Five Minute Blockchain • TruBlo Newsletter Nr. 44: How VALL-E creates realistic voices • How to use ChatGPT for almost anything • Why the fight between Genesis and Gemini is now more complicated
Five Minute Blockchain - No. 44
13.01.2023
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes 33 seconds
TRUST
Medium starts a dedicated Mastodon instance
"Online publishing platform Medium, originally created by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, announced today that it’s embracing the open source Mastodon platform by creating its own instance to support its authors and their publications. The company said it’s launching me.dm, a Mastodon community that will offer reliable infrastructure, moderation and a short domain name to make it easier for authors to share their usernames, among other things."
Who is speaking?
Microsoft recently announced a new AI service called VALL-E, which is focused on creating synthetic voices. Using the system, even a short recording of an original voice is sufficient to create an artificial voice which sounds almost like the original.
"... it maintains tone, timbre, a semblance of accent and even the 'acoustic environment', (for instance, a voice compressed into a cell phone call)."
The human ear is not easy to deceive. But with the newest services, we might see a surge in deceiving phone calls or audio recordings, opening a new field of work for dis- and misinformation investigations.
CONTENT
Don't ban Chat GPT in schools - teach with it
Chat GPT poses a problem for schools: What if pupils write a prompt, get a decent answer and hand in the result as their work? Would it be cheating? Kevin Roose (@kevinroose), writing for the New York Times, suggest this:
"Instead, I believe schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults. Here’s why: The first reason not to ban ChatGPT in schools is that to be blunt, it’s not going to work. Sure, a school can block the ChatGPT website on school networks and school-owned devices. But students have phones, laptops and any number of other ways of accessing it outside of class. (Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT how a student who was intent on using the app might evade a schoolwide ban. It came up with five answers, all totally plausible, including using a VPN to disguise the student’s web traffic.)"
ChatGPT Tutorial and Crash Course
Would you like to learn what ChatGPT is or get some advice on how to use the (currently free) platform? Here is a link to an excellent video to get started.
YouTube Link: ChatGPT Tutorial
How to use AI art and ChatGPT to create an entire website
People are already going further. Here is a quick way to create a complete website using the tool.
YouTube Link: Create a website using ChatGPT
How to use ChatGPT to make YouTube videos
The use cases are almost without limits. This one does not create videos directly but uses ChatGPT to write scripts for videos very quickly, including a demonstration of extending initial answers through additions towards facts, etc. There is some product placement here (for a video maker), but the case is interesting.
YouTube Link: How to make a YouTube video using ChatGPT
BLOCKCHAIN
Gemini vs Genesis: It's complicated
One legal fight between crypto companies draws a lot of attention right now, specifically as it became more complicated today.
It is the one between Gemini and Genesis.
Summary: The two companies started a project called "Gemini Earn". Users of Gemini could hold their crypto assets on Genesis and receive interest. Such lending projects worked as long as crypto was on the way up. But since last year, they have come under pressure when the value of crypto holdings fell. In the case of Genesis, the company started blocking any funds withdrawals in November last year. This resulted in angry demands from Gemini to give back the assets.
This week the case became much more complicated: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged both companies with offering an unregistered financial service. As Genesis is now busing sued along with Gemini, this will block any payback of the crypto assets to the original owners for a long time.
SHORT LINKS
Gizmodo found that CNET has been quietly publishing articles based on ChatGPT for months, not indicating that a machine wrote the articles. LINK
CNET explains why it uses AI writing tools like ChatGPT and promises to mark future articles written by such technologies. LINK
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