This ad was purposefully playing off the fact that it was AI though, it was a large amount of short bizarre things like two old women selling Fresh Manatee out of the back of a truck. You couldn't replace a regular ad with this.
Is there any example of an AI generated film like this that is actually coherent? I've seen a couple short ones that are basically just vibe based non-linear things.
Some of the festival winners purposely stay away from talking since AI voices and lipsync are terrible, eg. "Poof" by the infamous "Pizza Later" (who is responsible for "Pepperoni Hug Spot") :
Without commenting on the overall conclusion, these parts not correct:
"it can distinguish testosterone from any other molecule based on its exact molecular weight and fragmentation pattern. This means that does NOT fall for the bait that immunoassays like RIA do, where similar looking things are potentially tallied because antibodies are, as we call it in the business, promiscuous."
--and--
"There's no indirect measurement, no antibody binding, no relative comparison to a standard that might be off. If the machine counts 1000 testosterone molecules in your sample, that's exactly what was there."
In reality, the there are several fudge factors you need to apply to the MS to get absolute counts (starting from the back):
1. The ion detector (a pulse-counting electron multiplier) efficiency depends on the discriminator's threshold voltage, the multiplier's bias voltage, and the age of the multiplier. As the multiplier wears out from ion & electron impacts (they have a special low work-function coating on the inside of the multiplier channel), the multiplication ratio degrades. There's a precision/recall or sensitivity/specificity trade-off with respect to the bias and threshold voltages. Since these tradeoffs impact recall/sensitivity, they affect absolute counts that the detector produces for a given ion flux coming out of the mass filter.
2. The mass filter (the link shows a quadrupole mass filter, but the same applies to time-of-flight setups) may have some losses when the incoming ion fragments are not perfectly focused. This impacts absolute count rate.
3. The ionizer at the front of the MS produces ions from neutral species by hitting them with (usually) electrons (but you can use photons too). The energy of those electrons affects both the fragmentation pattern of the ions and the ionization efficiency (absolute counts, again). ("Fragmentation pattern" in this context means the mass distribution of the resulting fragments) Ionizer current also especially affects ionization efficiency (number of ions produced from a given incoming flux of neutrals). Most ionizers also have a set of ion lenses to guide the resulting fragments into the mass filter, and the potentials of these lenses are important both for focusing the ion fragments (so the mass filter has high Q) and for capture efficiency (again, absolute count rate).
Most of the things that affect absolute counts are fairly stable in a well-designed MS, but the multiplier is effectively a wear component. So you do have to compensate for that as it ages.
All this is to say:
1. Getting an absolute count from a MS requires calibration using a source with some known flux. It doesn't just come intrinsically from using a MS. I don't know enough about the older method to say if calibration is easier with a MS (almost certainly it is), but the author is hand-waving away a lot of calibration in a MS.
2. I don't know anything about the fragmentation patterns of T specifically, but I do know that organic molecules have complex fragmentation patterns, and that back-fitting to get the distribution of original species (when the incoming flux is not one pure species) can be very challenging. A MS is still sensitive (at some level) to contamination by other species.
All of this could be addressed by a self-calibration setup using a consumable (and probably only available from the original manufacturer for $$$) reference standard, but you don't get to claim that there's "no relative comparison to a standard" nor "it can distinguish testosterone from any other molecule". Both of those are false statements.
The story is pretty clearly meant to indicate that the Babylonians were worshiping an animal though. The theology of the book of Daniel emphasises that the Gods of the Babylonians don't exist, this story happens around the same time Daniel proves the priests had a secret passage they were using to get the food offered to Bel and eat it at night while pretending that Bel was eating it. Or when Daniel talks to King Belshazzar and says "You have praised the gods of silver and gold, of bronze, iron, wood, and stone, which do not see or hear or know, but the God in whose power is your very breath and to whom belong all your ways, you have not honored". This is not to argue for the historical accuracy of the stories, just that the point is that Daniel is acting as a debunker of the Babylonian beliefs in these stories while asserting the supremacy of the Israelite beliefs.
Iran specifically was super worried about overpopulation in the 80s and the government began a massive program to decrease childbirth rates. With things like government messaging on small families and providing free birth control. Here is a graph that shows it
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira...
I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.
I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.
The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich.
So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
> I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done.
It is still true, but it was inaccurately presented as overpopulation, rather than excess resource consumption and entropy generation.
The mass starvation and death is not going to be a sudden nuclear bomb type event, it will be gradual decreases in quality of life due to changing environmental variables leading to changing political climates and eventually physical conflicts.
Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life.
(If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)
OK but all the software code the AI companies write is also IP so they're probably not going to make the argument that all of their stuff should be fair game too.
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