David: Thank you very much for the invitation. There is a part of this that I'd very much like you to be able to share having recorded it. I have four topics and the second one is about the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, where we have a project which is about using them with people who are blind or visually impaired. And that's been very successful, to the extent that we really are now moving on to try and really spread the word. Because it's easy to talk about AI in terms of things that do harm and things that are a bit worrying. But in terms of these, these are a pure win. And getting the word out there is really the key part. So if you're on the Science and Technology Group, or if you know anybody who's visually impaired, then please do tune in to the back part of this talk, with its accompanying website where you can see all of the information that you would need to be able to get someone helped by that. Okay, now hopefully you can all now see my screen and my screen should be showing the Silver AI project. Can somebody do a thumbs-up just to confirm to me that? Thank you. So you said you started your AI project a couple of months ago. We started ours back in March of last year, 2024. And that happened in the usual u3a way. There was a list of things you could express interest in. I joined the u3a and expressed interest in AI and they said, well, you're the only one, so you'd better run it. And here we are now. The Silver AI project is a, it's just a non-profit-making website that I run. You'll see that I'm published by FirstM and all of that is just kind of my standard website stuff. I'm a kind of tech background person. I've been using AI for 12, 18 months before then. And when I was tasked with running AI as a group, I decided it needed more than just a kind of casual approach to here's an interesting bit, and this was going to be so impactful for u3a members that it was useful spending some time on it. So we run a 6 week, 1 hour a week, course which goes through lots of things. We've had more than 100 people through that course; it's very well attended we've got a big waiting list. We're running a course at the moment at our room capacity of 24 people. If we go back to March 2024, the suggestion was that u3a people were non-technical and wouldn't be interested. I think everybody in u3a is capable of operating a phone, iPad, a whatever, and is interested in what AI has to bring, both on the good and bad side. I'll just very briefly go through what the course normally covers. The first session covers music and art. Second session goes into using chat tools and the ways that they're delivered. The third session is more complicated use of AI art, like consistent characters for story books and then goes on to making video with prompts-to-video which always astonishes people when they first see it. The fourth thing is more complicated uses of chat-tools writing fiction, doing podcasts and so on and so forth. We then go into session five, which is humanoid robots and self-driving cars, which will be with us all very, very shortly within the space of 12 months. I feel that will first impact us in real life. And then the sixth course, we let people talk about ethics and so on, which we've been mostly damping down through the course, until they understood exactly what AI is, and kind of where it comes from and so on. But also the kind of hopefully AI future with tremendous health benefits that Peter was just talking about, the potential wealth benefits if AI is as productive as people tell us. And, of course on the negative side the potential that it's just going to kill us all before we get to all of the benefits. And people clearly need to understand each of these different things because they will be borne in on us over the next 12-18 months in the news as things progress at the amazing pace that they are at the moment. You'll notice for the Silver AI project it's on the home page. I won't scroll about too much because I know it's not helpful on this, but it's a multi-page site, it has a page for each lesson, it has all sorts of links into interesting things for people who want to dive more deeply into the technical side or whatever. And at the top of each page, incidentally, there is a picture like the one we see here. All of those are produced by MidJourney and today I have four topics: What I'm talking to you about now; The Meta Ray-Ban glasses for the blind; The use of AI music software Suno. And we have a song about St Ives to contemplate, created by Suno. And we have a little session on MidJourney which is my go-to AI art tool and probably by far superior to most of those that you've played with. It's a mostly subscription tool, but the details demonstrate what AI art is about, and the subscription is tiny and can be just for one month if you want to play with it. So in terms of locally ... Incidentally, we've created the course and we have a monthly group we call that the AI News Group and if you want to see what that does if you scroll down on the home page you can see that we do a monthly newsletter, the last one being April. And I won't go into it, but if you go to it you'll see there's about 15 or or 16 news articles, mostly accompanied by little video clips. So if you're looking for video clips on the latest news or anything that you're talking to people about, you'll find it in our news session. And we have that monthly meeting and people, we have something like there's going to be 60 plus people who belong to our news group who've been through the course and they want to continue to keep up with the news. So that's how we've structured that here. So that's as much as really I want to say about what the Silver AI project is other than the fact that anything on the website is free to copy, free to re-purpose. You don't have to give any credit to getting it off the website. Feel free to steal bits off it if you find it useful for anything you're doing. We do have one or two u3as who just use it to run courses. They probably mostly put it back into a PowerPoint sort of way because they're more comfortable with that than with the website but nevertheless it is material that you can use later on if you decide you want to go for that sort of course-based approach. Any questions on the Silver AI project? I see no questions. Stunned to silence? So let's move on to the interesting question of AI glasses. So this is a website, and you can see at the top the website name, aiglassesuk.com. This is another one of my websites. It is kept separate from Silver AI project because it has kind of a very specific audience, a lot of people who are sight-impaired, so it's accessible in large part for various sight-impaired reading devices, and we keep it up to date just with the relevant AI news rather than too much waffle. So why are AI glasses important? There are going to be many, many forms of AI-powered glasses. When I say an AI-powered glasses, then they look like normal glasses. I'll show you the pictures in a minute. They look like normal glasses, but they are normally using Bluetooth to a phone. They are connected thereby to the internet and thereby to an AI. They have speakers in the ears so the AI can talk to you and they are receptive to you talking so the AI can hear you. This is going to be almost, and it wasn't clear six months ago, but now it's becoming entirely clear that this is going to be the dominant form of delivery of AI to people over the next while. Why glasses? Well, because having a phone in your hand in order to point the camera at something in order to ask a question feels very redundant if you can have glasses which have in-built cameras. Having a phone in your and many people talk about this feeling vulnerable in many situations, holding a phone to do something. They worry about it getting stolen or whatever else. Glasses are just another, not the glasses can't get stolen, but nevertheless, glasses are just part of your everyday life. There were all sorts of other devices that were and are being created for delivering AI. And it wasn't at all clear a while back which one was going to be the dominant one, but the glasses are distinctly winning. They have another advantage which is they can put, not all of them, each glass has different combination of these things, but there are a whole set of glasses which can project a screen of text or whatever in front of your eyes. So that you're seeing your screen in your eyesight rather than having to once again look at a phone. So that's the generality of AI glasses. Let's specifically talk about AI glasses, though, for the blind and visually impaired. And I encourage you really very much to, if you know anybody who is, or you can kind of get this to anybody who is working with the blind and visually impaired, please do so. It is what I'm telling you is powerful and real and now. So when we started the Silver AI project, one of our early goals of the group was to make sure that AI helped people who were socially or physically disadvantaged in any way. Whatever else AI can do, it should be able to supplement people's natural abilities, and if you're limited in some way, then it should be able to help. And we spotted that a long time, really right back in, kind of, April last year. But the first time that it became practical was when Meta created their Ray-Ban glasses. Now Meta Ray-Ban glasses come in a case, you buy them from John Lewis online to your nearest Waitrose or whatever the mechanism you choose. They cost around about £300-400 which for a device of its power is an astonishingly low figure. And certainly if you are blind you're used to paying thousands for special glasses and all sorts of bits. This is a very affordable thing and you can even get them down at £230 if you're prepared to buy one of their refurbished ones which come with a one-year guarantee. You can get prescription lenses for them. There's an online company called Lensology which will produce you your prescription lenses for it for £50 or so, depending on what they are. And this is a mass-market product. It's nothing to do specifically with blind people. And that's the beauty of it. That's why it's that price. That's why it's affordable. They've sold two million pairs already and they're going to sell a shed-load more. It continues to develop. What makes it interesting to blind people? Well, let me explain. There it is in the case and you can see the glasses sitting in there. That was as it came out of the case originally with a little kind of tag there. That gets taken out when you take the glasses out and disappears, but they're sitting in the case and that's like a little charging bridge. The case is the charger. You take them out of the case and you now have controls. You have a camera. You have a little light that lights when the camera is used. That's to alert people that you're using the camera. If you're a baddie, you'll put black stuff over that so that nobody knows you're taking pictures. But us law-abiding citizens will be telling everybody that we're using the camera. The camera is both for still and video. The top button: one click for a photo, two clicks for a video start, one click to stop it again. When you take it out the case, it's got an on/off button because it uses power when it's on. It takes about 10 seconds to boot up and you put it on and you hear "Your glasses are now active". So, and you've got a side control that you can swipe up and down on the side arms. So what does that give you? Well, just as an ordinary citizen, what it gives you is this. You're on your holiday and you take a picture of that statue. You can take a little video of the river scene. And you can talk to the AI. Meta's AI at the moment is free. Which is a nice thing. They have a business model, which is about, basically, that they're gonna profit from running Facebook and all of that social media stuff, rather than from the AI itself. Whether that's sustained, I don't know. But their AI is free. So you're not paying anything to do this. You set up your account. Lots of people are worried about privacy and all of that sort of stuff. When you set up an account, you can set up a completely new Meta account, a new Facebook account and you can use a fake name - they don't mind. In other words you shouldn't have any concerns about privacy from the viewpoint of "they'll see my existing account and know who I am". You can start a completely new one. So you put on your glasses and you can say "Hey Meta! What is this statue in front of me? What is it essentially?" Or you can say, "Hey Meta! In Italy, which is the main train line?" And you can do all the AI type of things by saying, "Hey Meta!" and Meta will talk in your ear with the response. "Hey Meta! What's the weather like tomorrow?" Now, imagine you're a blind person. You can put on these glasses and you can connect them to WhatsApp and your WhatsApp messages you'll hear in your ear and you can send WhatsApp. Okay, nice, but you can say kind of "Hey Meta! Send a WhatsApp to John" and it'll find John in your address book and it'll say "What you want to say to John?". And you can say and it will say "Here's the message". It'll play it back to you. "Do you want to send that?" Yes. Now immediately, that's great because it's far better than having to get your phone out and think about all of that and find the particular app and so on. But it gets better. You can set up a video call on WhatsApp with a friend. Let's imagine you're at home and you're blind and you want help with setting the cooker or something and you can't quite work it out. You can put your glasses on, contact using WhatsApp to a friend and you can set up a video call in WhatsApp. Your friend can see through your glasses what you're seeing or not seeing, and then your friend can say, "Ah, yes, what you need to do is just turn it a bit to the right, okay? Yeah, that's perfect now". And then you can say goodbye to your friend and get on with your life. And there's a Be My Eyes app that actually gives you a volunteer if you haven't got a friend. And there will shortly be a Be My AI app, which just puts you straight onto an AI, which is capable of doing all of this. So immediately you can see the power there, can't you? Transformative compared with some of the things at the moment you might be able to do, but you'd have to get your phone out. So then you get your phone out and you've got a hand occupied with the phone. This is far better. But it doesn't end there. You can go into a cafe, you can pick up the menu, and you can say "Hey Meta! Read me the menu". And Meta will start reading you the menu. You can say "Hey Meta! Tell me about the breakfast baps, and it'll find within the menu the breakfast baps, and start reading them out to you with the price. Now given that all of that is available for £300-400, you can imagine that from the viewpoint of a blind person who's got some level of technical, you know, is not scared of technology. And given that most blind people have to navigate quite complicated interactions with phones in order to survive at all and I think you can see the power. So please do spread the word. Our first trial person has been using them for six weeks and is buying their own pair. We're setting up the second person with a free pair because the whole point of this is having a free pair that they can use so there's not that big kind of "Oh, I don't want to commit the money because I don't really understand it" thing. And you can't kind of evaluate it in four hours. So we're trying to finance basically, giving free pairs that can be lent out for four to six weeks for anybody who's interested with a sight impairment, so that they can get comfortable with it before spending their own money. Okay, any questions on that aspect? Peter L: That's quite extraordinary isn't it? I knew nothing about any of that. Did anyone else know anything about this? Sophie: Yeah, I think I've got a comment actually. You'll have people wandering around talking to themselves. I mean that's been quite common for 20 years. The first time I saw it I thought that person's mad. They're talking to themselves. Yeah, the other thing is my brother, because I said to him, what do you think will be the next phase in online shopping? And he said, oh, you'll just be able to go into a shop and look at something and then you'll buy it. And I thought that's a bit dangerous, but I wonder whether you think, you know, contactless will be built into these as well? David: Yeah, if you imagine just the numbers I've mentioned already, they've sold two million pairs of this. These do live translation potentially by the way as well. In other words, if you're speaking to somebody in French, it'll speak to you in English what they're doing. So this is now and this is exponential growth. So given that there's an established huge arket, so nobody's doing the piloting with this, this is real. And given that the pace of the AI intelligence is growing at exponential speed. It's limited only by a science fiction novel's concept of what it can do. This is real. But that's the important thing, and I think you make a good point, Peter. You haven't heard anything of it. I mean, realistically, people like the Beeb and so on should be grabbing hold of this and making sure everybody knows. Peter: It's extraordinary. It's news wise, it's a very good story, you know, you would imagine they'd lap it up, you know. Yeah, it's the deep fakes people love and that kind of bad news story and so on. Oh, yeah, but they do. Yeah, well, some of them, dare I say, as an ex-journalist, but some actually go for very positive stories as well. You know, I mean, this This is remarkable, I think. Alan - you haven't told me what you think. Alan: No, I think it's brilliant. I've just had no idea at all. Peter C: Yeah. David, how much support are your trial people needing? Do they just sort of use it without any support, or are they needing much? No, it's a good question. David: Once the thing is set up on their phone, then they're not really needing any support. In order to pair it with the phone, make sure you've got the WhatsApp set up with it and the Be My Eyes and the whatever. Then, I mean, typically I meet the chap whenever kind of we or people whenever we're setting this up in a local cafe and we sit and have a cup of coffee and over the course of 10 or 20 minutes set the glasses back up on the phone and check it and then we're done. It's not a big complicated thing to set it up, it's just easier with full eyes because of the usual kind of speed things of working through if you're blind. You've normally got all sorts of double tap commands on your phone so that it speaks to you whenever you hit a button and so on. So yes you need somebody, and it's not a technical thing to set that up, it's just a case of having to know how to do it. So it's very easy to do. Peter L: I was going to say that blind people are more tactile aren't they? They're more capable of manipulating the controls and being able to use this sort of thing than probably the sighted people are perhaps sometimes. David: Yeah, certainly the controls of the glasses are very natural anyway, so that you know like turning sound up and down is a left and right thing on your right pair of things and so on. So, no, it really is a very practical workable solution and if as an ex-journalist, Peter, you want to make sure that the aiglassesuk.com message gets out there, there's all sorts of videos associated with it and so on. Peter L: I've got a daughter who works on the Telegraph so that's my next call, I reckon so no problem. You mentioned about funding people's testing of it. Where do you get money from? Do you get charitable donations or what happens? David: Most of the initial funding is just my money. I was fortunate enough to sell a domain name in the way that happens from time to time to people in tech for enough money to be able to get this underway. And I have a little scheme in my head for raising the next few sets. So yeah, somebody needs to kick it off with, I mean, if your local u3a could come up with, you know, the £230 or whatever it needs to buy a recon set, it would be a good investment. I assure you, you really would be making a difference in your community. Peter L: There you go, Peter, you've got a challenge now. Peter C: Interesting, interesting. I mean, certainly I'm in touch with organisations locally dealing with all sorts of groups of people, so that's certainly a possibility. David: Good. Well I'm on the end of the phone any time if I can give any help or enter any sort of Zoom meeting to push things along more locally for you. Ok, let's move on in our coverage to a different thing which is Suno music. That's my third of the four topics. Now, Suno has a free option is the first thing to say. So, and in terms of encouraging people who are a bit nervous about AI to start playing, then music is a really, really good way because you can make a lovely song for your grandchild, you know, Uncle, husband, whatever the need is, very easily, and share it so that you've really got a very quick win. So I'm on the simple page of Suno. You can see it says simple at the top here. The website is Suno.com. Please do go in and play. You will wonder why you haven't done it before if you enjoy creating music. It is used by musicians. There's another one called Udio, which is perhaps more used by professional musicians, I believe, but it is extremely powerful. But let's keep this very simple. I asked ChatGPT for a little write-up of St Ives and I clipped a sentence out of that. "St Ives in Cambridge is a historic inland town with a quite traditional feel. How do the people feel about the better known St Ives in Cornwall?" I added In other words, do you get fed up when you say you're from St Ives and everybody says, "Oh, I've been there." Which I can imagine must be your everyday experience. And then you select on this simple thing, a particular style, and there are thousands. The ones that happen to list here, I'll just go with what happens to have come up this time. And I'm not going to press the create button now because it might just take kind of half a minute or something doesn't take long. but here are some I prepared earlier. So the style I chose was tavern music and the thing it came up with was Tavern Confessions and here we go. It took a while for the sound to come in before, didn't it? It started after a while before when we were testing it. Lyrics being sung on Suno: In the heart of the square where the whispers thrive We sit by the fire in the St Ives hive The mugs are full and the story's shared Of the other St Ives and its coastal flair Cornwall's calling with its waves and gold But here in the fields is where stories are told We're inland dreamers with no sea to sway St Ives in Cambridge are where we'll proudly stay Now, I'm not going to inflict too much more on you there. You can experiment for yourself. But the key thing is, in the simple version, you put in some sort of prompt and a style, and it'll produce two songs. And then you can play those. And if you don't like those, you press it again, and it'll create two more. If you're on the free thing, eventually it will say you've had enough for today of the free and you have to wait the next day to come back. As you can see over here I've got 2,500 credits so I'm on here quite often. The potential of it is huge. If you combine it with, I have a website which has a radio station on it. That has a hundred poppy songs of reasonable quality and those are generated by using ChatGPT and telling it to generate some lyrics. And then another version of ChatGPT to criticise the original lyrics and tell the first one how to improve them until it cycles. Penny: Can I ask you a question? Are you able to get sheet music from this? David: I don't believe so but there is an AI which is focused around sheet music. So a bit of searching, I'm sure you can find that or email me and I'll find you a reference for it. I mean basically anywhere there's demand nowadays, and as you yourself immediately said and you're about the tenth person who's said that question when they first come across Suno music, there is a demand for that. So therefore, there is an engineer working away, generating a product for it, because anything in AI with a demand has got numerous people producing products. So be assured, it's not forgotten, and I must find an answer I can remember on the spot. So with the jukebox, actually, you know, you get your lyrics off ChatGPT, you go into the custom bit here, you paste the lyrics and ChatGPT in here. Some people paste poems, some people paste all sorts of stuff in there. You can type in there the style you want and it will go off and it will produce your complete song in whichever kind of rock, pop, folky style you want and then you can download it share it and do any number of things with it. It is very powerful. Peter L: Can we listen to another one? Can I hear the ballad, please? Lyrics being sung on Suno: In Cambridgeshire has come a treat we stand An inland town carved by careful hands Our market square, where stories blend A peaceful air that never bends They talk of Cornwall and the sea of blue Of cliffs that rise and skies brand new But here our stillness sings a rhyme No waves, just history through time Raise a glass in the ... David: You're enjoying that too much! Sophie: It's good. It's amazing, really. Is it going to... Can you choose a male or female singer? David: Yeah, you can do. I think it's putting musicians out of business. I'm not sure about the composers. Penny: I am worried about this because my great nephew is studying composing as we speak. David: Pretty well everybody in university who's studying pretty well anything is currently challenged by AI. There are no real exceptions to that. Peter L: It's the quality. Given the state of AI - it's only just started in effect, or become more prolific, you think about that quality being enhanced over the years to come, it's remarkable. David: If you play with this or Udio, you'd be amazed. And when I'm teaching this to a group in front of me, we have it in the first lesson for two reasons. One is because it's an easy thing for everybody to get involved with and do a bit. But the second one is because it shows that the AI even here in a music tool has got a real understanding of the world. It has a "world view" is the phrase. In order to give that song lyric from that prompt, you've got to really understand the concept of why Cornwall is different from where you are, and the kinds of things that you might talk about in the two places: the fields here and the sea cliffs there and so on. It's a real understanding that even with this little bit of song software, this AI understands the world not too far off what most of us do. When you test it you'll find it's got a real world understanding. Peter L: Yeah I think that's the interesting factor you know because that must have searched how many numerous websites in order to come up with the information, in order to come up with a concept. It's what we're going to talk about O3 a bit later on. You might stay you on or you might go, but Pete is going to talk about the thinking ability. David: Just to correct one thing, it may have been originally trained on information but it's not searching any websites to do that. That's all part of its own knowledge base that it is coming up with. Peter L: What it's been back with, yeah. Thank you, yeah that's interesting. David: So please do - in terms of your people - you'll find that if you run a session on just Suno music, you'll get a lot of people involved who otherwise would be a bit put off by AI. Okay, my last topic then. So, if you've played with AI art tools then Idiogram, Leonardo, they have good free things and indeed if you're playing with ChatGPT now, ChatGPT has a very powerful inbuilt image creation tool. But MidJourney is probably the go-to place for all sorts of people when it comes to creating art. It really is very powerful. I'm not sure it's got a free thing at the moment. If it's just subscription, you can sign up for paying by month and cancel after one month. You can really have a good play with it for not very much. It's about £12 a month or something. And you can see going down here, these are all my pictures, generated over a long period of time. Thousands of them. What makes it good? It has about a hundred billion styles and you could find a particular style that somebody else has used for a picture and just use that style and you'll get a similar sort of feel to your picture. If we said cats and dogs playing in a fountain, you've got some settings - unfortunately a lot of the settings are underneath where your pictures are so I won't play with them too much. But you can make a long picture, a tall picture, a square picture. You can change the weirdness, variety and stylisation and you can do all sorts of bits and pieces. And then you press the button and off you go and it will generate four pictures. Now that could all happen in the space of the next five seconds or it might take two minutes to do so we won't ... Oh we've got some starts and some pictures. That's quite quick today. So there you see, I've typed in something and here we've got dogs and cats playing in a fountain. You get very good quality pictures and you have enormous amounts of ability to now edit them. I'm not going to give you that lesson because a) I'm coming up to my time and b) it really could turn into another 20 minutes of editing these pictures so we make the dogs into unicorns and change the fountain to do different things. But hopefully you can see from that that it's kind of a pretty useful tool. And if we click on one particular picture, I mean ... Now, whatever you ask AI for anything, it'll take the bits it fancies, and it will randomly, so if you get four things, but if you don't like it, you press it again, you get four four more. I mean look at the face on that cat. Amazing. So you could now highlight bits, cut bits out, ask it to replace bits with other bits and so on and so forth. If you want to just kind of see the kinds of things that people do, you can go on to the explore button and this is what other people have done and you can click on a particular picture and over on the right it'll give you what their prompt was for getting that picture. So a very good and easy way of kind of learning how to produce some effective things. And sometimes if you've been playing with Leonardo or one of the other ones, people can find some of the results not quite as great for as they might like. They're very good, the other tools, but this is always as I say my go-to tool. I don't pay a subscription monthly lightly, but for this one I ... Sophie: Some of them are not very good at things like hands. They do people with three fingers and things. David: Yeah, that can happen, particularly with the less good ones. It's a rare thing these days on the good AI tools. That stage of three arms and six fingers has largely gone. So MidJourney, a recommendation. That then is my 45 minutes. So thank you very much for your time. I am more than happy to return to talk about the glasses at any point you have any forum where that would be a useful thing to know what it's like actually using them with real blind people, as it were. And I hope that we can help spread that particular word.