Announcing Xavvi, a Great Leap Forward for App Building

[paul@researchware.com]

The other area that there has been a few legals cases around has been instances where someone has tried to copyright ot patent something generated by an AI in the name of the AI (vs a person or persons). The rling hae consistantly rules that a Patent or Copyright can't be in the AI's "name" bt mst be by people.

I think that makes sense - the patent or copyright should be in the name or names of the people who made and/or trained the AI rather than the AI itself. It would be like someone writing a Livecode app and then tryng to copyright the App with the author being "Livecode" (the tool).

If someone tells an AI generate a new drug candidate to treat disease X and it does, I think it's still the person who entered the request for the new drug candidate or the people who trained it to find new drugs that deserve the patent or copyright.

[Francesco77]

Of all the different software development systems I've used over the past 30 years, LiveCode is definitely the only one that periodically asks for more money.

I mean, if someone had such a great business idea, surely investors should be found to fund it. Even without begging from users on a regular basis.

As for AI, it's the most fascinating and dangerous thing that's ever happened in the digital world.

We will (hopefully) all see what happens.

[paul@researchware.com]

I mean, if someone had such a great business idea, surely investors should be found to fund it. Even without begging from users on a regular basis.

If you have every contributed to a Livecode crowdfunding effort, then you ARE an investor. You are either getting product, services, or something as the return on your investment (with some eceptions where people simply contributed for no reward or downstream enhancement to the product). Whether that return was worth the investment or not is a consideration every investor has to make on each investment as it develops.

[richmond62]

then you ARE an investor

Then it is 'funny' that people are not made to feel that.

[richmond62]

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Well, in spite of my fairly cynical nature, at this moment all I can do is say "Well Done LiveCode."

AND, of course, see what materialises.

[HenryDi]

Honestly, after all the license changes in Livecode, I don't feel like burning or investing money again. I'll wait until 2024 and see how far the platform is developed.

[joseggarza]

Hi dear friends...

I would like to share this reflection from a student of mine whom I teach LiveCode.

He is 13 years old and very intelligent (a genius! ) and sometimes comes to this forum as a guest to
understand the language better and to experiment.

Yesterday, he saw that there is persistent talk about Xavvi on the site and said to me (I summarize his thoughts):

"Teacher, it seems useless to me to keep learning LC, in a few months you will ask
Xavvi to make an app and he will make it. Our jobs cannot compete
with those generated and powered by AI, so probably, only those who will not
will have the money for the professional subscription (and he was referring to me! ) will write themselves
bad code on their own ."

I add another thought that I thought was interesting (I always summarize his speech):

"Moreover, the figure of the programmer, who used to be a 'wizard', is now outdated instead. With Xaavi, there is no need for that wonderful 'understandable' language to teach us, because who cares about language? " And then, which seems even more interesting to me, "Why, since Xavvi has artificial intelligence, couldn't I "save as" in other languages like Python as well?"
And I conclude, "Lc is committing suicide since its strength, which is the human programming language, is delegated to a machine that generates code for humans (who will no longer care about the code)."

To me, frankly, this new swerve debases all the promises that were made for LC 10, including even that willingness to make the "exe" safer, smaller and less decompilable.
Xavvi will make LC worse than the name it has when I talk to other teachers "Ah! LC!, But it's not a language! It's a toy!" and now they will say "Ah, you did this in LC! ChatGPT made it for you! Ah ah! But I did it in Python always with the help of ChatGPT!".

Sorry, I'm depressed... and then the marketing style chosen for Xaavi, with all due respect and affection, seems to me that of the pot seller... and after a few days of pushing... here it comes that if Xaavi doesn't make money everything will fail!

In short ... as always thank you all and I greet the little genius who will surely read these lines and be happy. But my dear student...I read a lot of science fiction as a girl and believe me, never trust the machines, always keep yourself in control because the end is always to get crushed by the gears...or worse...to be part of them!

Un bacio grande a tutti...I feel useless...both as an aspiring programmer and as a teacher to children...

Mariasole
(='.'=)

In life, science and knowledge are built block by block. Nothing can be created with the snap of a finger. I remember 40 years ago, they said the same about calculators. Nowadays, children no longer use simple calculators; they use scientific calculators. Thanks to these advancements, many children are already exposed to calculus in high school at a young age. There's no reason to be afraid of science; instead, we should use it for the greater good and create a new block of intelligence.

Jose Garza

[Mariasole]

Hello Jose,
unfortunately, science, at least in schools, with all its toys, from smartphones to this new marketing initiative that is generative AI, is creating ignorance.
Thanks to pocket calculators very few students in Italy, and we are talking about university students, know the multiplication tables by memory.
Thanks to automatic spellcheckers in school (Word et similia), students do not think it is important to remember how to spell words correctly.

We have gone from humans who with Vedic math instantly calculated multiplications and square roots in their heads to people with atrophied brains.

The worldwide decline in IQ is in my opinion due to the fideistic relationship we have with science/technology.
But I simplify even more. As the ancient Romans used to say (which in short, scientifically and technologically still represent the top since there are two-thousand-year-old buildings that "regenerate" thanks to cement whose formula still remains quite secret) idleness is the mother of all vice.

In other words: techno-commodity makes man stupid. One who will use Xavvi (or whatever it is called--a meaningless name, and nomen omen said the Latins/Greeks...) will certainly be less original and creative than one who will not use it.

For a student it will be even worse: the one who will use AI to generate his code will not know what it means to create code... because in spite of the pot sellers, the magic lies not in the AI but in the heart of the programmer*.

Among other things, these AIs are "stochastic parrots" whose gross errors, unnoticed by a society that is becoming mentally underdeveloped, will go on to swell the crass ignorance of the decision-makers, leading us to a world like Idiocracy or simply ... as AI said so many years ago.... Let's play Global Thermonuclear War....


Mariasole
(='.'=)



*I could have said in the brain, but maybe everyone doesn't know that the heart is populated with neurons and that you really can reason with your heart. Peace and love to all...

[richmond62]

Cripes.

I sit somewhere in the middle of these 2 polarised opinions.

[mwieder]

It could get (is getting) much much worse. This is both ridiculous and very scary. Even when doing research on wikipedia I'll check other sources for verification...

The TLDR version
A lawyer asked ChatGPT for examples of cases that supported an argument they were trying to make.

ChatGPT, as it often does, hallucinated wildly—it invented several supporting cases out of thin air.

When the lawyer was asked to provide copies of the cases in question, they turned to ChatGPT for help again—and it invented full details of those cases, which they duly screenshotted and copied into their legal filings.

At some point, they asked ChatGPT to confirm that the cases were real... and ChatGPT said that they were. They included screenshots of this in another filing.

The judge is furious. Many of the parties involved are about to have a very bad time.

https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/lawyer-chatgpt/

[FourthWorld]

Good times. Maybe one reason the world's wealthiest tech company, Apple, is taking their time entering the market is that they understand how things this big need some time to settle down before we can plan productive work with meaningful budgets.

For example, the US Copyright Office has ruled that their mandate, to provide copyright protection for original creative works, only applies to work humans create, and portions generated by machine are excluded from copyright protection in the US:

A human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.’ Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection,” the statement of policy read.

The Office continued to say that, in these cases, copyright will only protect aspects of the work that were judged to have been made by the authoring human, resulting in partial protections of entire works, as in Kashtanova’s case.

According to the statement of policy, applicants who submit their works for registration from now on must declare if AI was used in any part of the work and those who have submitted applications that lack this declaration must amend them.

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/a ... 234661683/

USCO policy statements and guidelines can be read in full directly from their office:
https://copyright.gov/ai/

Meanwhile on the other side of the pond, the EU draft proposal of the AI Act will almost certainly raise API access fees and curtail some usage applications as it seeks to address concerns of privacy, accuracy, and sourcing:

The GDPR, the EU’s data protection regulation, is the bloc’s most famous tech export, and it has been copied everywhere from California to India.

The approach to AI the EU has taken, which targets the riskiest AI, is one that most developed countries agree on. If Europeans can create a coherent way to regulate the technology, it could work as a template for other countries hoping to do so too.

“US companies, in their compliance with the EU AI Act, will also end up raising their standards for American consumers with regard to transparency and accountability,” says Marc Rotenberg, who heads the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a nonprofit that tracks AI policy.

Editorial summary here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/0 ... ct-europe/

EU press release, which includes a link to the AI Act itself:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/ ... telligence


Those of us who are pro-business may reflexively scoff at regulations of this scope.

But it's worth noting that some of the biggest concerns, and requests for broad legislative restrictions, and coming from the product manufacturers themselves.

Here's Elon Musk and Sam Altman:

Altman, 37, stressed that regulators and society need to be involved with the technology to guard against potentially negative consequences for humanity. “We’ve got to be careful here,” Altman told ABC News on Thursday, adding: “I think people should be happy that we are a little bit scared of this.

“I’m particularly worried that these models could be used for large-scale disinformation,” Altman said. “Now that they’re getting better at writing computer code, [they] could be used for offensive cyber-attacks.”
...
The Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, one of the first investors in OpenAI when it was still a non-profit company, has repeatedly issued warnings that AI or AGI – artificial general intelligence – is more dangerous than a nuclear weapon.

Musk voiced concern that Microsoft, which hosts ChatGPT on its Bing search engine, had disbanded its ethics oversight division. “There is no regulatory oversight of AI, which is a *major* problem. I’ve been calling for AI safety regulation for over a decade!” Musk tweeted in December. This week, Musk fretted, also on Twitter, which he owns: “What will be left for us humans to do?”

On Thursday, Altman acknowledged that the latest version uses deductive reasoning rather than memorization, a process that can lead to bizarre responses.

“The thing that I try to caution people the most is what we call the ‘hallucinations problem’,” Altman said. “The model will confidently state things as if they were facts that are entirely made up.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... rning-gpt4

Altman's and other testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee can be read in full here:
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/commit ... telligence

When the manufacturer of a product tells you it may harm you, believe them.

[stam]

Very emotive posts here, but not sure I agree with most of the opinions expressed.

While the biggest risk is AI’s contribution to disinformation, let us not forget that we already put ourselves in that hole without any help from AI. The disinformation that flows through and drowns everything on social media is confirmed by the the influence this has had on political and economic realities we’ve all witnessed. Brexit, storming the Capitol, you name it. Everyone is constantly gaslighted, and that’s without any help from AI.

As to Musk’s opinions, it’s hard not to see his musings as a “humble brag” - as in, ‘oh look how powerful my AI is, it will render us all useless’. Yes it will change how we work, in the same way that CAD applications have revolutionised how architects work. But like architects the “important” jobs won’t go away, although the more menial tasks of producing sound architectural drawings will be affected. In short I call BS on that one.

And on the topic of worrying how AI will “make us stupid”: it is skills, not intellect that will be affected. It’s almost within living memory that a wake up calls were provided by people wondering the streets and knocking on windows, at least in the UK. Yet funnily enough no one bemoans the loss of these jobs.

A calculator doesn’t make you “dumb”. Using an abacus or your fingers doesn’t make you “smart”. Using AI will not affect anyone’s intellect… and seeing these posts on a programming forum seems inordinately oxymoronic.

There are of course pitfalls like the silly lawyer example posted above. But this “stupid behaviour” is secondary to poor education, not AI.

I’m sure everyone has had similar experiences to mine, in that newer generations appear less knowledgable, less capable. When I consider the skills I had as a newly qualified doctor, it makes me cringe how our very senior trainee doctors can’t even consider 10% of the procedures I was skilled in and have only a fraction of the theoretical knowledge I was forced to learn.

But is this the fault of technology? The answer for me is a categorical “no”. It’s clearly the fault of decisions of those forming the shape of education based on economical and political pressures. At least in the UK, it is clear there is a drive to mass-produce poorly educated and low-skill doctors that can be more easily manipulated.

And I suspect the same is true of wider education. It is in most governments’ interest to suppress critical thinking and mass-produce worker drones that are easily influenced and manipulated. how else will they sell the 2-party system that masquerades as democracy to the masses?

This is where educationalists have the greatest opportunity to help improve things - teaching critical thinking. I remember how my teachers in school passionately pushed critical thinking, looking beyond the obvious and questioning, but I suspect this no longer happens. No one is an island and everyone is subject to economical and political pressures - it can’t be easy to push an idealistic agenda when you’re vastly overworked, underpaid and undervalued as a teacher. And this is intentional.

My point being AI is just a more capable tool. But how society changes is not the result of technology, it’s the result of political will.

AI will definitely change things. Pretending it’s not there and insisting LiveCode doesn’t incorporate this will do exactly squat. If there are worries how this will will affect the tiny proportion of students that rely on LC, it is up to the teachers, not LC to fix this…

[richmond62]

I was fed this sort of nonsense at school in 1971:
-

-
Our teacher piously and dogmatically declared that this is how we would live when we were all 38 (i.e. 2000 AD).

Needless to say, Richmond had to stand in the corner for asking the teacher what evidence she had to 'know' that: later my
father went round and complained to the Headmaster (a school mate of Dylan Thomas) who made the teacher stand in the corner of
his office and attempt to explain why she was not encouraging kids to think [but, Hey, that was 1971 in an experimental school].

Now some of that stuff is 'on its way' (well, if you believe Musk), and some is well behind us (black and white tellies): and
that has seemed to be the case everytime somebody has looked into their extremely cloudy crystal ball . . .

So: well, Yes, A.I. can be dangerous, and, well. Yes, A.I. can bring us good things: but as both of those statements
are just about as nebulous as one can get . . . so frigging well what?

We should worry about the fact that in places like Britain they now have 145 'Universities', of which about 125 are not fit for purpose

[pace my attendance at the 'University' of Abertay on an 'MSc' program where the lecturer was teaching stuff I had learnt in High school at 14 -
and she was getting things wrong.],

and the remaining 20 have had to lower their standards to meet 'productivity norms', and where there is a continual banging on about
'critical thinking' but almost no evidence of that happening. The Monster Robots of the Science Fiction future will not have to be very
clever to take over the world as we are so busy dumbing ourselves down all they are going to have to worry about is a bunch of bald
apes a dozen Bonobos could knock out without pausing for breath.
-

[richmond62]

Pretending it’s not there and insisting LiveCode doesn’t incorporate this will do exactly squat.

1. That's up to LiveCode, so no one else can 'insist' anything of the sort.

2. LiveCode are not really incorporating A.I. into LiveCode, as they have been at pains to explain.
LiveCode are building something with A.I. that can be used as an add-on to LiveCode.

3. Getting "all hot and sweaty" means, mainly, that you get all hot and sweaty, and very little else.
Having a relatively calm and sensible discussion about some extremely important considerations
might bear fruit, and fruit that does not leave a bad taste in people's mouths.

4. LiveCode would be silly to ignore A.I., whatever it may turn out to actually produce [and that is far from
clear at the moment], just as radio actors who refused to act for the television in the 1950s were silly
and found themselves unemployed.

5. LiveCode may be engaging with A.I. in a way that some users of LiveCode feel they
do not like. But, as they have stated, you can have LiveCode 'plain and simple', or you can have LiveCode
with Xavvi: so there is no obvious reason why one has to protest.

6.

Vedic math

Someone has been on the hotline with Modi, Bhaktivedanta swami and all the other peddlers of the mystical
Satya-Yuga BS age [probably quite a lot of BS given the level of cow worship that was supposedly going on].
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rama-airplane.jpg (28.12 KiB) Viewed 65376 times

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Aeroplanes in Satya Yuga: Beam me up Scotty.

As you can see, those Vedic engineers were way ahead with aerodynamics.

This is a bit like saying that when Leonardo da Vinci was strutting his funky stuff the level of mental Mathematics
was higher in Europe than it is now. This is a load of cod: Leonardo da Vinci and half a dozen also-rans were very
good indeed at mental Maths (and, judging by da Vinci's notebooks, good at working things out on paper): but 98%
of the population couldn't divide a 3 figure number by a 2 figure number to save their lives.

And before I got a calculator (at 15) I had a slide-rule for the very simple reason that I was as crap then at complicated
Maths as I was after I got my calculator: Oh, and I had a big book of Log tables for the same reason.
-

-
Sure beats the BS out of Sadaputa's effort:
-

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An early effort in fake news [or fake science].

[jiml]

the US Copyright Office has ruled that their mandate, to provide copyright protection for original creative works, only applies to work humans create, and portions generated by machine are excluded from copyright protection in the US:

But the Patent Office has long held:

“The threshold question in determining inventorship is who conceived the invention. Unless a person contributes to the conception of the invention, he is not an inventor. ... One must contribute to the conception to be an inventor.”

Imagine challenges to patents where it can be shown an AI was first to invent!
Or that the inventor was assisted by AI.
Would such a co-invention be ruled unpatentable since it was not fully invented by a human?

And at the same time US law also considers corporations to be persons.

A new era of full employment for lawyers!!!