[00:00:09.210] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.670] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.160] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.000] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.040] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week with Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And it's been a very busy seven days.
[00:00:26.250] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:26.720] - Gordon
You had a birthday.
[00:00:27.710] - Taylor
I did.
[00:00:28.490] - Gordon
Which was very exciting. And we had a day out Back to the Future what's the word? Exhibition. Did we mention this last week? I can't remember.
[00:00:41.150] - Taylor
I think we did.
[00:00:42.080] - Gordon
Okay, so I won't repeat it then, but we had a great day. What else has happened this week? You had a hospital appointment.
[00:00:51.110] - Taylor
Yes.
[00:00:51.980] - Gordon
Okay. Things are happening with that. You went to see the consultant. That's pretty much it. Been sort of catching up with people because it's getting closer to Christmas now. So, yeah, that's sort of a catch up of other things that we've been doing in the last seven days. So let's go through to our topics for the week. First of all, any news?
[00:01:14.120] - Taylor
No, none from me.
[00:01:15.110] - Gordon
No news. Okay, straight into our topics then. Do you want to go first?
[00:01:17.920] - Taylor
Yes. So my topic this week is AI.
[00:01:21.610] - Gordon
That was going to be my topic.
[00:01:23.460] - Taylor
Well, shame I said it first. So there's lots of different types of AI that people are using now. A lot of them are open source. A popular one is GPT-3, which is, you can do chat, which has just been released, and you can do lots of other things. You can get it to complete, you can give it prompts and things like that. It can complete sentences, things. And there's also been AI used for generating code. So there was a new tool that was released recently where you can ask it to generate a bit... you know, "I want to do this," and it will generate you some code that you can put into your projects. Which is very clever. It can also explain to you what code is doing. So you give it code and then you say, "what is this doing?" And it will explain to you what it does, which is very very clever. You can also generate images. So there's MidJourney. Now, MidJourney is a tool where you give it a prompt and it will generate you an image. And they're very very good. You can get quite high res images and quite realistic images as well from these prompts. And obviously the more detail you give them, and the more information, the better the prompts are or the better the images that are generated are.
[00:02:51.670] - Gordon
Yeah, I've actually signed up for MidJourney. It costs $10 a month and for that you get 200 minutes of GPU time, which is an interesting way of pricing it. So a picture or a graphic that it creates will take an average of a minute, basically, or four pictures, in fact, will take about a minute. So you're getting sort of one image, you've got four variations of it, per minute. So you're getting about 200 images ish I mean, it's very round. It depends on a lot of settings, like your aspect ratio, which is something I found out you can do the other day. So you can do 3:2, which will give you a sort of a landscape style picture, but you can also go in and change and remix those pictures. So you might end up having sort of several generations to get the picture you actually want. And they are really, really good. And there's a definite skill in writing prompts for these to get what you want, I found.
[00:03:57.200] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely. And obviously a lot of the training that is done for all of these AIs comes from open source code, open source people...
[00:04:07.860] - Gordon
Images and text.
[00:04:09.310] - Taylor
People that are using the AI, it's obviously learning from that and saying, "okay, well, this is what you asked and this is the image that you actually wanted to use. And so this is the best one out of them." And then kind of use that in the future for when it's generating new images.
[00:04:27.050] - Gordon
Yeah. And in fact, I should say that MidJourney uses Discord, which if you don't have an account with, you should, it's free. And it basically allows you to have a go as well. You get sort of 15 images for free, something like that. So you can have a go at MidJourney. There was something else I was going to say about MidJourney. I can't think what it is. It'll come back to me as soon as you carry on talking.
[00:04:54.910] - Taylor
I mean, the licencing and things like that around AI is very grey at the moment because people kind of don't know if it's using training on data that other people have written. Do they have the copyright? Do you have the copyright because you've written the prompt? Do the people that have trained the AI own the copyright? So there's a lot of grey area about who owns what. AI currently can't write original content because obviously it's only being trained on the data it's been given, but it's very good for giving you briefs, giving you outlines for content. So if you're a marketer, for example, if you are writing articles, if you're writing essays, you can definitely use it to give you a basis on which you can then use and modify and rewrite yourself. But it can give you a good starting point on any topics that you want.
[00:05:55.000] - Gordon
And Chat GPT is like a chat bot. It's something very new. I only came across it yesterday, in fact, and it does effectively the Turing test, it's the Eliza. Do you remember? Do you know about Eliza? Eliza was a programme that was written, and basically the Turing test is the computer is in one room and a real person is in another room and it talks to the computer through an interface and the person who is doing the talking has to decide whether they're talking to a computer or if they're talking to an actual real life person. And it's a long standing test that's been since sort of computing started; and I think we're nearly there. I think we're getting so close now that it's going to be really difficult to actually distinguish whether you're talking to a real person or not. And this Chat GPT is very, very clever. I'm not sure what the sort of real world usage of this is going to be, because we already have chat bots. I don't know if it's going to be adding intelligence into the chat bots, even more intelligence. They do already have intelligence, but only to what you've programmed them to do. So it might be that it's going to allow a wider range of questions and be able to interact with people in a better way. I'm not sure, but it's very exciting. And what I have to say about OpenAI, which is the sort of company that's pushing all this forward, is that they are moving ahead in such gigantic leaps at the moment. We had, for example, version three of MidJourney only a few months ago and now we're on version four. So a lot of the videos that are on YouTube about MidJourney are already out of date, because we've already gone to the next generation and that was only a couple of months ago. So in the next two, three months we might have another version.
[00:08:09.770] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:08:09.770] - Gordon
It's just moving so quickly at the moment.
[00:08:13.870] - Taylor
Okay.
[00:08:13.870] - Gordon
And it is interesting to see where this is going to go because you can, if you're doing images, you can put "in the style of" and then put somebody's name, which is very interesting. So talking about the licencing, as you were, is the style that you have decided you want your image in, is that sort of ripping off the original artist who's created this style? Is it building on what they've already done, you know, standing on the shoulder of giants type thing? It's a real grey area. And I was reading an article just the other day about how the legal system, and the people who make the laws, are just not keeping up with technology as we have it. For example, Deep Fakes is using AI to create video of what looks like people we know, celebrities, but it's just a computer that's been trained on their model. And Deep Fakes is something else that's helped out with a lot of films where one of the main characters has died halfway through filming. They're able to then carry on with the rest of the film, using AI and CGI to put all of the content and the imagery of the person who's no longer with us, into the film so they can finish it. Which is really interesting. But yeah, I think we've got a long way to go, and a lot of hoops and rules and things to jump through before it's clear cut. But it is very exciting.
[00:09:51.870] - Taylor
Yeah, it's very interesting. And there's lots to come.
[00:09:54.850] - Gordon
There is lots to come. Oh, just by the way, the Chat GPT, which is free to use at the moment, we'll put a link in the show notes, would also create code for you as well, so you can go in there and ask it to write JavaScript on a function and it will create it for you, which is amazing. It's been trained how to do it. Anything else you want to say on that?
[00:10:18.020] - Taylor
No. There was GitHub Co-pilot, which was something that GitHub released, which is based on AI and supposed to help you when you're writing code to predict what the next bit of code you need to write and things like that. And there was a lot of kind of disagreements about it because a lot of... GitHub was using and training based on GitHub code. So the people that have uploaded code to GitHub. But there was rumours that they were using private GitHubs. So, things that were being used in production in corporate companies that were not open source, and they had been used that code. And so obviously they're not licenced to use that, because it's not under the open source licencing. Whether that be GPL or any of the other open source licences. So there was a lot of kind of questions about "what are you using to train your models?" And things like that. And people were saying that some of the code they've written for closed software was appearing as suggestions in the Co-pilot. So there's obviously a legal standpoint from that about what's allowed, what's not allowed and things like that.
[00:11:36.910] - Gordon
Yeah, that is very interesting, and I don't know enough about it to know if they can remove code from the model and... I guess that sounds reasonable. So can they take all of the copyrighted code out and then that fixes that problem? I don't know. But yeah, very interesting. The more information you seem to be able to put into these models, the smarter they become. And I just love the idea that computers are coding themselves now, with a human person in the middle. So humans have coded originally, the computer is now using that to code themselves via a human. Amazing.
[00:12:20.340] - Taylor
Yeah. So what's your topic?
[00:12:22.120] - Gordon
So my topic is about maintenance. I had a client who I'm doing a show for at Christmas, right near Christmas in fact, and they contacted me - they're a big company and they said, "we just want to check, our buildings manager wants to know, are all of your electronics PAT tested?" Now, PAT testing is a little sticker that you get from an electrician who comes to test all of your equipment to make sure it's safe, basically. And as far as the big company goes, it's just them ticking boxes, it's health and safety. But I didn't have PAT testing on my equipment, because it's not a legal requirement. And I look after my equipment really well. I mean, all of my sound equipment is in a proper box and all the cables are cable tied together and it's all very carefully done so that all of my equipment is kept in as good condition as I can, because it will last longer and it won't fail on me. And if I want to make sure that I'm giving a good product, I don't want something to break down on me at any point, so that's why I look after it. But they need this PAT testing for me to be able to bring this equipment into their building, again health and safety.
[00:13:46.000] - Taylor
It's one of the policies.
[00:13:47.490] - Gordon
It's one of their policies, yeah, but it isn't a legal requirement. So I said to them, "I don't have a PAT testing stickers on any of my equipment, but I'm happy to get someone to come and do it, if you want to pay for it." And that's what they agreed to do. So during this week, on Wednesday, in fact, I had an electrician who came to me and they PAT tested up to 15 items for £69, which I thought was reasonable, and then it's a pound per item after that. And all he did is he turned up, he sat on my floor, he took all the plugs that I'd given him and it was just the plug sockets themselves that he wanted. Didn't need to be plugged into the devices, it was just the plug. Plugged it into this device to press a button. It gave him a tick, he put a sticker on it. It's as simple as that. That's all he did. I say that's all he did. There's going to be electricians who are watching this and they will say to me that a lot of PAT testing is visual inspection. It's making sure that the cables are in good condition and there isn't any bare wires showing, it isn't frayed at all. It's all been in the plug and screwed in and created properly. That's a big part of it. And so I now have all of my stuff PAT tested, which is supposed to be done every year, so the sticker has today's month on it, so it says December 2022. But it did get me thinking, maintenance is a really important thing. How many of us have a device or a piece of equipment that we use all the time and we're not checking on it to make sure it's actually running as it should be? Every now and then, it's good to unplug things and take them out and just make sure they're working as they should.
[00:15:42.460] - Taylor
Same way you do with a car. You have your MOT once a year, which is obviously a legal requirement. If you haven't driven it for a while, sometimes it's good to go and take it for a bit of a longer drive to make sure that the engine's running as it should do and you're not leaving it. So obviously, when you have people that have left their cars for ten years or so and it's all rusted and you don't know if it's going to start first time and things like that. It's just looking after your car and making sure that it's going to last as long as possible.
[00:16:10.550] - Gordon
Yeah, exactly right. But it also applies to other equipment, maybe not electronic equipment. Things that maybe you only use once a year. It's a good idea just to get them out, dust them off, make sure that they are in good condition, make sure they're working well. For me, as a performer, I need to make sure my props look good as well, and that's something that I don't always do. You get to the point when you're using it every show and there's no time to actually stop and fix things because you need them for the next show, and there isn't enough time to fix them between shows. So January is normally a good time to do it because you've got a big rush at Christmas, and then January's a lot quieter. So, I think one of my New Year's resolutions coming up for the New Year is going to be to get out my equipment I use all the time, and just look at it and check it, and do some maintenance and maybe some paint touch-ups or get our previous neighbour Ty involved and get him to do some fixes on various things. And I think it does make a difference. It will make your equipment, props in my case, last longer. And it makes sure that if you've got things with batteries in, for example, if you're not using it for a long time, take the batteries out. Because they do leak, and you don't want to get to a point when you need something and you open it up and you find the batteries have leaked into the internals of your device. I mean, that's just the worst thing ever, because it's not the device that's failed, it's you that has failed the device by not taking the batteries out. So, yeah, just take the batteries out. I always put them in a little money bag and put them with the device so that I know that they're there, I know that they are going to work. If I need to replace them, when it comes around to using it again, it's two batteries or three batteries, whatever it is. I just get new batteries. But I'm not getting rid of these ones that potentially have lots of charge left in them, and I can still reuse. But they're not staying inside the device, so that if they do leak, they're not going to ruin it. So, yeah, that is pretty much all I had to say on maintenance. I think we've talked about maintenance before, but I'm not sure we've gone into it in such, such detail as this.
[00:18:36.440] - Taylor
I think it's a different type of, kind of maintenance. Because we normally talk about maintenance for websites and things like that and looking after your website, which again is something that is a non-physical thing that you kind of need to look after. Making sure you keep it up to date, whether that be your software, but just even the architecture and the software that you are actually using, you can be keeping it up to date, but it still can be an old piece of software. There are hundreds and hundreds of companies that use legacy code and legacy software, purely because nothing out there exists. So they're having to maintain very, very old code bases, which they don't want to be doing. But the cost to rebuild it and the time to rebuild it is bigger than what they can afford, both for a monetary...
[00:19:27.220] - Gordon
Well, for the return on investment. It's going to cost more to do it than they're actually going to get back from it. There are companies, or there used to be at least, that were running their whole computer systems on Windows XP, which is like 20 years old or something.
[00:19:44.810] - Taylor
There still are people that do it, purely because the software only runs on that.
[00:19:48.360] - Gordon
And hasn't been updated to run on newer operating systems. And these companies rely on them so much, they haven't found anything that will do what they need to do so they can migrate over. There's a niche in the market for a company there: custom building. But again, it's return on investment. Is it going to be worth spending millions of dollars or pounds on software? Are you going to get that money back? I guess if it's running and it's working, then why fix it?
[00:20:22.860] - Taylor
Same with your kind of database and stuff like that. You use something that's relatively old, I mean, there's still newer versions that come out, but there are better solutions out there. But you've just got a system that you've used for so long that the time it would take you to migrate everything is just not worth it.
[00:20:40.400] - Gordon
And it does everything I want. It's been customised to do what I need and if I need it to do something new, well, I know the system, I can do it. So yeah, I stick with what I've got. But at least it does run on the latest operating system, which is a difference there. So that's it from me.
[00:21:00.150] - Taylor
That's it from me as well.
[00:21:01.400] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can find us on Facebook and on YouTube. Please like, share, and subscribe.
[00:21:08.960] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.
[00:21:15.910] - Gordon
And just to let you know, we've worked further on the new version, or the new design, of This Week With's website. And so it's looking like we're going to be on target for releasing that on the 1st January. So, yeah, very exciting. Brand new season, and a redesigned website.
[00:21:35.380] - Taylor
With a new colour.
[00:21:36.450] - Gordon
New colour, new functionality. Yeah, colour. We've been changing colours every season, haven't we, for the artwork. So what colour do you think it's going to be next year? Leave your comments below. We shall enjoy looking at those. We've already made our decision what it's going to be. So there is a right and a wrong. So leave your comments.
[00:21:58.170] - Taylor
Have a guess.
[00:21:59.030] - Gordon
And we'll find out who gets it right. You'll know, on the 1st of December. So thank you...
[00:22:05.290] - Taylor
December?
[00:22:06.100] - Gordon
1st of January. So sorry. We're going to bring it forward to January. We're not going to make you wait till the 1st December next year. So thank you for joining us. We'll see you next week. As always, 1 o'clock on Friday afternoon, live. We will see you then. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:22:24.270] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:22:26.830] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:22:27.440] - Taylor
Bye.
