Voice cloning is here, protect your passwords, and more...
Keep up to date on curated AI, security, tips, tricks and more with The Digital Life!
Welcome back to the Digital Life. We’re a little late getting this month’s issue out - things have been busy out here in San Clemente. We hope this month’s newsletter is worth the wait.
Give us a call with any questions or needs as Memorial Day and the travel season get underway.
Thanks for your continued support of Lökwest, and Happy early Mother’s Day to all the Moms out there!
Our excuse for being late on this month’s newsletter - at least partially. We were volunteers last weekend at Art & Creativity for Healing’s annual Fundraising Dinner and Gala “A Canvas of Hope.” It was a great evening for a wonderful organization that’s been a long-time client (and therefore an “unofficial” newsletter sponsor. 🙂)
Check out the summary of the gala, then look around their site to see what Art & Creativity for Healing does in the community. You can try out the Art4Healing® method live online via Zoom, via pre-recorded courses on Teachable, and live in Laguna Hills!
This month in AI
This month in AI land, we’ve selected a couple of fun examples of creative AI use and a thought piece from one of the sector’s leaders (who I also follow on Substack).
The capabilities I’m seeing advance daily, and I’ve started to incorporate Chat GPT and other AI tools into my workflow. The next frontier is knowing how to effectively work with and prompt AI models to generate the desired output. That takes some practice.
Voice cloning technology is moving at the same pace as other AI technology. Thanks to the hours and hours of vocals captured on your devices over the years, the base models are trained well. So well, in fact, a basic cloned voice can now be had with 30 minutes of audio and $39/month. Read about this reporter’s experience of cloning his own voice and testing it on his family and friends. This could be the “Grandma I’m in trouble” call scam on steroids if put to the wrong use.
Here’s another clever side project from a friend who had a group chat going on with his college buddies for 7 years and over 500,000 messages. What to do with all that past conversation? Train a personal AI to emulate the group, of course. Read about this guy chatting with his virtual friends and how they reply just like the real bros.
It’s amazing to type anything into an AI model and get a reasonably good answer. It’s almost as though there’s another person, the “Mechanical Turk” behind the curtain, at our beck and call. Tempting as it may be to attribute sentience to these models, they are NOT. In fact, if you understand enough of the mechanics, the current models are not much better than a very good educated guesser of what comes next in a phrase. Don’t fall into the “it’s alive” trap - just yet. 😮
Security and Privacy Updates
You’ve heard it all before - your password is at risk. With the breakneck speed of AI development, passwords are becoming more and more vulnerable. After reading this, you may want to second-guess your clever scheme. And remember, long passwords are good passwords. For example, to crack a password with uppercase, lowercase, and numbers, here are some of the numbers: 7 characters - 42 seconds, 8 characters - 48 minutes, 9 characters - 2 days, 12 characters - 2,000 years. Every character matters.
Yep - we’ve scared your pants off about your passwords, yet again. Are you convinced to bite the bullet and use a password manager yet? Apple is making two-factor, tokenized authentication easier by building that feature into its own password manager. Before, when you needed “the second code from the app” you had to open up another app to get it. This may bring more people over to app-based, secure tokens.
Google / Android users aren’t missing out on the security upgrades either. Google is following Microsoft’s lead and converting to a password-less authentication system. Now, you can secure your Google account and set it up so you only need a code from an app to log in. In the long run, this is much more secure than a password and a code texted to you. Read all about setting it up here.
It wouldn’t be another month if we didn’t write about how big data is sucking up all the behavior it can about you. In the latest of “oh my gosh” moments in the cycle, read about how all the telehealth, mental health, self-help, and other apps are packaging, sharing, and selling your data to the highest bidder. Next will come the “we’re sorry”, slap on the wrist, and submission by the public because they don’t have any other alternatives in some cases.
Sometimes it may just be better to visit the shrink and pay cash…..😂
That’s Interesting
I’ve always envisioned an army of tiny robots that could be injected like an oil cleaning to purge the body of defective cells from time to time. The “shrinking machine” trope has been around for ages in science fiction. Now, a machine that can navigate to capture a single cell is here. This could be a breakthrough in any kind of targeted diagnostic or therapy.
Take the social graph concept of Facebook, and the messaging capabilities of Slack, throw in a ton of information and communications processing capabilities, and use it to fight a war. Take a look at the next-generation way war is behind decided with this rarely unclassified look at Palantir’s AIP suite. 😮
In Closing
After reading “The Surveillance Economy”, I’m on the lookout for my next great book in computer science, physics, or philosophy. If you have a recommendation, reply to this e-mail! Maybe we should start a book club? 🙂