Tag Archives: discussion

chatGPT, discussion, documentation, featured, Research, Unreal Engine, xr

Wrapping Up: Seeing Earth, Talking to the Geon

June 15, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

To wrap up this bespoke residency, now that our 6 months (part-time) has come to an end, I thought it would be helpful to cover a bunch of ideas and workflows we’ve established, some problems, and future directions to explore. There’s a lot to unpack, but I’ll try and be succinct – with a few digressions.

Here’s a video that covers the main points, which I expand upon in the text below.

During the course of this residency I’ve conducted lots of experiments and had a great dialogue with Chris about how to approach things, leading down some inspiring pathways for future work.

2D visualisation

Initially we started off with looking at how to visualise hyperspectral and multispectral satellite data – and it turns to be pretty straight-forward using Python and some programming help using AI – a great way to develop ~explained~ code for libraries one may be unfamiliar with.

You need to know how to iterate and debug a program, work through some documentation, and the data can be accessed in complex file formats and transformed into usable images. This can be done in Juypiter notebooks, running locally in e.g. Anaconda, or remotely on Google Colab or NCRIS Cloudstor notebooks. Pretty straight-forward. These programming assistants will significantly improve over time and complex tasks will become even simpler to prompt.

What the data captures is an entirely different matter – and hyperspectral data is a lot more complicated than multispectral data. I explored a raycasting volume system for that in UE, but that is beyond the remit of this wrap-up. There are lots of different ways to approach it – the question is which one is most useful. It’s a bit “chicken and egg.”

In concert, the question arises as to what one can infer from the data – which is in itself a huge field of scientific and engineering research. It’s not just a matter of applying some kind of GIS colour palette to spectral data – there’s whole fields of analytics that can be applied. These range from naïve naked-eye approaches, through quantitative and statistical analyses to fascinating work in deep learning .

What we have attempted to do is to move this data from the exclusive purview of the specialist to the generalist, from the desktop GIS system to the spatially-located mobile device where an observer may ~actually~ be in a moment in time, and to establish how a human-AI interaction might be established that can create dialogue, queries and observations about the data and their immediate environment.

3D+ Visualisation

Similar approaches can be undertaken in Python for creating 3D+ representations of data, using e.g. MatPlotLib or VisPy (amongst many others).

For our purposes, Python scripts can run in Unreal Engine/ Omniverse platforms (as well as Unity) and become involved in the creation of geometry, textures, actors and a whole range of actions and narrative entities, Very interesting to see how this is opening up as a result of Virtual Production pipelines, upon which art/science projects can piggyback. This includes creating complex time series animations, physics simulations and volumetric rendering, including interactions with other toolsets used in scientific visualisation and creative industries workflows. Python is the lingua franca.

Cesium

Cesium for Unreal has progressed a great deal. It is currently more stable and flexible than implementations for Omniverse or Unity. I surmise that this is because of the source-available nature of Unreal, as opposed to the closed-source model of the other platforms. Smart move by Epic. I hope it stays that way and becomes more open over time. Cesium is opensource, which is crucial to its flexibility and widespread adoption.

AI and ML

Of course, the elephant in the room is Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. It has been fascinating to watch this evolve over the past 6 months – a huge hype-cycle reminiscent of the Blockchain frenzy of the last few years – but at least blockchain was never represented as an ‘existential risk’ . Nevertheless, quantum blockchain technologies will, some day, become human-actor authentication and provenential authorities for lots of different types of data – it may become the only way to distinguish between ‘real’ and generative datasets.

AI is the definitive enabling technology of our time. It present risks (not yet existential ones) and great opportunities. Like any powerful technology it must be treated with great circumspection and aligned with scientific and ethical interests for the benefit of ‘humanity’. It’s a mirror of humanity, and humanity is not all good. Artistic engagement can help explore and critique this new domain.

XR

David Chalmer’s Reality+ (2022) stimulates thoughts about the interfusion of world, data and intention, as does Jeff Malpas’ Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (2nd Ed. 2018) and Peter Otto’s Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (2011).

Apple’s Vision Pro is the latest technological offering in this long history of the intermediation of the self, panorama and place. And it is compelling – not because of the artificial gaze projected to the outside world (deixis to the other), but because of the disposal of controllers – that it can operate by coded hand-gesture alone. Its parts are not new, but the bringing together of systems is. It looks very interesting.

Yet the price of all ‘complete’ XR is total surveillance, even with a ‘secure enclave’: it’s still a head in a box, inherently panoptic and performative.

One wonders how long it will be before we all need to start wearing tinfoil hats to resist implanted thoughts or inception. Quite a long time, I expect, but not forever. Besides, the notion of implanted thoughts is epistemically ambiguous – often these are simply referred to as ‘culture’, ‘beliefs’ and ‘language’. It’s all quite problematic in the post-truth, post-human world of the Novacene. More to contemplate.

Some Practical Examples

In these naive and early days of AI XR, the world that is opening up is fascinating, as I hope the brief sketches above demonstrate. I think of them simply as sketches in exploring how XR will become continuous across mobile devices, HMDs/spectacles and desktop and large immersive screens. Each device format has its own affordances and content, interactions and UI/UX needs to be cognizant of that – lots of interesting design considerations. Natural interactions seem the most compelling, as the premise of ubiquitous/ambient computing is that it will disappear into the background and essentially become invisible – except for intermediation with the world via AI agents such as our idea of the Geon.

I hope you’ve found the material I’ve covered here as interesting, useful and thought provoking as I have! My sincere thanks to Prof. Chris Fluke, the SmartSat CRC and ANAT for facilitating this absorbing residency. Lots to think about and lots of ideas for future work.

ai, CloudXR, omniverse, Research, tests, Unreal Engine

NVIDIA Omniverse or Unreal Engine 5?

June 2, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

Throughout this residency I’ve been working with two development platforms to try and evaluate which is the ‘best'(easiest?optimal?) workflow for the ideas we’ve been exploring. Even at this penultimate stage, things are unclear, so I thought I’d unpack some of the similarities, differences and interactions between the approaches.

Here’s two takes (after a few unsatisfactory tries) from ChatGPT 4 and Google Bard, using the prompt:

“You are an expert computer artist and programmer. Explain what are the differences and similarities between NVIDIA Omniverse platform and Unreal Engine 5? Create a list of 5 (or so) dot points that clearly indicate when each approach would be the optimal one.”

They’re quite useful – generic (as expected) – and indeterminate because there is so much replication, cross-over and interaction of features.

<aside>reading these responses, I suppose this inevitably speeds the end of some national, regional, alternative and idiomatic versions of English – “ise/ize”, “colour/color”, “mould/mold” etc. </aside>

It seems to come down to a few points that I’ll detail at the end.

GPT4:

As a computer artist and programmer, you are looking at a blend of aesthetics, functionality, and the ability to customize and extend the features of a platform. As of my knowledge cutoff in September 2021, both Unreal Engine 5 and NVIDIA Omniverse have features that will appeal to artists and programmers, albeit with different strengths.

**Unreal Engine 5:**

1. **Game Development**: Unreal Engine 5 is built primarily for the development of games, with a wealth of tools for creating, scripting, and animating game worlds.

2. **Blueprint and C++**: UE5 provides both visual scripting through Blueprint and full source code access with C++, giving you a range of options for scripting and customizing your projects.

3. **Nanite and Lumen**: Nanite allows you to import high-fidelity, cinema-quality art assets directly into the engine, while Lumen provides dynamic, real-time global illumination.

4. **Multi-platform Deployment**: UE5 supports a wide range of platforms, making it ideal for game and application development across devices.

5. **Community and Resources**: The Unreal Engine has a large and active community, which means extensive resources, tutorials, and support.

**Optimal for**: Artists and programmers focused on game development or creating other interactive, real-time experiences. If you need access to source code or want a large community for support, Unreal Engine is a strong choice.

**NVIDIA Omniverse:**

1. **Collaboration and Interoperability**: Omniverse is designed as a platform for collaboration, allowing multiple users to work together in real-time across different applications, thanks to its use of USD (Universal Scene Description).

2. **Physically Accurate Rendering**: Omniverse provides highly accurate, real-time ray tracing rendering with the NVIDIA RTX platform, which is ideal for projects requiring high-quality visualization.

3. **AI Integration**: Omniverse leverages NVIDIA’s AI technologies, offering unique possibilities for AI-enhanced simulation, animation, and more.

4. **Infrastructure Management**: Omniverse can be used to visualize and manage data center infrastructure, an application unique to NVIDIA’s platform.

5. **Integration with other NVIDIA tools**: Omniverse is designed to work seamlessly with other NVIDIA tools, such as Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), enhancing the platform’s capabilities.

**Optimal for**: Collaborative projects requiring real-time contributions across different applications, projects requiring high-fidelity, physically accurate rendering, and tasks involving AI-enhanced graphics or simulation.

Please keep in mind that both platforms continue to evolve and have likely added new features or improvements since my last training data in September 2021.

BARD:

Sure. Here are the similarities and differences between NVIDIA Omniverse platform and Unreal Engine 5:

Similarities

Both are powerful 3D creation tools.
Both can be used to create realistic and immersive 3D experiences.
Both support a wide range of features, including 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and simulation.
Both are used by a wide range of professionals, including game developers, architects, and filmmakers.

Differences

NVIDIA Omniverse platform is a more collaborative platform, designed to help teams work together on 3D projects.
Unreal Engine 5 is a more game-oriented platform, designed to create high-performance, real-time 3D experiences.
NVIDIA Omniverse platform is currently only available for Windows, while Unreal Engine 5 is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Here are 5 dot points that clearly indicate when each approach would be the optimal one:

NVIDIA Omniverse platform is the optimal choice for:
- Collaborative 3D projects: The platform’s real-time collaboration features make it easy for teams to work together on 3D projects, regardless of their location.
- Large-scale projects: The platform’s scalability makes it well-suited for large-scale projects that require multiple users and high-performance computing.
- Complex projects: The platform’s powerful tools and features make it well-suited for complex projects that require a high level of detail and realism.
Unreal Engine 5 is the optimal choice for:
- Game development: The platform’s real-time rendering and performance make it well-suited for developing high-performance, visually stunning games.
- Virtual reality and augmented reality: The platform’s support for VR and AR makes it well-suited for developing immersive experiences.
- Filmmaking: The platform’s powerful tools and features make it well-suited for creating realistic and immersive visual effects for films.

I hope this helps!

It does indeed – thanks Machine Intelligence! 🙂

The main differences are subtle and strategic, and perhaps more effectively understood in the context of industrial competition and the territorialisation of artistic and developer activity – driven by business. It’s basically technological evolution driven by capitalism, not social good or woo-woo philosophical outcomes. Was it ever not thus? Well, yes – opensource provides an important alternative model, but it has significant infrastructural constraints.

Omniverse provides – at a basic level – an incredible toolset that enables the development of bespoke applications for realtime visualisation and simulation. The workflow is quite different to UE, but it provides access to all its features in Python (above) and C++ (below)- and a graph visual language that is easy to use, including standardised UI features. So it is nice and fast, even if it’s a bit crashy at this stage. It’s pretty compelling and I am interested to learn more, especially as it develops in the direction of UI’s for XR streaming across multiple platforms and the integration of AI and physics simulations (e.g, via Paraview). It’s very modular – reminiscent of Opendoc – but not open! Forgotten dreams of a better world. Really, Omniverse could be access-controlled opensource, like Unreal is. And much more free (not only in $$, but in principle).

Of course, all these systems ~could~ be like a better improved version of Opendoc. But $$$ – it’s in their interests, currently, to be non-interoperable.

Unreal Engine is more mature – and much more stable, in my experience. But far more monolithic – perhaps it could be modularised. There is an emergent UI Library, but UE UI (UMG) seems counter-intuitive to me – it’s complex to get your head around (I understand why it is as it is, because of C++ legacy, but feel it needn’t be this way – UI could be an intuitive MVC plastic layer, not casting, binding and widgets).

Cesium runs both in Omniverse and UE – is it possible to create an Omniverse USD scene using Cesium and pipe that into UE using an Omniverse connector or is it best just to use the UE Cesium plugin?

An interesting Omniverse/UE co-simulation here.

It would be nice if UE had ~easy~ realtime server capabilities like Omniverse, without all the asset issues of version control with Git, LFS, Bitbucket, Github, Plastic, Perforce, Subversion etc cross-platform. This is something I need to investigate to find an optimal solution for our use-case. Of course, everything is complicated in a non-commercial research context.

A useful talk comparing the two approaches can be seen here (registration may be required)

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtcspring22-s42162/

Omer Shapira, a Senior Omniverse Engineer from NVIDIA discusses: “Learn about designing and programming spatial computing features in Omniverse. We’ll discuss Omniverse’s real-time ray-traced extended reality (XR) renderer, Omniverse’s Autograph system for visual programming, and show how customers are using Omniverse’s XR tools to do everything together — from design reviews to hangouts.”

A useful diagram from the PDF slides:

It provides an insightful abstract overview of the relationships between data sources, pipelines and developer/artist/user activity – and, of course, computers. Somewhere there must be cloudy-bits and AI that will soon complicate the picture.

I must try and find the abstract view from an Unreal Engine engineer somewhere – I’m sure the diagram would be different. Nevertheless, the territorial play is the same – a stack from hardware engineering, through software engineering, to ‘experiences’ is basically the monopoly. It comes down to engineering choices – the physical constraints, scientific research, economics and politics of engineering. That defines everything. But it is driven by human desire, a seeming-paradox, top-down but bottom-up.

USD (Universal Scene Description) seems to be on track to be the lingua franca of the metaverse/omniverse/whatevs. A universal file format is an incredibly important idea – not only because there are literally thousands of incompatible, difficult to translate formats, but because of obsolescence. Like human language, digital ‘file language’ evolves and changes; it is currently much more fragile. A significant solar storm might wipe out AI and all digital knowledge. Biology might not be fried in the deep ocean. We’ve had a few billion years of experience.

Nevertheless, the Hyperscale/Game Engine counterpoint is instructive. From my research into Cloud XR, either via Google Immersive Stream or Azure Cloud XR or Amazon etc. – the problem at scale is simply that you need lots and lots of individual virtual machines to run instances of a ‘world’ and lots of low-latency network traffic to synchronise apparent time (with a sprinkling of predictive AI for the ~20ms perceptual lag barrier).

Strangely, this sounds like an ecosystem.

This is clearly a problem that Omniverse tries to address, but won’t work until it is much more open. UE may beat it via the Omniverse of the expanded Fortnight platform, if they can colonise the hardware and mindware at speed. Or they may collaborate or parasitise each other – hard to tell. Are the metaphors appropriate? There are, of course, many other potential players in this space, even, I expect, disruptors or disruptive technologies that have yet to emerge from someone’s loungeroom.

No doubt agentive AGI systems would approach this in entirely different ways, given their own interests.

ai, discussion, documentation, ethics, featured, policy

Safe and responsible AI in Australia: discussion paper

June 1, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

Illustration of Supporting responsible AI: discussion paper — Supporting responsible AI: discussion paper. SD/AI Image by Peter Morse

In case you have found it impossible to find via either the ABC news article or Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic’s media release page, or via the website of the Government of Australia here’s the actual Safe and responsible AI in Australia discussion paper:

https://consult.industry.gov.au/supporting-responsible-ai

Submissions can be made until July 23rd 2023.

Alternative link to pdf:

https://apo.org.au/node/322938

and another:

Australia’s AI Action Plan

https://apo.org.au/node/318137

Analysis and Policy Observatory (APO or Australian Policy Online) – which looks like a credible resource as far as I can see (WHOIS)(Registrant)- has a bunch of useful policy documents on it – and it’s searchable!

Bit of a discovery failure from the Australian Government website. How would you know where to look? Clearly they need an AI assistant such as SwiftSage (something similar coming your way soon).

links

A better way to share Earth observation data

Link June 1, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

We Need a Better Way to Share Earth Observations

featured

Melbourne Visit 2

May 8, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

Last week I went on my second visit to Melbourne to work with Chris at SmartSat and the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. It’s always a blast returning to Melbourne – I lived and worked there for many years, so it’s like returning to my old home town. The city remains familiar yet different – it grows larger and stranger between the years, but it retains both fond memories for me and a sense of nascent possibility.

You get quite a view of Hawthorne from these buildings.

And inside you get a view of the whiteboard on which we did most of our work – essentially laying out what we have covered in our collaboration so far and mapping out some possibilities for future progress. Yes, it’s a bit cryptic – so I’ll unpack it with some details in the next post.

ai, ar, chatGPT, CloudXR, mr, omniverse, Research, Unreal Engine, xr

AI XR in the Cloud

April 13, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve spent some time virtually attending Nvidia’s GTC Developer Conference, which has been very illuminating. The main take-aways for me have been about how, now that we’re in the Age of AI, that it’s time to really start working with cloud services – and that they’re actually becoming affordable for individuals to use.

Of course, like most computer users, I use cloud services every day – most consumer devices already use them – like Netflix, iCloud, AppleTV, Google Drive, Cloudstor, social media etc. These are kind of passive, invisible services that one uses as part of entertainment, information or storage systems. More complicated systems for developers include things like Google Colab, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Nvidia Omniverse, amongst others.

In Australian science programmes there are National Computing Infrastructure (NCI) services such as AuScope Virtual Research Environments, Digital Earth Australia (DEA), Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), and even interesting history and culture applications built atop these such as the Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia (TLCMap). Of course, there are dozens more scattered around various organisations and websites – it’s all quite difficult to discover amidst the acronyms, let alone keep track of, so any list will always be partial and incomplete.

So this is where AI comes in in a strong way – providing the ability to ingest and summarise prodigious volumes of data and information – and hallucinate rubbish – and this is clearly going to be the way of the future. The AI race is on – here are some interesting (but probably already dated) insights from the AI Index by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence that are worth absorbing:

Industry has taken over AI development from academia since 2014.
Performance saturation on traditional benchmarks has become a problem.
AI can both harm and help the environment, but new models show promise for energy optimization.
AI is accelerating scientific progress in various fields.
Incidents related to ethical misuse of AI are on the rise.
Demand for AI-related skills is increasing across various sectors in the US (and presumably globally)
Private investment in AI has decreased for the first time in the last decade (but after an astronomical rise in that decade)
Proportion of companies adopting AI has plateaued, but those who have adopted continue to pull ahead.
Policymaker interest in AI is increasing globally.
Chinese citizens are the most positive about AI products and services, while Americans are among the least positive.

Nevertheless, it is clear to me that the so-called ‘Ai pause‘ is not going to happen – as Toby Walsh observes:

“Why? There’s no hope in hell that companies are going to stop working on AI models voluntarily. There’s too much money at stake. And there’s also no hope in hell that countries are going to impose a moratorium to prevent companies from working on AI models. There’s no historical precedent for such geopolitical coordination.

The letter’s call for action is thus hopelessly unrealistic. And the reasons it gives for this pause are hopelessly misguided. We are not on the cusp of building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the machine intelligence that would match or exceed human intelligence and threaten human society. Contrary to the letter’s claims, our current AI models are not going to “outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us” any time soon.

In fact, it is their lack of intelligence that should worry us”

The upshot of this, for the work Chris and I are doing, is clearly that we need to embrace AI-in-XR in the development of novel modalities for Earth Observation using Mixed Reality. It’s simply not going to be very compelling doing something as simple as, for example, visualising data in an XR application (such as an AR phone app) that overlays the scene. I’ve now seen many clunky examples of this, and none of them seem especially compelling, useful or widely adopted. The problem really comes down to the graphics capabilities of mobile devices, as this revealing graph demonstrates:

(screenshot from Developing XR Experiences for Every Device (Presented by Google Cloud) )

A potential solution arrives with XR ‘in the cloud’ – and it is evident from this year’s GTC that all the big companies are making a big play in this space and a lot of infrastructure development is going on – billions of dollars of investment. And it’s not just ‘XR’ but “XR with AI’ and high-fidelity, low-latency pixel-streaming. So, my objective is to ride on the coat-tails of this in a low-budget arty-sciencey way, and make the most of the resources that are now becoming available for free (or low-cost) as these huge industries attempt to on-board developers and explore the design-space of applications.

As you might imagine, it has been frustratingly difficult to find documentation and examples of how to go about doing this, as it is all so new. But this is what you expect with emergent and cutting-edge technologies (and almost everyone trying to make a buck off them) – but it’s thankfully something I am used to from my own practice and research: chaining together systems and workflows in the pursuit of novel outcomes.

It’s been a lot to absorb over the last few weeks, but I’m now at the stage where I can begin implementing an AI agent (using the OpenAI API) that one can query with a voice interface (and yes, it talks back), running within a cloud-hosted XR application suitable for e.g. VR HMDs, AR mobile devices, and mixed-reality devices like the Hololens 2 (I wish I had one!). It’s just a sketch at this stage, but I can see the way forward if/when I can get access to the GPT-4 API and plugin architecture, to creating a kind of Earth Observation ‘Oracle’ and a new modality for envisioning and exploring satellite data in XR.

Currently I’m using OpenAI GPT3.5-turbo and playing around with a local install of GPT4-x_Alpaca and AutoGPT, and local pixel-streaming XR. The next step is to move this over to Azure CloudXR and Azure Cognitive Services. Of course, its all much more complicated than it sounds, so I expect a lot of hiccups along the way, but nothing insurmountable.

I’ll post some technical details and (hopefully) some screencaps in a future post.

chatGPT, discussion, featured

ChatGPT Perspectives

February 20, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

Interior life. Stable Diffusion image. Credit: Peter Morse

This post is a more general discussion about ChatGPT and related systems – it’s important to cut through the hype surrounding LLMs and absorb the sober scientific and cultural perspectives and questions around these systems and their capabilities. The impacts of these systems for knowledge work and creative work is going to be huge in the near future – so time to start understanding their context and implications.

S. Wolfram : What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

This is an excellent technical discussion about how Neural Nets (NNs) work, with interesting questions about the internal ‘black box’ goings-on – that are in general quite inscrutable. Wolfram is arguing for a rigorous scientific understanding of NNs, as they seem principally to have arisen as engineering exercises – things that work, but no-one really understands exactly why (‘lore’ in Wolfram’s estimation). This is a sharp counterpoint to the feuilleton hype about AI (which is, really, ‘Machine Learning’, or ‘Machine Representation’, as it is not ‘truly’ intelligent or aware). He makes interesting points about interfacing something like ChatGPT with Wolfram Alpha, which is a kind of computational knowledge engine, and argues convincingly that an interface between the two systems could solve many of the factual errors confabulated by the LLM, and provide something much more powerful in combination: a system that is ‘factually’ connected to the ‘world’ – and perhaps even capable of causal inference as a result.

The discussion touches upon several interesting philosophical/theoretical areas concerning the construction and emergence of language and discourse.

Human language—and the processes of thinking involved in generating it—have always seemed to represent a kind of pinnacle of complexity. And indeed it’s seemed somewhat remarkable that human brains—with their network of a “mere” 100 billion or so neurons (and maybe 100 trillion connections) could be responsible for it. Perhaps, one might have imagined, there’s something more to brains than their networks of neurons—like some new layer of undiscovered physics. But now with ChatGPT we’ve got an important new piece of information: we know that a pure, artificial neural network with about as many connections as brains have neurons is capable of doing a surprisingly good job of generating human language. (Wolfram, 2023)

Of great interest to me is the possibility of what one might call ’empirical semiotics’ or ‘computational semiotics’ – where semiotic generation and analysis (semiosis) could be underpinned by computational forms of emergence, categorisation and logic.

The success of ChatGPT is, I think, giving us evidence of a fundamental and important piece of science: it’s suggesting that we can expect there to be major new “laws of language”—and effectively “laws of thought”—out there to discover. In ChatGPT—built as it is as a neural net—those laws are at best implicit. But if we could somehow make the laws explicit, there’s the potential to do the kinds of things ChatGPT does in vastly more direct, efficient—and transparent—ways. (Wolfram, 2023)

Presumably many of these ‘laws’ are already uncovered or at least hinted-at by research in NLP and computational language models – but it appears very much a contentious field – especially with regard to what any formulation of what ‘intelligence’ is.

If there is one constant in the field of artificial intelligence it is exaggeration: There is always breathless hype and scornful naysaying. It is helpful to occasionally take stock of where we stand. (Browning & LeCun, 2022b)

To me it seems important to understand LLM cognates and extensions in multimodal systems – that intelligent systems can draw inferences across visual, audial, somatic and other sensory modalities beyond the textual and linguistic (Browning & LeCun, 2022a).

The underlying problem isn’t the AI. The problem is the limited nature of language. Once we abandon old assumptions about the connection between thought and language, it is clear that these systems are doomed to a shallow understanding that will never approximate the full-bodied thinking we see in humans. In short, despite being among the most impressive AI systems on the planet, these AI systems will never be much like us.(Browning & LeCun, 2022a).

The field of semiotics has a significant body of work covering these differing/interdependent signifying regimes – but not a great deal that is computationally reducible, as it has been more in the form of ‘literary criticism’ or humanities ‘theory’ (including in my own research background). This is clearly inadequate for a scientific approach as it is far too qualitative – more ‘top down’ than ‘bottom up’ – reminiscent of debates concerning symbolic reasoning vs (what might be termed) ’emergent’ reasoning. However, there are examples in the work of C.S. Peirce, M.A.K. Halliday and others that may be useful for thinking about this domain. In the area of cognitive neuroscience/neuroanthropology I immediately think of the work of T. Deacon, A. Damasio, D. Deutsch, J. Hawkins and others that synthesise this inter-disciplinary domain of knowledge into useful ways of thinking about what might constitute an intelligent system and how it might emerge.

For non-specialists like me there is much to absorb – that can inform ways of critically engaging with this novel technology.

It is terribly important to not be naive about this stuff (AI), as it will (and has already) have transformational impacts upon personhood, economic, political and natural systems, for good and for bad. It is hard to imagine a future when a self-aware, agentive machine intelligence is more than a science ‘fiction.’ It sounds absurd, but perhaps it isn’t.

Imagine a world where people’s online images, text, music, voice recordings, videos, and code get gathered largely without consent to train AI models, and sold back to them for $10 a month. We’re already there but imagine something beyond that – and assume it’s incredible…

…Here’s a thought experiment: imagine an AGI system that advises taxing billionaires at a rate of 95 percent and redistributing their wealth for the benefit of humanity. Will it ever be hooked into the banking system to effect its recommended changes? No, it will not. Will those minding the AGI actually carry out those orders? Again, no.

No one with wealth and power is going to cede authority to software, or allow it to take away even some of their wealth and power, no matter how “smart” it is. No VIP wants AGI dictating their diminishment. And any AGI that gives primarily the powerful and wealthy more power and wealth, or maintains the status quo, is not quite what we’d describe as a technology that, as OpenAI puts it, benefits all of humanity. (Claburn, T. , The Inquirer, 2023)

We don’t have a good definition of intelligence – so it seems best to define it operationally (as Friston et. al. 2022 does). At this stage the take-away is that LLM’s are clearly what the label says: they are language models, not artificial intelligences – they are, literally, Rhetorical Devices.

LLMs statistically parameterise a huge amount of ‘knowledge’ about linguistic representations of the world – based upon their massive set of ‘training’ data. These terms are information, signs, similes, metaphors, metonyms, synedoches – abstractions that can exhibit indefiniteness: degrees of epistemic and ontic undecidability or infinite regression. Uncertainty.

LLMs seem to respond dialogically, perhaps following chains of reasoning akin to the vectors in ‘meaning space’ that Wolfram discusses (’embeddings’ – examples of t-SNE or word2vec dimensional reduction plots). These dialogues can also be guided by user interaction via the Chatbot query interface through ‘chain-of-thought’ reasoning – which demonstrably improves the model performance (even, it seems, when the model performs what might be the equivalent of ‘self-talk’).

Larger models seem to improve inferential reasoning – yet presumably there will be drawbacks or limits in a scale-only approach. Not least amongst these being the prodigious amounts of compute required, and their concomitant use of electricity and consequent carbon-impacts.

Are they ’emulations’ or ‘simulations’? What would this distinction imply?*** To me, it indicates that it (an LLM) is a map, not an actor; a palimpsest, not an agent.

A counterpoint.

At no point with chatGPT is there any self-initiation. Purpose and curiosity, at this juncture, seem very much a human property. Whether this will continue to be the case, time will tell.

Graph explaining Dunning-Kruger curve, reinterpreted for ChatGPT. — Credit: Maurizio Bisogni

For our current purposes we can be reasonably confident about the ongoing necessity of the ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach we’re pursuing. For the time being. And with which humans?

*ChatGPT apparently implements this type of response training interface – thumbs-up/thumbs-down.

***Thanks to my colleague P. Bourke for drawing this distinction to my attention.

References

Altman, S., n.d. Planning for AGI and beyond [WWW Document]. OpenAI. URL https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond#SamAltman (accessed 3.10.23).

Ananthaswamy, A., 2023. In AI, is bigger always better? Nature 615, 202–205. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00641-w

Browning, Jacob, and Yann LeCun. “What AI Can Tell Us About Intelligence,” June 16, 2022. https://www.noemamag.com/what-ai-can-tell-us-about-intelligence.

Browning, Jacob. “AI And The Limits Of Language,” August 23, 2022. https://www.noemamag.com/ai-and-the-limits-of-language.

Claburn, T., n.d. OpenAI CEO heralds AGI no one in their right mind would want [WWW Document]. URL https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/27/openai_ceo_agi/ (accessed 3.10.23).

Daull, Xavier, Patrice Bellot, Emmanuel Bruno, Vincent Martin, and Elisabeth Murisasco. “Complex QA and Language Models Hybrid Architectures, Survey.” arXiv, February 17, 2023. http://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09051.

Deacon, Terrence W. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. WW Norton & Company, 2011.Deacon, Terrence W. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. WW Norton & Company, 1998. ISBN:9780393049916

Dennett, D.C. Consciousness Explained. Little, Brown, 2017. ISBN: 0-316-18065-3

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform The World. Penguin UK, 2011. ISBN: 9780140278163

Friston, Karl J, Maxwell J D Ramstead, Alex B Kiefer, Alexander Tschantz, Christopher L Buckley, Mahault Albarracin, Riddhi J Pitliya, et al. “Designing Ecosystems of Intelligence from First Principles,” December 2022. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.01354.

Halliday, Michael Alexander Kirkwood. Language as Social Semiotic. London Arnold, 1978. ISBN:9780713159677

Hawkins, Jeff. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. Hachette UK, 2021. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.6.1.282

Huang, Jiaxin, Shixiang Shane Gu, Le Hou, Yuexin Wu, Xuezhi Wang, Hongkun Yu, and Jiawei Han. “Large Language Models Can Self-Improve.” arXiv, October 25, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2210.11610.

Ouyang, Long, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll L. Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, et al. “Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback.” arXiv, March 4, 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.02155.

Pearl, J., Mackenzie, D., 2018. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. Penguin UK. ISBN: 9780141982410

Savage, N., 2023. Why artificial intelligence needs to understand consequences. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00577-1

Tanaka-Ishii, K., 2010. Semiotics of Programming. Cambridge University Press. ISBN:9780521516556

Tenachi, W., Ibata, R., Diakogiannis, F.I., 2023. Deep symbolic regression for physics guided by units constraints: toward the automated discovery of physical laws. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2303.03192

Massimini, M., Tononi, G., 2018. Sizing Up Consciousness: Towards an Objective Measure of the Capacity for Experience. Oxford University Press. ISBN:9780198728443

Wolfram, Stephen. “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?,” February 14, 2023. https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-doing-and-why-does-it-work/.

chatGPT, discussion, featured

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Working with AI

February 7, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

Mirror, mirror on the wall – imaged generated by Stable Diffusion. Image credit: Peter Morse

It’s important when working with the current generation of AI systems (principally Large Language Models or LLMs) to approach them with caution and circumspection. The reason for this is essentially human fallibility – both by the end-user and by the system itself.

The computer science behind generative AI is moving so fast that innovations emerge every month. How researchers choose to use them will dictate their, and our, future.

(Stokel-Walker and Van Noorden, 2023: 214-16)

The system I’m currently using – ChatGPT – is genuinely revolutionary in terms of how helpful it is for programming assistance – it has saved me hours and hours of time working out some approaches I can develop to programming problems. The underpinning technology is, in fact, several years old, but the way it has been implemented and its availability is what sets it apart (expect many more of these sorts of systems over the next few years).

But it has also hallucinated things that simply don’t exist – and presented them in a convincing matter-of-fact way:

Q: How can I import a multispectral geotiff into Unreal Engine 5 and break it into different layers for selected wavebands all correctly geolocated?

ChatGPT: To import a multispectral GeoTIFF into Unreal Engine 5 and break it into different layers for selected wavebands, you will need to use a plugin or script that is capable of handling multispectral imagery. One example is the “GeoTIFF Import” plugin, which is available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. This plugin allows you to import a GeoTIFF file and separate it into different layers for each band.

Once you’ve imported the GeoTIFF, you can use the “Landscape” tool to create a terrain that corresponds to the image. You can then use the “Landscape Layer Blend” node in the material editor to control the blending between the different layers of the image.

To correctly geolocate the image, you will need to use the “World Aligned Blocking” feature, which allows you to align the image with the terrain using GPS coordinates. In the Unreal Engine, you can use the “World Settings” panel to set the GPS coordinates for your image.

Alternatively, you can use Python scripts that are designed to handle the import of multispectral GeoTIFFs and separate them into different layers, such as rasterio and gdal libraries. You can then use these layers as textures in the Unreal Engine to create a 3D representation of the multispectral data with accurate geolocation.

I’ve highlighted the plausible falsehoods – for instance, there is no GeoTIFF import plugin for Unreal Engine in the UE Marketplace. There are off-the-shelf solutions for this such as Landscaping, Cesium and Terraform Pro (amongst others out there on the interwebs) – and it would be great if UE could directly import GeoTIFFs via a native plugin. But there isn’t – instead ChatGPT hallucinates a solution. It sounds plausible – just like using a ‘World Aligned Blocking’ feature, or simply using the ‘World Settings’ panel to set GPS coordinates.

Essentially the system is confabulating. Large Language Models are pejoratively referred to as ‘stochastic parrots’ – they act basically as ‘token prediction’ machines, where there is no awareness of on-going context within a given text generated by the system, and certainly no concept of inference or common-sense. Long passages of text or programming are simply realisations of the likelihood of these generated token streams on a larger scale than individual words**, articulated within the interpretive reception of the ‘user’ that may perceive ‘seeming’ coherence:

We say seemingly coherent because coherence is in fact in the eye of the beholder. Our human understanding of coherence derives from our ability to recognize interlocutors’ beliefs [30, 31] and intentions [23, 33] within context [32]. That is, human language use takes place between individuals who share common ground and are mutually aware of that sharing (and its extent), who have communicative intents which they use language to convey, and who model each others’ mental states as they communicate. As such, human communication relies on the interpretation of implicit meaning conveyed between individuals….

Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that. This can seem counter-intuitive given the increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether or not they do [89, 140]. The problem is, if one side of the communication does not have meaning, then the comprehension of the implicit meaning is an illusion arising from our singular human understanding of language (independent of the model).

(Bender and Gebru, 2021:616)

Nevertheless, even with these caveats, the system provides a valuable and useful distillation of a hugely broad-range of knowledge, and can present it to the end user in an actionable way. This has been demonstrated by my use of it in exploring approaches toward Python programming for the manipulation of GIS data. It has been a kind of dialogue – as it has provided useful suggestions, clarified the steps taken in the programming examples it has supplied, and helped me correct processes that do not work.

But it is not a dialogue with an agent – seeming more akin to a revealing mirror, or a complex echo, from which I can bounce back and forth ideas, attempting to discern a truth for my questions. This brings with it a variety of risks, depending upon the context and domain in which it is applied:

The fundamental problem is that GPT-3 learned about language from the Internet: Its massive training dataset included not just news articles, Wikipedia entries, and online books, but also every unsavory discussion on Reddit and other sites. From that morass of verbiage—both upstanding and unsavory—it drew 175 billion parameters that define its language. As Prabhu puts it: “These things it’s saying, they’re not coming out of a vacuum. It’s holding up a mirror.” Whatever GPT-3’s failings, it learned them from humans.

(Strickland, 2021)

Moving beyond this current state, the path to ‘true’ AI, human-level AI, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI (Artificial Super-Intelligence), may be shortish (20 years) or longish (50 years) – but given the current pace of development, my impression is that it will be measured in decades, not centuries. Domain experts have already mapped out research programs that encompass many of the conceptual and scientific breakthroughs that need to be made for this to occur (Hutter, 2005; LeCun, 2022), neatly adumbrated by Friston et al. (2022):

Academic research as well as popular media often depict both AGI and ASI as singular and monolithic AI systems, akin to super-intelligent, human individuals. However, intelligence is ubiquitous in natural systems—and generally looks very different from this. Physically complex, expressive systems, such as human beings, are uniquely capable of feats like explicit symbolic communication or mathematical reasoning. But these paradigmatic manifestations of intelligence exist along with, and emerge from, many simpler forms of intelligence found throughout the animal kingdom, as well as less overt forms of intelligence that pervade nature. (p.4)

…AGI and ASI will emerge from the interaction of intelligences networked into a hyper-spatial web or ecosystem of natural and artificial intelligence. We have proposed active inference as a technology uniquely suited to the collaborative design of an ecosystem of natural and synthetic sensemaking, in which humans are integral participants—what we call shared intelligence. The Bayesian mechanics of intelligent systems that follows from active inference led us to define intelligence operationally, as the accumulation of evidence for an agent’s generative model of their sensed world—also known as self-evidencing. (p.19)

In the meantime, it is the role of the human interlocutor to establish the inferential framework with which we work with these systems. It is remarkable that what until recently seemed like science-fictional concepts are now available for use.

A critical awareness of machine learning and machine intelligence capabilities seems to me to be a prudent mindset to develop for any engagement with technology that interfaces with Earth observation systems – indeed, any observational system, because it is up to us human beings to develop frameworks for designing goals for these systems, and developing the capacity to interrogate and understand them in accessible ways, discern objective and/or consensual truth and to deploy them for good.

For argument’s sake – here’s some hallucinated images of bushfires taken from a satellite, created using Stable Diffusion 1.5. Who’s to say they aren’t real images of real places? How would you be able to tell?

Notes:

**This is a supposition I have made that may or may not be correct (I don’t know, so I am rephrasing this/correcting this as my knowledge increases). Tokens are word fragments or components, and, apparently (see next posts) each is added singly on a stochastic basis – but presumably the probabilistic value is informed by larger-scale probabilistic structures than individual words in sequence. There must be syntagmatic and paradigmatic values at play.

References:

Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Shmargaret Shmitchell. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜.” In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 610–23. Virtual Event Canada: ACM, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3442188.3445922.

Hutter, Marcus. Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability. Germany: Springer, 2005.

LeCun, Yann. “A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence Version 0.9.2, 2022-06-27,” July 2022. https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf&fbclid=IwAR2lFOl7Uy0lyfYbOya3sExmULL9uZopKuPbSJuNBqLYB2G9aob4j32fxqQ.

Stokel-Walker, Chris, and Richard Van Noorden. “What ChatGPT and Generative AI Mean for Science.” Nature 614, no. 7947 (February 6, 2023): 214–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00340-6.

Strickland, Eliza. “OpenAI’s GPT-3 Speaks! (Kindly Disregard Toxic Language).” Accessed February 7, 2023. https://spectrum.ieee.org/open-ais-powerful-text-generating-tool-is-ready-for-business.

discussion, Hyperspectral Imaging, Research

Technical Webinar: Can satellites monitor crop and pasture quality across Australia?

January 16, 2023 morse2022 Leave a comment

From the SmartSat CRC Newsletter:

This Technical Presentation hosted by Ha Thanh Nguyen, Research Scientist in Digital Interactions (Agriculture & Food) at CSIRO explores the outcomes of SmartSat Project P3.25: Can satellites monitor crop and pasture quality across Australia?

Knowledge of crop and pasture quality can provide the industry with insights to assist with the grazing management of pastures and input management decisions for crops. Handheld and lab-based spectroscopy have been extensively employed to monitor quality-based plant attributes. The methods employed are time consuming and expensive to implement and do not provide the industry with insights into the temporal trends of the critical variables. High resolution and frequent return time can overcome numerous deficiencies affecting equivalent visible IR and SWIR platforms, that limit the ability to create a viable product around crop and pasture quality. This project conducted a feasibility analysis capitalising on existing and planned satellite missions, including the Aquawatch satellites and precursors to test development of new high frequency products for crop and pasture quality across the Australian landscape. This project is led by Dr Roger Lawes, Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Agriculture Flagship and includes participants from CSIRO and the Grains Research and Development Corporation. For more information visit https://smartsatcrc.com/research-prog…

Peter Morse 2022-2023