This week has been a big news week in AI. Google DeepMind launched the next generation of its powerful artificial intelligence model Gemini, which has an enhanced ability to work with large amounts of video, text, and images. And OpenAI has built a striking new generative video model called Sora that can take a short text description and turn it into a detailed, high-definition film clip up to a minute long. AI video generation has been around for a while, but Sora seems to have upped the ante. My X timeline has been flooded with stunning clips people have generated using the software. OpenAI claims that its results suggest that scaling video generation models like Sora "is a promising path towards building general purpose simulators of the physical world." You can read more about Sora from Will Douglas Heaven here.
But—surprise—Marcus is not impressed. "If you look at [the videos] for a second, you're like, 'Wow, that's amazing.' But if you look at them carefully, [the AI system] still doesn't really understand common sense," he says. In some videos, the physics are clearly off, and animals and people spontaneously appear and disappear, or things fly backwards, for example.
For Marcus, generative video is yet another example of the exploitative business model of tech companies. Many artists and writers and even The New York Times have sued AI companies, claiming their practice of indiscriminately scraping the internet of data to train their models violates their intellectual property. Copyright issues are top of Marcus's mind. He managed to get popular AI image generators to generate scenes from Marvel movies or famous characters, such as the Minions, Sonic the Hedgehog and Star Wars. He has started lobbying for clearer rules on what goes into AI models.
"Video generation should not be done with copyrighted materials taken without consent, in systems that are opaque, where we can't understand what's going on," he says. "It shouldn't be a legal thing. It's certainly not an ethical thing."
We stop at a scenic spot. It's a beautiful route, with views of the city, the mountains and the beach. A speckle of sun hits the peak of a mountain just across the bay. We could not be further away from Silicon Valley, the epicenter of today's AI boom. "I'm not a religious person, but these kinds of tableaux… just continue to blow my mind," Marcus says.
But, despite the tranquility of the surroundings, it is on walks like this that Marcus often uses X to rail against the power structures of Silicon Valley. Right now, he says, he identifies as an activist.
When I ask him what motivates him, he replies without missing a beat: "The people who are running AI don't really care that much about what you might call responsible AI, and that the consequences for society may be severe."
Late last year he wrote a book, called Taming Silicon Valley, which is coming out this fall. It is his manifesto on how AI should be regulated, but also a call to action. "We need to get the public involved in the struggle to try to get the AI companies to behave responsibly," he says.
There's a bunch of different things people can do, ranging from boycotting some of the software until people clean up their act to choosing electoral candidates around their tech policies, he says.
Action and AI policy are needed urgently, he argues, because we are in a very narrow window during which we can fix things in AI. The risk is that we make the same mistakes regulators made with social media companies.
"What we saw with social media is just going to be like an appetizer compared to what's going to happen," he says.
Around 12,000 steps later, we're back at Granville Island's Public Market. I'm starving, so Marcus shows me a spot that serves good bagels. We both get the lox with cream cheese, eat it outside in the sun, and then part ways.
Later that day, Marcus sends out a flurry of tweets about Sora. He's seen enough evidence to call it: "Sora is fantastic, but it is akin to morphing and splicing, rather than a path to the physical reasoning we would need for AGI," he wrote. "We will see more systemic glitches as more people have access. Many will be hard to remedy."
Don't say he didn't warn you.
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