Tank Man for the 21st century

5th October 2023

Welcome to AI Collision,

In today’s collision between AI and our world,

• Whoop your backside into shape, now with AI 🏋️

• What if “Tank Man” never existed? 🪖

• Priest Snoop will see you now ⛪

If that’s enough to get the guns blazing, read on…

AI Collision 💥 Whoop There It Is 🎵

There’s a fascinating German movie from 2003 called Anatomie 2. As the name would suggest, it’s a sequel to the hugely popular Anatomie.

I bring up the sequel as it’s a favourite of mine. I like it more than the first one (which is rare for sequels).

But it’s in the film that medical students with a complete disregard to ethics and the Hippocratic oath, experiment and test bionics on willing (and not so willing) subjects.

It’s a horror/thriller and quite a dystopian take on the idea of the intersection of humanity and bionics and where the line exists between progress and morality.

While the movie is now 20 years old, it still makes you think about what progress might be like without some of the restrictions regulation forces on us…

Think about sports science for instance. We know over time that athletes have become stronger, faster and just all round better. It’s down to advances in the understanding of everything from training and physiology to nutrition and supplements (and more).

A lot of the work of modern athletes is also down to data. This impacts the training schedule, the playing schedule, as well s time on and off the field. Time spent in the red zone, out of it, and at the end of it all, in the ice bath.

Now mix in the knowledge and capacity to learn of AI.

The big question is, how much further can humanity push itself physically? We know that performance-enhancing drugs are a big no-no… but what about performance-enhancing AI?

Take for instance the rise of the phenomenon that is WHOOP.

WHOOP is a wearables company that makes a fitness tracker called the WHOOP Strap. The WHOOP Strap is a lightweight wristband that tracks a variety of physiological metrics, including heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep quality and blood oxygen levels. The WHOOP app uses this data to provide users with insights into their overall health and fitness, and to help them optimise their training and recovery.

It was founded in 2012 by Will Ahmed, John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae. The company's initial focus was on the professional sports market, but it has since expanded to include consumers and other types of athletes.

You’ll see WHOOP Strap on the arm of pro athletes from Tour De France cyclists to golfers like Rory McIlroy and everyone in between.

WHOOP has raised over $400 million in funding from a variety of investors, including SoftBank Vision Fund 2, IVP and Cavu Ventures. In August 2021, WHOOP raised $200 million in a Series F funding round at a $3.6 billion valuation. This made WHOOP the most valuable standalone human performance company in the world.

And now, it’s taking its product and data to the next level with AI.

The company’s founder and CEO, Will Ahmed, recently announced that WHOOP is integrating AI into its new WHOOP Coach product through a partnership with Microsoft-owned OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT).

Ask WHOOP anything about your data and you will get instant, real-time feedback on your training, sleep, output and performance.

Imagine watching Rory walking down the 18th at The Open and he’s in a tie for the win. It’s down to just one putt – sink it and he wins, misses and he loses.

As he walks over the Swilcan Bridge and he whispers to his WHOOP band to ask about the best way to calm his nerves. He stops, does something and continues on. He makes the putt and wins.

His victory, in part, is down to real-time feedback from WHOOP Coach.

Is that performance enhancing? Or just the evolution of the modern athlete? Does it even matter? If it’s available to all the athletes, then it’s fair, no?

There are questions that will no doubt be raised about the collision of AI, athletes, biometrics, health, performance and success. But what’s also for certain is that companies like WHOOP will be right there making bank as we find AI in more and more parts of our physical lives.

While WHOOP may be privately held for now, I wouldn’t expect that to last long. An initial public offering (IPO) may be on the cards if the environment for risk capital comes back to the market. For me, WHOOP is definitely a fast-moving company to keep on your watchlist.

AI gone wild 🤪

“Crap data in = crap data out” – Sam Volkering

I thought I’d heard the quote I just made above somewhere before. But if I did, I can’t find it. Or at least a Google search can’t find it.

So thereby, this is my quote, and I’m claiming it.

What I’m saying is true though, and highly relevant to the world we’re about to live in.

I subscribe to a few different newsletters and Substacks. It helps to keep a finger on the pulse of what’s going on around various industries in addition to my usual research and network of contacts.

I was recently reading one that I particularly enjoyed, in which they share a post from Twitter, with commentary, that just didn’t seem right to me.

It couldn’t possibly be right. Could it?

The claim was that when you Google search “Tank Man” and then go to the images search, the number one-ranked image for that search is an AI generated image… This one specifically:

“Tank Man”, by the way, refers to the widely known images/video of the Chinese protestor who stood in front of the Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

However, I struggled to believe that an AI image could possibly “dethrone” the images we are all familiar with.

I googled “Tank Man” and here’s what I got:

All seemed as it should be (albeit you can still see the AI Tank Man in the mix).

When I went back to the source, I discovered that at some point, the post was actually true. An AI image had in fact become the number one image when searching for “Tank Man” on Google.

However…

Google was notified of this and subsequently found a way to rectify the situation. According to the OP (original poster), Joseph Cox:

This however does leave some questions to be asked…

Notably, what happens when AI-generated images become so ubiquitous that search engines recognise them as originals and bump the real originals down the list of search rankings?

After all, it is AI powering search now, both Google and Bing are using it guns ablaze.

In essence, we need AI to check that AI is not using the wrong data to populate historical events.

Let me put it this way, what if the AI Tank Man image becomes shared so widely that kids start to actually believe that’s the original Tank Man image?

They will go to a search engine, search “Tank Man” and learn about the historic nature of the event. But they’ll see the AI image. And perhaps just assume it’s real.

And then they pass that knowledge on, and so forth… until in 100 years’ or 200 years’ time, the original Tank Man image ceases to exist – in fact, it’s often cited as “fake” and the AI image is recognised as the one and only true Tank Man image.

It makes you wonder what truth might look like in the future if AI is allowed to source data that is crap data, and a virtuous cycle kicks in where crap data in equals crap data out, and that crap data is the next input and the cycle just goes on and on.

Yep, it’s a bleak outlook. But perhaps with the right checks and balances, human or AI built, we won’t lose history to the realms of generative AI.

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the last week).

Boom 📈

• Bigtincan Holdings (ASX:BTH) up 16.95%

• QuantGate Systems Inc (OTCPNK:QGSI) up 10.66%

• Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) up 5.68%

Bust 📉

• Vicarious Surgical (NYSE:RBOT) down 17.05%

• Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) down 5.45%

• C3.ai (NYSE:AI) down 4.29%

From the hive mind 🧠

• An historic win for movie writers against the threat of AI

• Trust AI? Maybe. Trust AI from the CIA? Oh dear.

• To some AI girlfriends might be awesome. To others, not so much.

• Movie writers might be ok. But what about music writers?

Artificial Pollteligence 🗳️ (Hold fire…)

In Tuesday’s Artificial Polltelligence section, we noted that you’ll typically get a weekly poll on a Thursday (giving you and everyone else time and the weekend to read our letter and think about our poll) and we’ll then publish and dissect the results on a Tuesday.

But as these are our first letters from AI Collision, this week we’re running Tuesday’s poll for a full week, and then next week you’ll get a poll here and “The Results Show” on a Tuesday… so if you missed it, check out Tuesday’s Artificial Polltelligence section.

Weirdest AI image of the day

“Snoop Dogg as a priest” – from Kvng Whillz on Twitter

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

"Believe you can and you're halfway there." - Theodore Roosevelt

Thanks for reading, see you on Tuesday. And if you’re enjoying our work, please like, share and leave comments below,

Sam Volkering

Editor-in-Chief

AI Collision

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