On this week’s Self-Publishing News, Dan Holloway dives into OpenAI's recent demo of GPT-4o, a new iteration of their ChatGPT technology. The demo showcased impressive real-time processing capabilities and emotional storytelling, hinting at a future where AI-narrated audiobooks might rival human voice actors. Dan also touches on the concerns raised by the UK Publishers Association regarding copyright protection in the face of rapid AI advancements and critiques Apple’s latest iPad Pro advert for its misguided metaphor on creativity.
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Listen to Self-Publishing News: GPT-4o
On the Self-Publishing News podcast, @agnieszkasshoes dives into OpenAI's recent demo of GPT-4o, a new iteration of their ChatGPT technology, featuring emotional storytelling. Share on XDon't Miss an #AskALLi Broadcast
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcripts to Self-Publishing News: GPT-4o
Dan Holloway: Hello and welcome to another rather grey early summer day here in Oxford for another self-publishing news podcast, and a slightly different one this week, it's of a podcast, shall we say, because as some of you will know, OpenAI have just been demoing their latest version of ChatGPT, or as they put it, their latest features of ChatGPT. They're very keen not to say that this is now GPT-5 rather than GPT-4.
I have made sure that I waited for them to finish that before I brought you this podcast so that I could basically let you know what we saw and what it might mean for us.
What we saw is something new, and that something new is what they're calling GPT-4o. That's O the letter, not 0 as in zero.
What they are saying is this gives basically GPT-4 level intelligence, but it gives it to everyone. So, it brings what they're calling the very best features of GPT to even the free users.
It wasn't very Razzmatazzy. I think they wanted to make it like a cozy fireside chat. Look at us, we're friendly. This is all good. We are your friends, we're not a great big corporation who's looking to steal your data. No, we just want to make your lives easy. So, no Razzmatazz, but they wanted to make it very clear that this is about making as many features as possible, as free as possible.
So, the highest-level functions from GPT-4 will now be available through GPT-4o to all their free users. They will be also available on a desktop app. So, you can use it anywhere and they will be available for API as well, for developers.
Some extra features, and those extra features in particular are what they're calling real time speed, whereas previous models have had to process input, visual and text and audio input, separately. What they're now doing is they are processing all of those things at the same time. There's no latency at all. ChatGPT responds in real time, whether by text or by voice.
It can pick up voice commands. It can watch what you're doing through the camera on your phone, and it can respond to you in real time, and you can interrupt it, so it won't go off on one.
You can also upload stuff and it will analyse what you're uploading, even quite complex things like images and charts.
The thing that really struck me from the demo, so it was cheesy, demos really always are cheesy, it was very in that sort of spirit of Steve Jobs, technology is your friend, look at this, it's cute, ChatGPT, let's see what it can do.
What they asked it to do was to tell them a story, and this is where it's really interesting for us. They asked it to tell them a story and they got it to do so in a variety of different emotions. So, not only was ChatGPT making up a story, it was a love story about robots falling in love, but they said, oh, can you make it more soothing? Then can you make it more dramatic? Then they asked it to amp the drama up even more and then even more. Then they said, oh, what about doing it in a robotic voice? All of these things the platform just responded in real time and did exactly what they wanted.
It didn't change the content, but it got the emotion, and it was pretty much spot on. It felt really seamless, and it felt like something, we can genuinely no longer say that voice narration doesn't do what humans do in terms of the conveyance of emotion and the parsing of sentences and so on.
It's the kind of thing that is going to make listening to an AI-narrated audiobook pretty much indistinguishable from listening to a voice actor narrated one, with the only difference being it seems that it's going to create the audiobook text as you go.
So, it was really quite an impressive demo. Obviously, we know what Steve Jobs does, we know what tends to happen, these things are not always the live demos they seem to be. So, obviously I've only just finished watching the live stream, so we don't yet know whether there's shenanigans going on. There were enough tiny little glitches in there for it to look as though there aren't.
If that is indeed the case, it's really impressive.
What does that mean for us? It means that the things that we do as creative humans are available to many more hundreds of millions of people, and the way to differentiate ourselves from them is going to be a really interesting thing to try and keep a grasp on.
There was lots of stuff said about security, we're going to make it safe.
There was very little. No, actually, when I say very little, I mean there was nothing about data input, copyright protection, or anything like that, and that leads into two other stories.
UK Government report response shows lack of interest in creativity and arts
So, one is that The Publishers Association in the UK has been really upset with the latest government report, the response to the report from the Communications and Digital Committee of the House of Lords, which is the upper chamber here in the UK.
The government response basically says pretty little about copyright, pretty much nothing about protection of copyright infringement, and this obviously builds on something I reported on earlier in the year, which is the Competition and Markets Authority update on AI, which is all about how to make the UK a centre for tech innovation, nothing about how to make the UK a centre for creativity, for the arts, for media. It just seems to be going down this pathway where there are concerns that there is a lack of access to data, not that there is too much access to data resulting from any infringement of creators’ rights. So, that feels quite worrying.
Apple iPad Pro adverts sparks anger over crushing creativity
The other really interesting news, talking of creativity content and Steve Jobs, or creativity technology and Steve Jobs, is the latest Apple advert.
Apple are clearly missing Steve Jobs. You will remember Think Different, whatever you think of it, it's an iconic advert. Also, Job's famous line about the iPod, a thousand songs in your pocket.
The latest advert for the iPad Pro seems to have taken, what was an incredibly powerful metaphor, filtered it through a marketing team that doesn't understand metaphor, and turned it into a, Ooh, how do we show a thousand creative tools in your machine? I know, we will put a thousand creative tools in a warehouse, we'll get a massive great press, and we will press them down until they are just the size of an iPad.
So, literally, you have pianos, you have record players, you have metronomes, you have cans of paint, you have anything that you might want to use to do something creative and fun, and they are literally squashed and turned into the size of an iPad.
Apart from being singularly unimaginative and proving that Apple have lost the plot a little bit, it has been condemned roundly by most people in the creative industries and outside the creative industries, for the obvious fact that at a time when book bans are making the news constantly, when the humanities are under threat from funding cuts everywhere, when it feels like society is going backwards in the rights of creativity and creators need to be protected at every step, showing people doing the literal equivalent of burning books by breaking instruments, it's not the coolest take on the planet if you want to get creatives on side.
So Apple, which obviously started life as the creatives friend back in the days when it was what graphic designers had to use, it feels like it's lost its way somewhat, and it feels like a soul destroying commentary on the state of technology and creativity, and how to some extent, some parts of the creative world and the technological world have diverged at a time when they should be converging, because there is incredible excitement to be had in that space.
We need people to bring those fields back together rather than this rather crass way of driving them apart. Who knows whether there might indeed be such a thing next week for me to bring you? I don't know. I hope very much there is. If there is, I will certainly report on it. If not, let's wait and see what happens.
I look forward to speaking to you again next week.
Thank you.
