Seeing is Believing…

Someone said that a long long time ago.

This video and the dogs and the snow was created without a single photon bouncing off a puppy or a snowflake and into a sensor. Instead someone entered the following oddly incomplete sounding prompt into Sora, the new text-to-video tool from openAI: “A litter of golden retriever puppies playing in the snow. Their heads pop out of the snow, covered in.”

Seeing is believing was never fully true and magicians and optical illusions inhabited the cracks in our perceptions. It was called trick photography when I was growing up. Photoshop made that available to the general public in the 1990s and it was what was used to airbrush ads and photos of celebrities. CGI became a thing at the movies and we marveled at Gollum in the first Lord of the Rings at the dawn of this century. This same technology allowed Marvel to become an entertainment powerhouse for the next two decades and for three hours at a time we inhabited make-believe worlds filled with make-believe characters.

But it wasn’t cheap, easy, or fast. You know this if you’ve waited till the end of a Marvel movie to see that post-credit scene. Before that you have to sit through many minutes of screens-full of people’s names at FX or Weta or a special effects studio. It literally took a studio full of people and computers to trick you into believing what you saw.

About a year ago you could create almost photo realistic images of a monkey in an astronaut suit riding a horse (many of us did). Dalle-E, MidJourney and Stable Diffusion invaded our imagination and our screens.

Recently Google, Runway, Pika, and others allowed us to make a few seconds of videos of anything you could put into words. The motion was jerky, the pixelation crude, but it was fascinating. Today OpenAI announced Sora. The era of seeing is believing is over.

Close your eyes and imagine three fluffy goldens playing in the soft snow. Puppies wrestle, snow flies, ears flop, deep brown eyes stare. Snow sticks to black wet muzzles. If I could now pull that visual image from your brain and put it in a 20 sec video it would probably not be very different from Sora’s video. Neither is the process inside Sora. It has been trained on billions on visuals of dogs and puppies and snow and perhaps even puppies playing in the snow, and sentences with those words. Based on that composite image in its artificial mind, it creates this video. Training Sora is very expensive. Only a handful of companies worldwide have the deep pockets, technology, access to needed silicon, and the legal muscle (the ethics are bing questioned in courts) to pull this off today. But the rendering – the “inference” as it is called – is almost effortless, compared to the cost of producing the same video using traditional FX techniques used to make the Marvel movies. You prefer Dalmatian puppies in the mud? Just retype the prompt and hit return.

Those of us that lived on both sides of this day will remember when seeing was believing. Hereafter there won’t be any expectation that reality and video are or should be related. That will seem like a quaint idea in time. We will go to the cinema, in the words of my friend Professor Ghosh, to watch Oscar-winning movies fully generated by AIs. With nary a human actor or a cinematographer in sight. In the words of Benj Edwards from ars technica, “Even when the kid jumped over the lava, there was at least a kid and a room.” Tomorrow, there will be no kid or room and certainly no lava.

Check out sora at https://openai.com/sora

Taylor Swift’s Mum

I imagine that Taylor Swift’s proud mum posted a grainy video of the young Taylor captivating the crowds with a song when she was three at her friend’s bar mitzvah (oh my, how pretty – don’t tell me that was an iPhone 7! Makes me feel so old). This is just like that except that Evan isn’t three or singing.

Enjoy a short video where Evan chats about the Bose-Einstein Condensate, the fifth state of matter. I believe he is available for the bar mitzvah circuit.

Caver

Vivian crawls into damp dark places.

Vivian’s school offers a nice range of respectable sports. She can play hockey or soccer or beat people up at lacrosse or run around a basketball, volleyball, or tennis court. She can run track or cross country and do yoga or swim. But she picked caving and climbing. So she goes off into holes in the ground with her other caving people and a very well regarded caving instructor who doubles as their English teacher and comes back filthy and without her headlamps (it’s easy to shop for Vivian – just buy her a headlamp because she has usually lost hers and mine).

Last year she became one of the co-captains of the caving team and says it is a job with responsibility. When she checks a newer caver’s knots and signs off on his belaying it is a big deal. The school organizes multiple caving and climbing trips through the year and they sound amazing.

This last Christmas Vivian gave me a caving gift. Three days after Christmas we drove for about an hour and a half and met a guide at the entrance of a cave. Jo had already surreptitiously measured me to make sure I was of less than 51 inches in circumference which meant that unless I did something very stupid I wouldn’t be stuck in the cave and need a rescue. Vivian had reminded me to bring a trash bag for dirty clothes and a change. Down we went.

We emerged three hours later, having belly crawled, climbed, stooped, and dropped through tiny openings in rocks. We sloshed through knee deep ice cold dark water. We stared at veins of white crystal deep underground and at stalagmites and stalactites that glowed vividly under UV light. We came face to face with tiny sleepy solitary tricolor bats hidden in crevices. We even stopped for a snack break underground.

I liked the caves but I wasn’t unhappy to I look up and see the sky afterwards. Vivian, thanks and happy to do it again.

Grace Garden

Back some time last fall, a group of parents and kids met at the front steps of Grace Garden to take a picture and make a donation. Half of these kids are high school juniors. The other half are 8th graders. More than a decade ago they used to walk up these steps every morning and through the doors behind them into a world of love and caring and friends and fun and teachers and learning.

Coincidentally or through some Bene Gesserit-ship, the older kids from the fours families are the same age (Vivian and one of the tall boys in the back were born a day apart), as are the younger kids. The families have travelled, hiked, camped, dined, and hung out together through the years. There is zero overlap in the schools these kids attend and perhaps because of that the kids aren’t close. But they all know each other well and are happy to chill together when they are thrown into the same physical space.

A few weeks after this photo op, I went for a friend’s birthday party to Thailand. I’ve known Sharath since the beginning to time. Vivian went with me. I think she appreciated the bonds between old friends. May be some of these people will visit each other in a few decades. Wouldn’t that be something?

Soccer is Life

If you know your Ted Lasso (my first quote from a TV show in the 17 years of this blog), you are familiar with Dani Rojas’ smiling face and “Football is life”. Outside of going to school or playing video games in his room, Evan plays soccer. Hence the American version of Dani’s quote.

Evan has been playing soccer since he was big enough to kick a ball, starting with Soccer Shots at Grace Garden and the Russian coach at Magellan in the early years. He spent most of his club soccer years at Lonestar with some amazing coaches like Coach Stevens, Coach Luis Papandrea, and most recently, Coach Jason. Stevens famously crept up on his young players and pushed them so they learnt to fall gracefully and get back up quickly, a skill Evan highly values even today. Stevens used to yell “There’s no walking in soccer.” When the season finished we made a t-shirt for him that said that. Papandrea used to look up at the sky and yell a player’s name from the sidelines during matches. That was all the communication they ever got but that was all they needed to jolt them into a higher gear. Papandrea moved Evan to defense, and Evan has been a central defender since. Jason joined the team when a previous coach left abruptly after telling parents to not expect much from the boys. Jason promptly took the team to multiple tournament finals and a championship.

The last one is his school team from 7th grade. They were undefeated for most of the season but then lost in the play-offs. There is boy in this photo who has played with Evan for many years. And 3-4 other boys who used to be at Magellan but have continued to be friends and play on the same soccer team. For a few years back there, from early spring onwards several of us parents (ok, dads) would conspire to keep the key group of friends together for another soccer season.

We parents traveled a bit with the kids for tournaments, ate ice creams after games, and saw each other on weekends and practice at the sidelines. The kids horsed around in hotel swimming pools or on one occasion took over an entire hotel for a game of hide and go seek. Sometimes, outside of my family, this soccer family is the most familiar and frequent visitors in our lives. As soccer parents go – we are pretty chill. We’re there to encourage our kids and have some fun. As you can see, for the first several years of Evan’s soccer career, the only photos I have of him are smiling with a medal after a tournament. Contrast that with the lovely action photos below and those in a previous post (Memphis and Mesa). Last year Evan and four boys moved to a new club based out of San Antonio and promptly doubled the number of games they played. Evan was suddenly in practice three nights a week and had to be driven to San Antonio for Saturday and Sunday games. And occasionally to games at cities like Memphis and Mesa. Thanks to a player’s mother I got some great photos of Evan in action. Soccer is life!

Till one day late last year when Evan had enough. He wasn’t having fun and I was burnt out from the driving. With bittersweet emotions, he gave up the rest of the club season. Evan still hopes to play school soccer this season and will most likely tryout in high school next year.

Jo and I didn’t expect Evan to go to college on a soccer scholarship. We just wanted him to do something fun. He went further and played harder and better than we expected. When he was on the pitch he was fully committed. One of my favorite pastimes in the last two seasons has been to see Evan defend. Someone with the ball jukes Evan or one of the other defenders and suddenly he is free and heading towards the goal with the ball. The fans of the other team start cheering him on. Evan turns around and gives chase. Our parents know what is going to happen. Evan runs like a dart. He makes himself pointed and sleek and moves faster and faster. Most of the time he catches up with the player and takes the ball away. The player looks around incredulously wondering how someone caught up to him. After the game a parent usually asks me how he trains. I tell him that he lays in bed whenever he’s not at school. What does he eat? Uh, ramen noodles. It’s the truth.

Evan had a great group of friends at soccer. He will miss seeing Adrian, Niko, Sevi, Vincent, and Roshan four or five times a week. I will miss hanging out with their parents. We had fun. Evan learned a lot from soccer. He learned being in a team, contributing to the team, winning with grace and losing with a smile. I hope some of these lessons and friendships stay with him. Me – I have my weekends back. Last weekend I camped with friends at Enchanted Rock. This weekend I went skiing with Vivian. Evan’s old team had tournaments both weekends.

Soccer is life. But life goes on, actually pretty nicely.