INDEX	April 1, 2025
Video as if by magic
People often ask me if you can do pretty well anything with video now thanks to AI. It may be true. The latest version of Apple's editing system Final Cut Pro is supposed to have AI capabilities, though I haven't found them yet. There are thousands of very impressive AI generated videos on TikTok with people constantly making the point that they look so real you feel you could almost touch them. Well maybe. I have been studying TikTok for various reasons. I got into it because I felt that if Biden wanted to ban it, it couldn't be all bad. I think this is more a criticism of Hollywood or the film industry, who have created a look, and particularly a lighting, that you never see in real life. Ok they look like five second chunks of Hollywood but is that real life? But I'm being petty. The point is that you are supposed to be able to generate these things using text instructions, or pretty much just with text. Of course this requires a kind of bolt on to the AI which presumably generates the information AI needs to turn the text into video. I took a look at one of these which was probably too cheap and too old. In the world of AI a couple of months and the software is passed its sell by date. What I found was that it required a lot from me to give me not very much. I couldn't generate video from a still image. It all seemed very clunky and not much better than the audio AI I have been using for a couple of years. Obviously it was the wrong stuff. And that's a valid criticism since there's a lot of stuff out there with people determined to feed you nonsense, since the game is partly to hold eyeballs. On TikTok you can get paid for that. This amounts to a sort of knowledge pay wall. Clearly some people are doing amazing things but it's bloody hard to find out how they are doing it. So I shifted to something less challenging, or I thought it would be less challenging. I took some 16th century documents that had been transcribed about 200 years ago and the script looked fairly modern. I asked an AI engine if it thought it could transcribe these pages. It did not go well. First of all it asked me about a thousand mainly stupid questions. It wanted to know everything I could tell it about the documents. Now Apple offers a similar service in that every now and then it transcribes documents I have photographed (signs for example) and adds a entry into my calendar. This always impresses me but I don't seem to be able to control when it is going to do it. I generally have a lot of trouble automating my calendar and Siri (the chatbot) is usually curt to the point of being unhelpful. But back to those Tudor documents. As I said before the handwriting was quite easy to read, but the documents were very old and faded. I asked the AI engine if it felt it was up to the task. Its response was evasive but it didn't say no. So I spent quite a long time agreeing a system by which it could understand what document it was that I was inputting. This was massively difficult. You can't just post it. Having done that I was thrilled to read what appeared to be a flawless transcription of the document. It was flawless. It was convincing. But it was not the document I had submitted. In fact it was not even a document on my computer. God only knows where it found it. At that point I gave up in disgust. My next foray into AI was an attempt to index a web site. It's a big web site but I didn't tell the AI engine that. We didn't get that far. Once again there were a massive number of seemingly irrelevant questions for me to answer. The way I think it should work is to give it a go, see how it worked and then refine the process. Once again the AI engine wanted me to do all the work, for example generate a list of file names in the web site. There are hundreds. I could probably have done it in Linux but I was using an Apple computer and the bastard (I hadn't got round to naming the machine, so that one will do as well as any) seemed to sense my weakness, telling me to run quite complex commands in the Apple command window. It generated huge amounts of text telling me to try all sorts of software, none of which was helpful. What it never did was actually generate any kind of index itself. It even tried to fool me that it had run a routine but I spotted immediately that about the second line was the creation of a directory and no such directory existed. At this point we stopped working together as a team. In fact we stopped working. Quite why AI is like this I don't know. Perhaps I need to go on one of these thousand bucks courses and learn all about AI, except probably generating website indexes since it appears that finding nouns is quite difficult for a computer, or so I am told.
INDEX Jonathan Brind	April 1, 2025