much computing power devoted to making this photorealistic picture, it will do it. It'll take longer, it'll cost you more, but you can have it do that. I doubt that the version that I'm using online for, like I said, a couple bucks here and there, is going to give me National Geographic level results. But if you can do it, if I can do it to a certain level here, I'm sure there's like a really pro version you can do a fantastic job with.

Eric Brown: 48:39

There's an AI image generator called Mid Journey that you interact with over Discord and I was looking into using it for image generation and I saw someone had written an article about using AI, chatgpt, to put together the instruction set for the image that you want to generate through mid-journey, because there's lots of different flags that you can set and it's almost like a 120-character-long Google search where you turn on all of these flags to get exactly what you want in the search. But you could do the same thing with the image generation of tuning how you get it to look by setting those flags and as a human it might be hard to remember that right. It's almost like generating code where you could then use the AI to generate those flags, which I thought was kind of neat.

Eric Pesik: 49:39

Yeah, it seems like it could be right, in line with, I mean, like you said, analogous to generating code, which is what people started using chat GPT at first. Hey, can you give me a Hello World program for Rust? I don't know. Let it generate your code for you, Right?

Eric Brown: 49:59

Yeah, could you convert this Java into assembly? It should be crazy if it could do that.

Scott Rysdahl: 50:06

Turn this rock song into jazz right.

Joshua Schmidt: 50:08

Right yeah, turn this rock song into jazz, right, right, yeah, when I one of the applications I see happening probably within the next five years, is taking a piece of film or a whole movie and uploading that into a score generator and then having the ai spit out 30, 50 different scores that are perfectly timed to the edits of the video and choosing the mood, and then you know, maybe you want a John Williams type score with Prince on guitar, with John Bonham on the drums, you know, I think. And then you know there's there's some money to be made there, though, in a way, because then you can get the John Bonham pack, you know, or you could pay. You know, some of these people that have these estates, I think, will end up monetizing those styles and figuring out legally how they can capitalize on those.

Eric Pesik: 50:58

those kinds of um signature sounds those will be interesting lawsuits, right, like, okay, john bonham, or you know any musician, you own this. But do you own songs that sound like it but aren't necessarily copy. Or do you own somebody who plays the drums like you? Right, so everybody can do the double bass nowadays. You know, does he get a royalty for every? You know everybody who does that with you. Know, I'm sure there's there's some limit where you just sound too much like John Bonham, but that's going to be some fun lawsuits. So, hey, you know, job security for lawyers right, I think you're set.

Joshua Schmidt: 51:38

You know, even John Bonham got sued for ripping off Little Richard. The introduction to rock and roll is the introduction to Little Richard's song. So you know, all those Brit pop guys stole a lot from the African-American blues artists. So it's just about how far back do you want to go and how the stuff all kind of ends up rolling out and how it kind of changes and amalgamates throughout the years. It's going to be quite interesting.

Nick Mellem: 52:07

Thank, you for having me have a great weekend everyone.

Joshua Schmidt: 52:09

Yeah, thanks guys. Yeah, have a good weekend.

Nick Mellem: 52:11

Bye.

Joshua Schmidt: 52:11

See you all. Thanks, all right.

Eric Brown: 52:16

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