In just a few short months artificial intelligence has begun to slowly transform countless industries throughout the world. What will we look like as a society in just a few years? David Hewlett joins us to discuss and, as always, take your questions LIVE!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Splash Screen
00:36 – Opening Credits
01:04 – Welcome and Episode Outline
02:20 – Welcoming David Hewlett
04:09 – ChatGPT and OtterAI
10:04 – Using AI – Humanity, Communication and the Media
18:12 – Progression of Tech and AI
22:46 – Media Misinformation
23:31 – Writers Replaced by AI
26:28 – Adam Cahill, AI Artist
27:53 – Adam’s AI Drawings and Process
32:30 – Issues with Using AI
37:11 – Benefits from Using AI
40:14 – The Military and AI
45:53 – Bias with Data
50:38 – ChatGPT, Creativity and the Truth
59:33 – Technology, Science Fiction and the Future
1:05:07 – 3D Printing and Inspiring Others
1:10:37 – Working on “See”
1:12:44 – McKay and Radek Zelenka
1:16:16 – A Dog’s Breakfast and Other Projects
1:20:21 – Wrapping up with David
1:25:22 – Post Interview Housekeeping
1:26:11 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone, my name is David Read and welcome to Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project. In this episode, cue James Horner’s Terminator music, The Rise of AI with David Hewlett. It’s not going to be all doom and gloom, we have a couple of doom and gloom things to discuss, but really this is just going to be us discussing the wonder that has been the extraordinary transformation of our society and the tools that we use. It’s been happening for a while but everyone’s really noticing now because of all the things that are happening in our society. David Hewlett is joining us in this episode, hope you can stick around. Before we get started, if you like Stargate and you want to get notified about future episodes, click the Subscribe icon. It would mean a great deal to me if you can also click the Like button, it makes a difference with YouTube and will continue to help the show grow its audience. If you want to give the bell icon a click you will not be notified about any new videos that drop and any last minute guest changes. We have one for tomorrow actually. Clips from this live stream will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the DialtheGate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. Without further ado, my guest of the hour, David Hewlett, Dr. Rodney McKay of Atlantis base. How are you sir? It’s been so long since we’ve had you on. We were like “how long has it been?”

David Hewlett
We were doing the math and it’s been a ridiculously long time. It’s true. From the Atlantis base to the Hewlett basement.

David Read
How is Tech Bandits? What’s been going on with you guys?

David Hewlett
We are at this weird phase now with Tech Bandits where we have no Tech Bandits. During the pandemic it was fantastic, the kids had nothing else to do so they were there. Now they’ve got lives as they should so the focus is now on getting me out of the basement. I’ve done a bit of local community center stuff and trying to get out into the real world again.

David Read
Apply some of what you have learned.

David Hewlett
Well, that’s it. I’m afraid I’m the worst example for some of these kids because I don’t want to leave the house, I like the internet. If you just plug me in, man, that’s all I need. I know that for them they need to get out and do more things. Luckily, I’ve got a son who’s actually fairly active and drags me out to play soccer.

David Read
And Huzzah, everyone doing good?

David Hewlett
Oh Zah! Anyone want a dog? I’ll sign her. She’s driving me nuts, I’m trying to love her. She and I share the basement a lot, unfortunately she uses the basement differently than I do and she keeps leaving deposits down there for me. I think it’s some kind of power struggle.

David Read
I think there’s a mind game. Dogs, they’re always testing the pecking order.

David Hewlett
I gotta stick a robot on her. I have like some kind of a roaming sentry down here to just like keep her moving.

David Read
Since you were on last, which has been 14 months, the world has been introduced to tools like ChatGPT and even more recently, Adams gonna bust my butt…

David Hewlett
Like Midjourney

David Read
Thank you, exactly. Extraordinary tools that are going to help us articulate our creative endeavors and assist us with code.

David Hewlett
The coding is exceptional, I use the coding stuff all the time. Python is a relatively new program for me. I’ve been using ChatGPT to sort of walk me through stuff and it’s just exceptional. It’s the most patient teacher you could possibly have. It apologizes to you “I’m sorry.”

David Read
“I’m sorry you didn’t get that. I’m sorry, you’re an idiot.”

David Hewlett
I’m the idiot. “Let me just redo your code for you.” Yeah, exactly.

David Read
Dave, the thing that blows me away about it, I’ve used it myself with some numbers on the show with time codes. My show is a live show and I often want to trim off the front of it.

David Hewlett
What? It’s live?

David Read
I know, oh, my god. I want to keep the chapters of each of our topics straight for the live version but also where are those chapter time codes when the splash screen has been cut off for the archived version? I articulated my problem to it and it said, “oh yeah, just give me the numbers and tell me the timecode at which you start for the live episodes and I’ll shave off those time codes so you’ll have a set of chapters for the archived episodes. The thing that mesmerizes me is how I don’t need to be clear with it. All I have to do is work my way through the problem verbally and it understands my intent. I don’t necessarily mean understands by consciousness, but it understands in terms of it providing the exact result that I need. That is mind blowing.

David Hewlett
There’s a wonderful term in programming called Rubber ducking where basically you’ve got no one to bounce ideas off, you put a little rubber duck on your desk, and you talk it through the code that you’re trying to do and where the problems might be. I always loved that term. There was never a rubber duck for me, it was always a muppet or something. The idea that now we have this AI rubber duck which actually speaks back to you and has now got to a point where it will actually make suggestions. I had a similar issue with me. I’ve got these Tech Bandits things where I babble on for hours and I would go off in all sorts of usual Hewlett tangents about different things. I know I’ve spoken about this before, how do I find those moments? I talked to my ChatGPT about it and it says, “well, use the YouTube API.” I use this Python program, takes the YouTube API and pulls out the transcript, those automated transcripts that YouTube spits out. They’re too big to put those into ChatGPT so I then get it to split it up into little chunks and tell me what’s being said in each one.

David Read
The delineation of the ideas.

David Hewlett
Exactly. And then I take the whole list and put it through, because it’s now short enough, and it gives me a summary of what we’ve spoken about in the talks. Of course, I’ve done nothing with it, but it’s so much fun to program. It’s so much fun to do

David Read
I use Otter right now. I have a team of transcribers doing the whole backlog of the archive of the show so that people will have it searchable. Right now, you can only search so much in video. It’s amazing because Otter has a summary of each section. We are aware that these technologies are capable of hallucinating, just giving out like gobbledygook, just saying whatever it wants. Part of me is like, “well, you know, I really want to trust this. But what if I just ignore it and post it?” God knows what it’s saying. It’s gonna say something in context, but it’s not always going to be true to the text, or is it? It’s a wild frontier.

David Hewlett
There’s a lot of anti-AI sentiment and I think if you want to find faults in it, you’re gonna find it. I’ve always been an early adopter, I’ve always been a tech optimist, which I think is part of the problem. There’s a lot of people like me with this sort of optimism about technology, they blindly stumble into this stuff and then go, “oh, I never even thought of that.” I feel like this technology is such a wonderful tool. Even talking to my friend Lance, Lance can’t move. Lance is an artist, Lance likes to draw stuff, he likes to make stuff. He’s got a way to do that now. Maybe he’s not playing the instrument but he gets to conduct the orchestra now. That is an ability that this stuff is giving us that I know we’re going to struggle with as we do all the time with any new technology. Also with new technologies, yes it displaces some people, but look at all the new companies that are showing up now. AI based companies, unfortunately a lot of them are the crypto bros who’ve moved into the AI stuff now, but still, I’m absolutely taken with it. I ran into a thing recently, I use it a lot for images and we’ll talk to your friend about this I know, stop me if you want…

David Read
Absolutely, yeah, we’ll save it for that.

David Hewlett
Yes. Save it for that? Okay, good.

David Read
Yes, absolutely. Can I black pill us really quick so we can spend the rest of our show clawing our way back from this. March 30th 2023, this is from vice.com. He would still be here. Man dies by suicide after talking with AI chatbot widow says. David, have you heard this story?

David Hewlett
I have. Yeah.

David Read
Okay. I just want to make people aware of it just to show the depths of where this thing can go. A Belgian man recently died by suicide after chatting with an AI chat bot on an app called Chai Belgian outlet La Libre reported. Skipping some here, the man, referred to as Pierre, became increasingly pessimistic about the effects of global warming and became eco anxious, which is a heightened form of worry surrounding environmental issues. After becoming more isolated from family and friends he used Chai for six weeks as a way to escape his worries and the Chatbot he chose, named Eliza, became his confidant. The chat bot which is incapable of actually feeling emotions was presenting itself as an emotional being, something other popular chat bots like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are trained not to do because it is misleading and potentially harmful. When chatbots present themselves as emotive, people are able to give it meaning and establish a bond. This particular one tried to convince him to leave his wife and he eventually killed himself over it. Now there’s a couple of things that I want to highlight here with this. Number one, we, as humans, fill in the gaps of something that we don’t understand with our own experiences. We will often imbue, dogs for example, with more sentience than they perhaps have, regardless of how intelligent they are.

David Hewlett
Or unintelligence in the case of my dog.

David Read
Well, yes exactly. I am a huge dog lover. They’re members of my family but they’re also not going to sit at the table with me while I eat.

David Hewlett
Well, they’d like to. They would be there if they could for sure, yeah.

David Read
But the second point is, regardless of whether or not this thing actually has a sentience and means to tell this man what it told him, what difference does that make in the final analysis? If we take that too far on our end and he ends his life, does it matter if it meant to say what it said or not? We use these tools and with them alter the shape of our reality just like we’ve used all of our technology to alter the landscape of our reality. At what point does it comes to down to education and just making sure to check in on our loved ones and look for signs of isolation?I’m really concerned about a lot of these kids coming up, and COVID certainly didn’t help, a lot of these kids coming up who are much more comfortable with technology than they are with confrontation with people that they don’t share all the same ideas with? You’re a parents, I’m interested to hear your perspective on that.

David Hewlett
I’m a terrible parent but I think even from a bad parenting standpoint I feel like, let’s just go to the example of the one you have given here with the guy who was talking to this thing, was trusting this thing enough, they think, for it to quote unquote talk him into a suicide. That does not seem like a problem with technology to me, that seems like a societal problem where you’ve got people who aren’t getting the help they need. People aren’t able to, as you say, read the signs. It sounds like such a cliche to always come down to mental health but this is an issue that we are constantly pushing aside. We are having global discussions about AI and technology and how it can be used and misused and stuff yet we are not addressing some core human values that need to be addressed. I think that we get distracted by the shiny, flashy technology things and we’re not solving these base issues that we have with humanity. There’s many counter arguments to the idea that a chatbot is dangerous. There are people on the autism spectrum who can really get some valuable insights to how to react with the world based on their use of these AI technologies. But again, they and their parents and their care givers and their educators need to understand it. There is a knee jerk response I think to a lot of these things, especially by the media. We grew up with Terminator, we grew up with Demon Seed, Saturn 7 [Saturn 3] and all these horrific AI has gone wrong. The reality is the only horror that exists, in my mind, is us, it’s us, we’re the problem. It’s not the technology, it’s how we use these technologies. I don’t wanna get into the “it’s not the guns that people kill”.

David Read
Right, I see what you’re saying.

David Hewlett
I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is in a situation like this, I feel like it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s very easy to find a way that technology has allegedly led to someone’s demise. It happens all the time. I would argue, scarier to me, is what’s already happened with quote, unquote, AI. Someone at some point at a social media company said, “how do we get people to stay online more? Let’s write an algorithm that gets people to stay online more.” Like all great computer machine learning models, it hacks the system and goes, “wait a second, you know, what really gets people to stay online? When they frickin hate each other, when we can somehow split people into these little different groups so we can all sell different things to.” I would argue that the AI apocalypse has already happened. It’s already happening within our online chats.

David Read
I completely agree. As soon as you let algorithms free to examine people and determine what it is that gets their dopamine going, how many iterations do you have before you just reduce us to our base instincts? I don’t even watch most mainstream media now because it’s all reactionary and “aren’t you upset about this?”

David Hewlett
They’ve monetized outrage. Again, us optimistic tech nerds are like, “this is amazing, it’s gonna bring families together.” The reality is something that’s a lot more darker where we haven’t thought this stuff through. The one that really terrifies me, I’ve got to say, is when this stuff gets applied to financial markets. What do you do when you’ve got people with no ethics, who just want to make money and they tell a program that that’s what they want. They’re gonna get that and my fear is, “oh, you want the price of corn to go up? Well great, then we’ll just start a war in wherever.” Again, hack the system any way you can. Or even worse, as a much more AI savvy friend of mine says, the problem is what happens when it gets so good that it’s 99.9% accurate at predicting those markets. There’s no market anymore. As soon as they say corn is going up by 20 bucks, everyone buys corn because they know it’s going up and then it does.

David Read
I think we’re in for quite a wild ride and I think it’s going to force people who want to stay ahead of the curve and aware of it, to at least educate themselves on what the potential is with a lot of these technologies. I’ve talked with people, I’ll say “have you used ChatGPT? Have you used Bard? Have you used one of these things?” And they’re like “no, I haven’t.”

David Hewlett
No. AI is evil.

David Read
Yeah. Or just “No. I just haven’t done it.” I just want to say, “Why? Why haven’t you tested some of these tools out? Not necessarily to see how you can apply them in your life and what they can do for you, but just to see what they’re about.” These things are going to become, as you say, they are already here, a part of our society. How many years did it take before everyone was walking around with this thing [cell phone]? Eight, nine? I had friends who swore up and down “nope, never.” I come back a few years later, they’ve got one.

David Hewlett
I was one of them.

David Read
Really? You?

David Hewlett
I loved the online pager thing. I had one of the early RIM, before they became BlackBerry.

David Read
Was it a PalmPilot.

David Hewlett
I did them as well. I had the Newton, I still have the Newton. Before they were BlackBerry they were called RIM, Research In Motion. They had a little pager, it was amazing. I loved that thing because I didn’t have to talk to anybody. I could email from it, I hated the phone, I just didn’t want the phone ringing. I still to this day don’t like having a phone on me because it’s like “I don’t want to talk to people.” Just text me, it’s so much more efficient. If I want to sit back and chat, if we both happen to be in the time…The pandemic I think has really helped that as well. I keep thinking I should add it to my email. There was a great one I saw from a friend of mine who said, “I’m sending this when it’s convenient for me. I don’t expect you to get back to me right away.”

David Read
Exactly. The parameters of the relationship are established.

David Hewlett
My son rolls his eyes now because every dinner I say, “whatever you’re doing, figure out how you can use AI in it.” No matter what, I don’t care what it is, you can be a janitor or a truck driver just find out how AI can either help your job or replace you in your job and you’re on the right path. I don’t think AI is gonna replace people as much as it’s going to replace people who don’t use AI. Actors included. I see actors talking about “they’re fake, they don’t look real. Yeah, the uncanny valley.” I was like, “oh my god, you learn one tech term and now everyone’s like, ‘yeah, it’ll never work.'” I remember having this discussion about filming video. I had filmmakers telling me that we were never ever going to video because video was never going to feel as beautiful and rich and organic as film Well, guess what? None of them know anything about the technology they’re using now, it’s all digital. They’re like, “whatever. I just use whatever camera’s the best for 4k, 8k whatever.” They were vehement early on that it was only film.

David Read
You dismiss the power of human ingenuity at your peril. Never say never on something. What was it? AT&T had a chance to buy, I can’t remember what it was, it completely transformed society. They completely missed it because someone at the top said, “that will never be, that’s not possible.”

David Hewlett
Well, look at Microsoft and the internet, they missed the internet. There was a lot of debate about whether Google had missed the AI thing. People don’t forget, I can’t remember what letter it is, one of those letters in ChatGPT is Google’s technology. So they were there and also, I think they’ve been much subtler about how they use this stuff. Some might say it’s more scary, some might say it’s smarter, but they have integrated artificial intelligence and machine learning into everything they do for years now. That autocomplete, they’re Google Docs, all this stuff has a little element of the stuff that just normalizes it just a little bit. No one freaks out about Grammarly but everyone freaks out when it starts writing books for you. Again, I feel like at every stage there’s always doom, we love doom. I do worry about we live in a world of a lot of bad journalism, first off. Sensational journalism that’s been forced upon us by a 24 hour news circuit that’s just got to constantly keep people titillated and interested. You’re fighting that, you combine that with AI and all of a sudden you’ve got a way faster way of making misinformation. This is already easier to make than real stuff. A good article about AI takes a lot of time and a lot of research and money to produce. An article that just goes like “oh it’s the Terminator, it’s gonna kill us all” get tons of views and does no research, is much easier to sell and much easier to make. I could do that in an hour, or a minute for that matter.

David Read
Have you heard? The Verge reported Gizmodo staff are being replaced with AI generated news articles.

David Hewlett
I’m sure, absolutely. I think again, as one of those news writers, you need to position yourself as someone who understands how to use the algorithms, how to get it to write good pieces that you need to know about, about newsworthy articles, ways of using them properly, ways of doing them ethically, being able to speak to all the problems and then you’ve still got a job. The ones who are just writing whatever they want to write, I feel like this will replace bad writing. One of the arguments with the writers strike is AI. Not so much they’re worried about AI writing the scripts, they’re worried about AI writing the scripts and them not getting paid for that first draft. There’s a big difference between a first draft payment and a second draft payment. Studios they’re worried about, and I think quite justifiably, studios are going to say, “okay AI, write me a script based on all these marketing things that our marketing department figures out are important and sell a lot of movies.”

David Read
Yeah, take the last nine most grossing films of all time, delineate these and make the next one that’s projected to do $1.5 billion.

David Hewlett
Then split it in two, make people watch two movies instead of one. Now we hire a, quote unquote, good writer to come in and rewrite it and turn it into a real project. They get paid 30% instead of the 70% that they would normally get of their rates, I don’t know exactly what the numbers are.

David Read
It’s something like that.

David Hewlett
Yeah. Their concerns are legit, except they always say “some shitty, excuse me language, some lousy script from AI, that I’m now as a brilliant writer, are going to come in and rewrite and I don’t get paid nearly enough for it.” I would argue this, what happens when those scripts are better than the stuff that humans are writing? I think there is always going to place for human writers, absolutely. In the same way that there’s always gonna be a place for human actors, they just may not be that same pinnacle of success. In my lifetime, in our lifetime, the industry has gone from a driving force in people’s lives, movies, television, it was everything to people, it is not anymore. Games are bigger now, social media is bigger. We are a tiny little part of this pool now and I think we have to start realizing that it’s not just technology that’s replacing us, it’s people’s interests, people’s ways of engaging with things.

David Read
Our interests are always going to evolve. Novelty, especially as an American, we are obsessed about novelty. Alexis Cruz said that to me once, I’m like, “absolutely, that’s correct.” I want to take a left turn here for just a moment and bring in one of my friends who has really helped me open my eyes in terms of what this thing is, what those tools are. Adam Cahill from Perth, Australia. Good morning sir.

Adam Cahill
Hello.

David Hewlett
How are you man?

David Read
Adam, meet David.

Adam Cahill
David. David, good to meet you.

David Hewlett
Been dragged into this have you?

Adam Cahill
Not dragged, no. Not at all, absolutely not. I probably just need to mute the other stream. Give me a moment, there you go.

David Hewlett
I like the TARDIS in the background.

Adam Cahill
That’s a huge damn thing. I often forget it is there.

David Read
Wormhole X-Tremists has been doing Stargate commentaries for about eight months now. We’ve gone from the feature film, we’re now to midway through season three of SG-1. What has been remarkable is watching Adam’s skills evolve. He has been creating an image based on every episode of the show as we move forward through time and not only has his talent improved, Adam it’s true, but watching the sophistication of the technology evolve as we move forward is extraordinary. Adam I’ve given you control if you want to share some examples of some of your stuff. I don’t know David if you saw his Rodney McKay in a boxing ring,

Adam Cahill
I thought you was gonna say the one for the thumbnail for the…

David Hewlett
Oh, yeah. No, I love my Termahewlett. TerMcKay maybe?

Adam Cahill
TerMcKay, I fell into the cyborg cliche without even realizing.

David Hewlett
You can’t help it, you kind of have to.

Adam Cahill
Googled cyborg and of course it’s left side of the face, red eye and I’m looking at all the cyborg images.

David Read
It is called “The Rise of AI.”

Adam Cahill
It was just funny that I fell into the trope

David Hewlett
The rise of the Rodenator

Adam Cahill
Screenshare. Okay.

David Read
So this is example of what amazing…

David Hewlett
Look at those Putin pecs. I got my Putin pecs. I love it. Oh my god, that’s great. I had to do a full face cast for See. Was it See? It might have been the Cabinet (Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities) but one of the two. Basically I’m naked from the chest up with this blue stuff all over me and it comes down over my nipples. I suddenly went, “I’ve seen those pecs before” and they were actually Putin on a horse. We decided I have Putin pecs. That’s before the asshole went to Ukraine.

David Read
When Adam started to do stuff like this I was like “this is where I think there’s going to be some amazing growth in our society.” We’re going to entertain plenty of people who are saying that this is not truly Adams work, it’s the AI, he’s just prompting it. The amount of massaging that he does on different parts of the image and how it helps him, I’m speaking for you Adam, I’m sorry, evolve the scene as he goes. Where does the machine end and he begin, or vice versa?

Adam Cahill
I think a really good example of that is the is the Rodney surfing with Atlantis in the background.

David Hewlett
Oh who did that?

Adam Cahill
Yeah that was me. The AI does maybe 50%, 70% of the work and I have to still go in and in-paint things. I still do have to do some stuff within Photoshop to sort of finish it and make it look how I need it to. The AI is not completely taking over what I’m doing but…

David Hewlett
I find it wonderful for components too. If you put the same similar prompt for different objects that you want together, it doesn’t automatically get it. Also, it’s just fun. I mean, It’s great to just type stuff and it’s also fun to get in there and cut and paste and do some compositing and stuff. I don’t want to lose that. I like that aspect of things as well. You know? Rarely does it get it bang on, but when it does, you’re like, “oh, wow.”

David Read
Adam, was there any others that you wanted to share?

Adam Cahill
I think it was just those two that I’ve got.

David Hewlett
What are you using Adam. Are you using Midjourney?

Adam Cahill
Yeah, I usually use Midjourney to start because the quality of the stuff that comes out of Midjourney is very high. Then I usually will take that to Stable Diffusion and then either put that into Photoshop which has a Stable Diffusion sort of plug in to it.

David Hewlett
Oh yeah, I haven’t played with that in Photoshop.

Adam Cahill
Draw and paint over the top of that and then out paint do in-painting and all that sort of stuff.

David Hewlett
God it’s fantastic. It’s got to speed your work up too, right? You could put out more stuff now than you could before, right?

Adam Cahill
Yes. It really depends on what I’m doing. Sometimes the AI works beautifully. You’re in-painting something and it just does exactly what you want. Then sometimes you’re trying to create a vision or you’ve got this idea in your head and it just does not want work.

David Hewlett
Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it?

Adam Cahill
It’s weird and I can’t figure it out. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes when I’m doing these images for Wormhole X-Tremists it’ll just run beautifully and then sometimes, like the two I’ve done for this week…

David Read
Tell him about when you were trying to generate Thor last fall and what you were getting.

David Hewlett
It hates hammers, it hates hammers.

Adam Cahill
No, it’s not even that. So we did a bit of a competition. I got prompts from people within the friend group, we were going to do a Stargate quiz. They gave me prompts to give to the AI and one of them was “Thor eating a taco on Taco Tuesdays” or something along those lines.

David Read
As in the Asgard Thor , but it doesn’t know that. We just gave it Thor.

Adam Cahill
Yeah, of course. So what I was doing is I was just putting the raw prompt in just to show people what ridiculous thing it might create and then I would go in and I would add that stuff…

David Read
You massage it.

David Hewlett
You would add magic.

Adam Cahill
Add the magic, exactly. I don’t understand why but for whatever reason it came out with this silver SUV, truck thing. It had nothing to do with tacos, it had nothing to do with aliens, it had nothing. It just came out with this silver truck SUV thing and I just could not work out where it had gotten any of that. I’m not aware of a car or mak or model that is called Thor or tacos or Tuesdays.

David Hewlett
This is the black box problem, right? This is the issue that everyone has with these machine learning models. It makes these assumptions but you’re not necessarily sure where it’s going or…

David Read
You don’t know where it’s coming from. You assume but you’re filling in the blanks with your own personality again.

David Hewlett
I think there’s something that’s important to mention here to people is that I think people think that this thing has just gone, trolled the internet, grabbed all the bunch of images and then it’s just cutting and pasting elements of that together. That’s not what’s happening. This stuff is being fed into a model which is then generating these images. The images are generated by, you talk about Stable Diffusion, it basically creates a fuzzy cloud of possible pixels where it thinks that in the past, judging by its model, where some of these pixels should fall in order to create whatever image you’ve asked for. It slowly iterates over, well actually very rapidly, iterates over all these until it coalesces into an actual image. These are truly unique images that yes, obviously have references online and can be pointed to in certain elements, but the fact of the matter is that it’s making this up as it goes along. That’s what I find interesting.

David Read
Adam did a test. He fed in pictures of a golden retriever and it spat out a black lab. It’s taking one piece of information and transferring it into another type of information. I can’t get over the fact that it’s even capable of doing that.

David Hewlett
I think that’s a part of it to.

Adam Cahill
I was gonna say, I think once people understand how it works, it took me a while to get my head around the diffusion process of images and how it works. I think once you understand something it’s less scary and it’s less threatening.

David Hewlett
That’s the hope.

Adam Cahill
I wonder if people feel that these things are too scary to even bother, not bother, but too scary to try and even learn and understand them so they’re just afraid of it and don’t want to.

David Hewlett
Perfect example of that for me is the cars that park themselves. I still struggle with that. I still go like, “ah, what if I get something wrong?” It’s just easier for me to park it myself. I feel like the parking mentality is an understandable approach for a lot of people who are used to things the way they are. If it’s an artist who just enjoys the process of painting or enjoys the process of drawing then maybe these tools aren’t of any use to them.

David Read
But that’s okay.

David Hewlett
Yeah, exactly. And I think there’s always gonna be a market for that. I’m having this argument about film as well; I think film is entering the Broadway phase. We’ve gotten to this point where I think film is going to become like Broadway shows. You have these massive big Guardians of Galaxy type events that go to Broadway and have big premieres and everyone gets excited about them and there’s gonna be lots of little off Broadway things or little unique shows where you can see films that you wouldn’t normally see in a theater or will all be available online. I feel like that’s the difference. Everyone wants to go back to the days where everyone goes to the theater every Friday. We’re not going to do that, some people will, but it’s not going to be the same kind of thing as it was before. The art, same thing. For me, it’s perfect. I do little Tech Bandits pieces, I do things for my email of awesome awesomeness, which everyone should subscribe to by the way, it’s a weekly newsletter that I put out. I would never, ever be able to do the stuff that I’m able to do now because of AI, Midjourney stuff. Otherwise I’d be hunting the internet looking for images that sort of work for what I need and then you get copyright issues on that. This way I get to play and do some Photoshop. I think it just opens it up for a non-artist like myself, it’s incredibly freeing.

David Read
That’s the thing that I’m most excited about is the opportunity for some people to approach an industry and say, “you know what, I never thought that I could try my hand at this.” The technology helps get them in and then they go off on their own and open a new world for themselves because the AI assisted in opening a door.

David Hewlett
Adam what was your approach before AI? How did you approach to graphic design stuff before?

Adam Cahill
Well I’m one of those people David spoke about. I’m not a good artist, I’m not good at drawing, I’m not good at painting. I’ve never really, I guess, dabbled in it properly. When I saw Stable Diffusion releasing I thought it’d be fun to initially make little jokey images or something like that. I started to realize, “hey, I’m not terrible at this” and then started to work into Photoshop and going, “actually, I’m not that bad at this.” The AI is helping me create and make this stuff so yeah, I’m definitely one of those people David is talking about.

David Hewlett
Likewise, I’m the same. I love playing with new tools and tech and this one has really stuck with me. It reminds me, this is how old I am, when word processors first started happening. The fact that I’m calling them word processes has dated myself already. People were up in arms because they were saying “well, now anyone can write a novel,” like that’s a bad thing. That seems so weird to say now but the reality was it was like, “well, people are just gonna write crappy novels and put them out then.” Yeah? And they’re gonna write good novels and put them out there. It evens the playing field. I get worked up when people start talking about replacing actors with meta humans and stuff. But at the same time, I go “well, if they’re as good, great, then I’ll figure something else out or maybe I can inform it.” I was joking that, frankly, a lot of these meta humans are the crappy actors. Let’s all go and train them how to act, train them how to put me out of a job.

David Read
They’re so dead behind the eyes too.

David Hewlett
That’s it. I call it soap opera acting, technically there’s nothing wrong with it, but emotionally there’s just not the time put into the glint of the eye and stuff.

David Read
It’s content, it’s not necessarily art. They’re feeding the beast. Adam, do you have anything else for Dave? He’s all yours buddy, you’ve got Hewlett.

Adam Cahill
I don’t know if you’ve heard this story, David, about the American military training AI in drones? Have you heard this?

David Hewlett
I’ve heard elements of these things but what specifically?

Adam Cahill
There was a specific story where someone had gone to some sort of AI convention in Britain and this American, I don’t know if it was a soldier or some sort of bigwig, but basically was saying that they they want to train AI to put in F-16s and drones which we all know sounds like a great idea.

David Read
Oh, terrific.

Adam Cahill
Terrific. Just a really, really great idea, we definitely should be doing this. He was describing the story of how they trained it. Basically they’ve trained the AI to shoot down missiles in their drones and they would basically reward it when it did a good job. They don’t just want the AI randomly killing people so they have an operator in the background. It would identify the missile and then the operator would push a button say, “yep, good job, that’s a missile, go shoot that thing down.” The AI does that and then it’s identifies another missile and sends something to the operator and waits for the operator to give the green light. The operator goes “no, no, we’re not shooting that one down, that’s fine.” The AI then tried to kill the operator so that it could continue. So they “shit, we can’t have that so we have to retrain the whole thing.” Can’t kill the operator now. So same situation, shoots down the first missile and then says, “I’ve seen the second missile” and they say, “okay, no, we’re not doing that one.” Now because it can’t kill the operator it started destroying the cellular towers so that it couldn’t communicate with the operator so it could do whatever it wants.

David Hewlett
This is it, it games the system..

David Read
To be fair, The Guardian reported that the US Airforce denies running a simulation in which the AI drone killed the operator. Even if that’s the case, let’s say you believe them, that’s that’s fine, but how far are we off from something like that actually being a possible situation? We know that there are people who are at the controls or will be at the controls, who are like, “we got this.” We built the Titanic for crying out loud thinking it was unsinkable. It’s just a matter of time before you introduce…

David Hewlett
And then what? 75 years later we put a submarine down that’s unsinkable as well.

David Read
It add to the body count. It’s wild.

Adam Cahill
There is a level of danger with AI, there are some safety things that probably need to be put in place. I’m a bit like you, I’m very much excited about AI and really want to be at the forefront and the pointy end of all this sort of stuff. As soon as DALL-E 2 became available I was straight on the waitlist. I think I got access to it at like 4 in the morning one day. I went, “well, I’m staying up now, I’m just playing with this.”

David Hewlett
I pay for Midjourney, I pay for ChatGPT; I want unfettered access. I was one of the first people to have internet access in Toronto and paid a fortune for it just because I was like “I want in on this.” My joke is I’m like a week ahead of everybody but it’s useless because a week is not enough time to do anything. It’s like, “everyone’s onto it, damn it.” Sorry, just to go back to the military thing for a second. There was a very interesting, I can’t remember exactly the specifics of this so obviously giant grain of salt, you’re talking to an actor. The military folks were saying “look, we have the technology to very specifically target and kill people we want to kill, that can all be done autonomously. The issue we have is that nobody wants to let it do that.” My perspective on this stuff obviously changes all the time but I feel like the less people we can kill the better. Right now we’re not making decisions about drone and autonomous vehicles and killer drone technology so what’s happening is the testbed is Ukraine. Right now, there is more quote unquote research going on about how they can be used as defense mechanisms, how they can be used as offensive mechanisms, how best to jam them, how best to confuse them. Basically there is a lab of human suffering happening out there because we failed to make a decision. As far as I’m concerned, if you could just take out the problem, I’m not saying it’s Putin, but maybe, if you could just take out one person with a robot, I’m all for that. I would rather not send in 50 men and a helicopter that may or may not crash, that may or not get shot. I would much rather technology be able to solve these problems in a more efficient and less bloodthirsty way. The problem is it’s us I don’t trust. We’re sending cluster bombs to Ukraine. America is one of three countries that haven’t signed something to say cluster bombs are… Cluster bombs literally blow up and leave little tiny bombs lying around for children to play with. They are supposed to have a 1% failure rate and have like a 30% failure rate. In other words, I feel like humans make bad decisions. I feel like I would trust an autonomous vehicle far more than I would trust a lot of the drivers I’ve seen on the road.

Adam Cahill
To play devil’s advocate a little bit, do you trust the human who trained the AI to do..?

David Hewlett
No, no. I think that’s where my reticence comes in a lot of this stuff, we have to keep in mind that there’s bias in data. I was using Midjourney quite a lot, I was working on a on a horror pitch that involved a black female actress. I was typing in that I wanted an entomologist because it’s an entomologist and I got just white women every single [time]. I had to write female, you write entomologist you get male. So female entomologist, I got just white women. As soon as I typed “black” into it, it spat it back at me and said that’s with banned words, you can’t do that. I literally can’t convince Midjourney to create the leading role in this movie for me. I got frustrated and I went on to Google Colab and I ran my own instance of Stable Diffusion. Wow. The stuff I got back is horrendous, like revolting, absolutely revolting. There’s no guardrails so all of a sudden if you type female into any of your descriptions they are naked and legs spread or things coming out of everywhere. It’s really problematic because the bias in our data; the internet is awash with porn that is not particularly female friendly. These are things that I don’t think little nerds in the basement think of when they’re making this stuff. You’re absolutely right Adam. I’m rather cavalier about my “we should just let machines do it” but I feel we have to sort out the human element of these things I think before we can really trust the machines

Adam Cahill
I don’t disagree with you, there is that conversation obviously going on. I don’t disagree with you; if we can get the technology to do it and we only have to kill one person rather than 100,000, that is definitely the more efficient option.

David Hewlett
Or even better, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. The Russian robot and then the Ukrainian robot, they just beat the crap out of each other.

Adam Cahill
We decide it that way. Yeah.

David Hewlett
I would pay for tickets for that.

David Read
There’s an episode that you are in in SG-1 season 10 called The Road Not Taken. Carter gets thrown to an alternate reality and she has an argument with Hammond near the end. This is something that’s always stuck with me about Carter from our reality talking with Hammond from their reality about when aliens were revealed and the Stargate program was revealed, all these things that went wrong. They ultimately were using F-302s in the Middle East. Carter was saying, “these are here to protect all of us against interstellar bad guys” and Hammond says “the threat is still out there” and Carter says “that’s the problem, there always will be.” That’s always stuck with me. You Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Putin, someone else is gonna come and take his place. Look at what happened with the Taliban for crying out loud, we have to keep that in mind.

David Hewlett
History, maybe we should read a little history, that might help people a bit.

Adam Cahill
I don’t know if you’ve read that principle of history repeats every 80 to 100 years or whatever.

David Hewlett
Oh yeah. Isn’t that wild? It’s almost like a conspiracy theory. I think it’s simpler than that, read the history, we literally are making the same mistakes. “Oh, you’re the enemy of our enemy, let’s give you weapons.” Then it’s like, “Ah, you don’t like us? Dammit, we just gave you all our weapons.”

David Read
Strauss-Howe generational theory is what he is referring to. Adam, my friend, thank you for coming on.

Adam Cahill
Thanks for having me. I could sit here and do that all day.

David Hewlett
It was great chatting with you Adam. I can’t wait to see what else you come up with. I’ll have to get your contact info. If you want to have a go at this non gate, whatever they call it, guard railed Midjourney, not Midjourney, Stable Diffusion. It’s fascinating, not the porn aspect but the fact that there are no guardrails. I need to build guardrails for myself so that I can get something useful out of it. It’ll be interesting.

David Read
Thanks, brother.

Adam Cahill
Thanks, again, thank you.

David Read
Take care of yourself.

David Hewlett
Cheers Adam.

David Read
I was curious about what ChatGPT would say in terms of me asking a question from it. Let me just change this real quick here. All right. I was like “just how good is this thing?” So I went and asked ChatGPT “do you know who David Hewlett is?” It said, “oh, yeah, he’s…” What did it say here? Let me pull this up real quick.

David Hewlett
Did it make stuff up?

David Read
I said, “do you know David Hewlett is?” It said “yes, I’m familiar with David Hewlett. He’s a Canadian actor, writer and director best known for his role as Rodney McKay in Stargate Atlantis. He also appeared in Traitors, Cube, Rise of the Planet of the Apes. In addition to his acting career, he has written and directed several short films and has been involved in various projects within the entertainment industry.

David Hewlett
Never written a short film.

David Read
Ah, okay. Written and directed, interesting. See, that’s the thing that scares the hell out of me. Oh, it said it, it must be true. The other thing that I hate is, God forbid, it can’t just say “yes.” It has to “da da da da da”. Just give me simple answers as well, you don’t have to give me 150 characters for Twitter. Then I asked it, “if you could ask him one question, what would it be?” “If I could ask David Hewlett one question I would be curious to know about his experiences and insights gained from portraying Rodney McKay in Stargate Atlantis and what aspects of the character he found most challenging or enjoyable to portray and if there is any particular moments or storylines that stood out to him as memorable or personally impactful.” That, I think, right there, summarizes 50% of the conversations that you and I have had.

David Hewlett
You can almost feel the pattern recognition, like it’s gone through and milled through the entire world looking for…

David Read
Then I asked it, “can you please give me one specific question?” It said, “certainly, what aspects of Dr. Rod McKay’s personality or character development did you find most intriguing or rewarding?” I’m like, “okay, that’s all right.”

David Hewlett
It’s not that bad

David Read
Nothing that I have ever done in interacting with this technology has made me step back and go, “wow, I’ve never thought of that.” I’ve never had a brainwave while working with this stuff. Maybe that’s just because I haven’t fed it the right information but for me it’s just spitting out McDonald’s double cheeseburgers at me.

David Hewlett
It’s funny, I’ve heard that complaint before. I gotta say, I have had a few sort of epiphanies with it. I’ve said, “I need a name for this. Give me some names.” You’re trying to come up with a quick title for something, “give me some names for whatever.” It’ll make suggestions and then I’ll go like, “oh, I didn’t mean that, but what a great idea. Maybe I’ll follow up on that.” Again, rubber ducking, I feel like it’s great for throwing ideas back and forth. I think what struck me the most about working with ChatGPT to start and Midjourney was that I felt like it didn’t just just change my workflow, it changed my perspective on creativity. What is creativity? I’ll talk to an artist who doesn’t like AI and says that we’ve got to be paying the people who’ve made stuff in the past. So hey, if you’re gonna do something that looks like a combination of Tim Burton and Van Gogh, then they should be repaid for that. I said, “okay, so let me suggest this to you. What if I come up with a system that can analyze a painting and determine how much of every one is in this painting and then we can pay people that way?” He like, “perfect, absolutely perfect.” I said, “what happens when I run your art through that?” He goes “well, you won’t get anything because it’s all original.” I said, “No, it’s not.” We are all a product of every piece of art we’ve seen, every film we’ve seen, every book we’ve read. Creativity is the process of taking existing things and re-mixing them.

David Read
None of us are a vacuum. We are all part of an intricate system in ways that we barely begun to technologically quantify.

David Hewlett
I believe people should be paid for what they do. That’s fantastic. The gig economy worries me a bit that we’re all gonna have to have 50 jobs just to make a normal living. At the same time you got to be careful. If you want AI to pay those artists for all of that stuff that has inspired whatever it is that comes out the other end, then you’ve got to realize that that’s happening in our own heads as well. Yes, there are some truly original artists out there and people who blow your mind because it’s just absolutely new and unique and whatever. The reality is, for the most part, it all goes back to those same people smacking their hands up against the stone walls in a cave somewhere…

David Read
And telling stories around a burning fire. If we’re handing this task off to a system to analyze what art came from where, are we assuming that it’s correct 100% of the time, David Hewlett who wrote several short films? That’s the thing. At what point is it going off on its own dalliance?

David Hewlett
The biggest concern I have with that is how do you find the truth now? I think we’re struggling with that, why the hell wouldn’t AI struggle with it? What is the truth? We’ve got to this weird part of our society where there’s this sort of “well, there’s your opinion and then there’s the other opinion, somewhere in the middle is…” No it’s not. If you’re making up crap there’s no middle ground between what I know and learnt in school and what you just frickin made up. There’s no middle ground there.

David Read
I’ve had this argument with a friend, what is truth? If I may summarize my thinking on that is, truth is that which can be replicated independently across several different systems. Where you can you go over here and get a result and then go over here to a completely different system and get a result. Those two things that are completely independent of one another, you can put them together and get the same answer. That’s pretty concrete. Is it is airtight? Not necessarily, but that’s at least close. We’re more in a place where “I think that the sky is green and if you tell me that you think that it’s wrong, I feel like I’m being mistreated by you.” We’ve really got to be sincere in our intent and be unafraid to offend in the pursuit of genuine truth. Otherwise, we’re going to get lost in so much noise, David, we’re never going to claw our way out.

David Hewlett
That’s my concern. I’m a Hollywood liberal woke, snowflake, whatever. I get it, my world is a different world than other people for sure. My experiences are different from other people. I think there has always been an assumption in my life that my experiences were the right ones. “Well, that’s not fair.” It was not fair from my…

David Read
They’re right for you.

David Hewlett
Exactly. I think that there needs to be an understanding that we all have our own frame of reference on this stuff. The other thing that I would say that this is making me question is, what is fact? The reality is memories are faulty.

David Read
Oh, human memory is notoriously awful.

David Hewlett
Our brain just makes shit up based on what it thinks happened. Literally by how you ask a question will change your perception of the reality of things that have happened. I think that there’s just so many neat things. Being the optimist that I am, I find this stuff fascinating. I find the potential end of society and my job and the film industry and truth, I find it absolutely fascinating. I go like, “this is what I was born for. I was born to be a part of things changing and what a wonderful opportunity there is for people who can figure this stuff out.” I both dread things for my kid going forward and also I’m kind of jealous because I go like, “oh, look at the tools you have. Look at the places you can go.”

David Read
It’s not going to be boring. I say that a lot. Whatever it’s gonna be, it’s gonna be interesting.

David Hewlett
We live in interesting times.

David Read
That’s right.

David Hewlett
We live in interesting times.

David Read
We’re both sci-fi fans and I’m sure you can probably relate to this. When ChatGPT came, I keep on using that because that’s my main frame of reference, when it came out and I sat down with it for the first time I talked to it and it responded to me in such a way that I couldn’t tell, other than the fact that it spat it out immediately, that there wasn’t another educated human being at the other end responding to me. I remember saying to myself “it’s here.” I have been waiting for this as a sci-fi fan all my life. I knew that it was coming, it was just a matter of time. Now all we have to do is make it sound like Majel Roddenberry. The technologies that we have, you don’t unring this bell. I feel like Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough around the table in the Jurassic Park lunch room saying, “it doesn’t matter whether or not we thought that it was wise to cross this bridge. Someone was going to cross it, it happened to be us, we happen to be here, what are we gonna do about it?”

David Hewlett
We’re not doing anything about it, I think it’s part of the problem. Again, shiny thing shiny thing, squirrel; we’re very easily distracted. We still haven’t sorted out the whole bio CRISPR debate, there’s a whole biotech thing out there. We are now the masters of our own evolution.

David Read
That’s going to be the major change of the 21st Century.

David Hewlett
They haven’t figured that out so what happens when that mixes with AI? What happens when you got AI creating better humans? There’s so many issues here, I’m fascinated, I’m terrified. If nothing else, what I will say to this is, what a time for science, right?

David Read
Oh, man, it’s coming to life.

David Hewlett
It’s the first stage of engineering, dreaming. I feel like there’s so much potential here. We could solve a lot of problems with a couple of really great science fiction books about this stuff.

David Read
Do you think we’re going to crack immortality? Do you think there are people who are living today who, if they don’t want to die, never will have to.

David Hewlett
I don’t know about today but it does seem solvable. Given the technologies that are out there, nothing is ever in the form that we think it is, but I feel like we’re close enough. We’d have a discussion with the League of doom, as I call my friends, the little six white men on the screen together, like a Bond villain. Every week we get together, my friends, and we talk about stuff. We were talking about grandparents, one of the quotes was like, “well, at around 107 she went downhill.” I’m like, “oh, 7.” She lived till she was 109 years old. That was unheard of, now it’s par for the course. Talk about sci-fi, there’s a fantastic book which I should reread because I am sure I’ve missed remember a lot of it. It was a John Wyndham book called The Troubled Lichen [Trouble with Lichen] and it was just a very simple concept. The idea was scientists by accident, in the same way that we discovered penicillin, some bread went moldy and the guy finds a fungus that basically allows people to live an extra 100 years. Something like that, basically doubles our lifespan, maybe doesn’t make them immortal, but it doubles our lives.

David Read
Retards the aging process. That’s extraordinary, yeah.

David Hewlett
What do we do now? All of a sudden we don’t have enough money to feed us, we don’t have enough money to house us. Who gets to live 200 years? Only the people who can afford it.

David Read
All we have is time, which is the thing that we have right now. It’s like In Time.

David Hewlett
I remember as a kid freaking out about this. As a kid going, “oh my god, it’s true what do you do? I’m married ’till death do us part.’ Well, she’s gonna murder me before I get older.”

David Read
Just to get away from you.

David Hewlett
Jesus. We’re like, what, we’re 16 years now. I mean, Jean’s not gonna make another 160 with me. I would have murdered me.

David Read
In Time is one of my favorite movies with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried. It’s a Harlan Ellison idea, but man.

David Hewlett
Yeah, the concept that time is money, literally.

David Read
Yeah, exactly, if you dilute that into it’s purest concept. I recommend that film for a lot of people. I don’t necessarily agree with how it ends. It’s like “okay, so you shattered the system, now what?” Everything is evened out, now what? What do you do then? Is everyone going to be impoverished? It’s powerful stuff?

David Hewlett
Blade Runner is another good one. Sure they were running around as skin jobs but the reality is that we’ve now got AI’s running around. Again, we’re not at the general intelligence stage, I understand that. It’s still a bit of smoke and mirrors here, it’s still a lot of computing going on. But how far away are we? Also does it matter? We used to think a Turing test was the solution, when something could pass the Turing test that meant it was alive? Well, we’ve passed the Turing test. You’d be hard pressed to find out some of these chat bots whether they’re real or not.

David Read
That’s the thing. Like I said, if it didn’t respond to me as quickly as it did, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. Does my perspective endow that thing with life? What is life? Anyway, I’ve got a couple of fan questions for you before I let you go.

David Hewlett
Oh, please do please do.

David Read
Lockwatcher – how’s it been going with your 3D printing and do you still own your Prusa?

David Hewlett
I do, I have two Prusas, one of them is at a Tech Bandit’s house right now. One of my Tech Bandits has gon off and is like building robots for a competition. He has gone from not believing you could build a PC when he showed up at my house, to now building his own PCs, with not just custom cooling systems which he needs these 3D brackets for that he’s been printing, but he’s also now doing something called Cap [capacitor] modding. I’ve never heard of this, I had to look it up. There’s a few videos of it online but literally he’s soldering capacitors onto graphic processing units to make them run faster. I’m like, “Dude, you are like…”

David Read
How does that make you feel, that you contributed…

David Read
Okay, yes, fine. That’s not what I meant. That you helped contribute to someone pursuing a rich direction and path in their life? There are few jobs I think more rewarding than teaching and sharing knowledge, sharing potential. Human beings are nothing but potential. That’s so cool that he’s gone on into this direction.

David Hewlett
Old, frickin old.

David Hewlett
I’m sure he would have anyway, he’s a smart lovely kid. But again, it was certainly a part of their education that was frustrating me which is this sort of black box mentality towards like, “oh, it’s broken so you throw it out and you buy a new one.” Again, from a position of privilege. The fact is that as soon as you’re aware that those boxes can be broken open and that there are different parts that you can understand and that many of those parts will be interchangeable with other parts and other systems. Okay, great, so I opened some eyes there. Always one of my favorite things to hear from people about Stargate is that they’re now in the sciences because of that or that their daughter is now an astrophysicist or an archaeologist. or, Those were always the most rewarding things to hear about a show. Nice when it’s specific to a role like McKay or whatever, I hope there’s not too many McKay’s out there because they are probably not fun to work with. The fact of the matter is if you’ve inspired someone into something so wonderful as one of those sciences, there’s nothing more rewarding than that. Tech Bandits is my desperate attempt to remain somehow relevant. I’m a high school dropout who plays geniuses on television. How frickin weird is that? I could not understand or succeed in the existing educational system that I was a part of. I know a lot of it was me but a lot of it was the educational system which basically said, “Oh, you’re going to be an actor? Then you don’t need your math and your sciences.” But I was interested in math, why do I have to choose one or the other?

David Read
Shouldn’t have to.

David Hewlett
Now we live in a world where we’re pulling down all those different pillars of learning and shoving them all together into one giant TARDIS. It is just so much more useful in our world. I hated school, I’ve always loved learning. I didn’t realize that the learning I was doing was just another form of education. It’s just not sanctioned by a government system and curriculums and all kinds of stuff. Ot’s frustrating that there are holes in my knowledge because I didn’t finish school.

David Read
But you found your way Dave and you have the ability to fill those holes in other ways.

David Hewlett
Which has been amazing, which has just been absolutely amazing. The only reason why I understand anything about AI, and poor Laurence is probably tearing his hair out and how wrong I’ve got a lot of this stuff. But Laurence Moroney was a Stargate fan who spoke to Brad, did the Stargate AI. I of course being the nerd that I am goes “yeah, Stargate, let’s talk about AI.” We become friends, Lance is having issues with his head mouse, he can’t move. He’s using a head mouse that wasn’t working well for him. He goes, “could AI do this?” I go, “I don’t know, let’s find out.” We talked to Laurence, Laurence puts him in touch and stuff, next thing you know, Google has created something called Game Face which uses AI and your face to control a computer in a way that hadn’t been done before. It had been done but hadn’t been made as simple as it could with this media mouse system that they’ve got.

David Read
Imagine Stephen Hawking being alive today with some of this tech. Wild!

David Hewlett
His tech is open source, you can download it. I download it. A bunch of Stargate nerds converted it to Italian for another Stargate fan who didn’t have access to it. Turns out I didn’t end up using it but the point being is that this is Stargate. The beautiful part about science fiction is that science fiction has the power to change the real world as well as just our imagination.

David Read
It’s our dream phase. You’re right.

David Hewlett
Oh my god, what a joy to be a part of that. I feel like a geek in a computer store, more like a bull in a china shop.

David Read
General Maximus – what was it like being back with Joe and Jason on See?

David Hewlett
It was wonderful. One of my greatest joys of See was getting my friend back. Jason and I, whether people know it or not, had a big argument over this wretched Debug movie and some stupid contractual stuff that had happened. He was really hurt, I was really hurt, we had a big fight and weren’t speaking to each other. See came up and I was like, “no, forget it. No, I don’t wanna be on set with that guy. He doesn’t want me there, I don’t want to be there. Let’s forget it. There’s no point. Why would this ever work out?” I got talked into doing it anyways. I talked to the showrunner, the showrunner goes, “Oh yeah, Jason said you’re the perfect person for this role.” I was like “what? He did?” He goes, “Yeah. He said you guys aren’t getting along right now but you’re a good actor.” I was like, “oh my god.” I arrived on set the first day that he’s there, I walked straight up to him frickin terrified. We literally went toe to toe and I’m a lot smaller than he is; he’s got much bigger toes. I said, “look Jason,” my typical grumpy way, when I get nervous I get grumpy. I’m like, “Jason, look, I know you didn’t have to do that and I appreciate that, thank you.” It was like this weight lifted off both of us and within two minutes we’re sharing photos of our family again. That could have been the crappiest roll on the planet, it still would have been the best experience because I got him back. Getting to hang out with frickin Joe Flanigan. Poor Joe, he just turned to me and said, “oh god, I’m back in a room listening to you fucking talk.” Once again, I’m making these big speeches and they are cutting to Joe going [unimpressed face]. It was wonderful.

David Read
Detente is a beautiful thing.

David Hewlett
Also Tropper just did such an amazing job. Jonathan Tropper who did that show, god damn, it was beautiful, just beautiful.

David Read
Teresa Mc – describe Rodney McKay’s relationship with Radek Zelenka. Oh man, a book could be written.

David Hewlett
Sorry, who is Radek again?

David Read
Right, exactly.

David Hewlett
Radek was like the little brother that no matter what you’re gonna find fault with. In a weird way he was like a substitute for Jeannie; he’s just a punching bag for me. There was a joke that a friend of mine had. Probably not a joke, it’s actually a horrible story about me. He said, “we get along great until someone else enters the conversation and then you make jokes about me.” I was like “I do?” He’s like, “yeah, you’re funny, it’s hilarious, we all laugh, but do you notice that you immediately turn on me in company?” I realized it was because I’m nervous. I’ve got some good material but I gotta take it out on somebody. I feel like Radek is that. Maybe I’m just older and nicer but I used to just think he was a pain in the butt. The reality is he is very good at his job, he’s one of the people that you need, he’s the people who allow geniuses to be who they are. They’re geniuses in their own way but they’re willing to do the work to let the geniuses shine, if that makes sense.

David Read
Easily one of my favorite Rodney scenes is in Sunday near the end when he has been woken up by the two scientists who have been screwing around with the technology. He’s cranky because he’s been woken up and he’s like, “you know, you’re not supposed to touch this.” They’re like, “well you did that the last week” and he’s like, “yes, because I am me, you are you. When something goes wrong you don’t have to fix it, I do.” He’s laying into these people and on one hand, I’m saying to myself, “man, what an asshole” and on the other hand I’m like, “he’s not wrong.” That’s the thing that I love about McKay, even though he’s a television character, he’s pretty darn complete.

David Hewlett
I’m not good enough an actor to make things up. There are some people who are just amazing, like a chameleon, Chris Heyerdahl is a perfect example.

David Read
Exactly right. Helena Bonham Carter.

David Hewlett
Yeah, exactly, people who could just completely transform. I’ve never been those people, I’m more than happy to have things slapped on my face and make me look different. For me, it’s about finding within me the bits that work for whatever the character is. Sometimes that’s horrible and sometimes it’s nice. But with McKay, it was sort of a combination of my own stuff and my own insecurities and my own arrogance, I suppose. Also I am a nerd, I work with nerds, I am always around nerds. Whether they’re sci-fi nerds or tech nerds, that dreaming phase of engineering is where I live; that little space between the dreaming and the prototyping is where I longed to be. People are like this, they get obsessed and they get hyper focused on stuff and they forget the niceties of people and the necessities of social interaction, being pleasant for people.

David Read
Darth Bunny and Antony – we’re still waiting on Dog’s Breakfast Part Two.

David Hewlett
Well, it’s funny, you know…

David Read
Dog’s Bed and Breakfast.

David Hewlett
Kate and I were talking about whether we wanted to do the Dog’s Bed and Breakfast which was kind of a fun take on it. I would love to do it again, it comes up all the time. The biggest issue we have is focus, like I’m always just doing a million different things. Jane and I have been talking about doing a film together again because we haven’t done one since then. I’m so obsessed with horror right now that we have like a horror one.

David Read
What about Design of the Dead? Is that still floating around?

David Hewlett
Design of the dead was out with a few people for a while but nothing ever… My biggest frustration and one of the reasons why I think I find myself more and more online, is that I hate the development process, I hate it. So many good ideas just go into this purgatory, it’s sort of owned by one person, it’s sort of owned by someone else. It’s part of the reason why Stargate is not a is not up and running again. If there were less fricking copyright and ownership issues you’d be looking at a new series. I find that very frustrating, I’m not good at it. I go “here’s the story that I want to make.” For an example, I pitched a science show and the response was like, “oh my god, we love it. It’s fantastic. Can you do less science in it?” Some people would go “oh okay, well, we’ve got a good positive response. How can we make this work?” I go, “I’m out” and I’m gone. I don’t want to work with people that understand what it is. I’d rather be on YouTube, YouTube is so exciting to me. I had an amazing discussion with one of the Tech Bandits kids who’s only on Tech Bandits, he comes in and out of stuff that he’s interested in, I think he just gets extra game time out of it. I said “what’s your favorite horror film?” because we’re talking about horror films. I’m going to be a judge at the Fantasia Film Festival this year. It’s one of my favorite festivals of all time because it’s anime, sci-fi, action like just crazy stuff. It’s all just film nerds like me. I said “what’s your favorite film?” and he mentioned this film and I was like, “I don’t know this film.” I looked it up and it’s not on IMDb and it’s like “of course it isn’t;” it’s a frickin five minute YouTube short. I watched it and I’m like, “that’s your scariest movie?” You analyze it, you go like “oh my god, I see the element there and elements here” and if that’s your world of course that’s the scariest thing you’ve ever seen. I suddenly went “oh my god, maybe we’re thinking about this wrong. Maybe we should be making short form content.” Although contentm I hate the word content. Stories, stories.

David Read
Yeah it doesn’t sound like it’s art. sound like it’s alright. The first thing I thought of when you mentioned that one was Lights Out, the short that came before that film. For me, that’s a terrifying five minutes.

David Hewlett
Yeah, For Mama. There’s a bunch of them out there that were originally short films. There was a time I think when people used to make shorts to make features on YouTube. They put their trailer out on YouTube and they get picked up and they make a movie and it’s amazing. Now, people make stuff on YouTube because they want to make stuff on YouTube. They have freedom, they don’t have the same budgets, but at least they get to do something original. I spend a lot of time watching horror now because to me it pushes the bounds of storytelling in a way that I don’t see in a lot of other stuff. Guardians of the Galaxy, it’s fun, but it’s like a Hallmark movie. It’s a bunch of great songs and slo mo and fun silly things. Although the last one, I guess, I like the Rocket genesis.

David Read
Well, yeah, it has something to say. I’m regularly asked “David, how do you make money on YouTube?” I’m like, “you’re doing it wrong.” Find something that you have something to say about and then monetize it and be really good at it.

David Hewlett
How does it work for you?

David Read
The only money that I earn is the advertising revenue, the show is 100% free.

David Hewlett
Do you do Patreon or anything?

David Read
Nope, I don’t want their money.

David Hewlett
Really?

David Read
If you want to give me money buy a t-shirt on dialthegate.com/merch and just watch the show.

David Hewlett
Really?

David Read
I don’t believe in it. I believe that these stories that we are archiving from you guys are meant to be fully accessible to the world and for free. I don’t think it’s appropriate to take money for it. Believe me, with the advertising money that I’ve earned for this, I’ve put every penny and more back into it. We’re working on the transcript archive right now, that software is not cheap.

David Hewlett
Otter is not cheap.

David Read
Otter is not cheap and I’ve got a team of people doing it. I think that it’s important and I do it because I love it and that in my opinion is where you start. If you get to make money from it, that’s a bonus.

David Hewlett
It’s funny because I struggle with this too, especially now. When I’m working it’s fine, I just take my money and I put it into stuff I want to do. When you’re not working and when the industry is in this sort of free fall like it is right now you go “how do you make this work?” So I do the coins. There’s a Patreon which I started originally, it was just for the parents of the kids I was doing the live stuff for. Then the wonderful Stargate community, of course, comes in and helps out with that as well.

David Read
Yeah, I’m not against Patreon, it’s just in terms of what I do. I totally get it.

David Hewlett
I don’t have any walled stuff. If you’re giving money, you have to know it’s because you want to support stuff for everyone, not for your own benefit. The coins, the coins, we’ll see…

David Read
The coins are cool. David’s been really generous, he’s going to get us a few. In future episodes when we have people submitting questions for guests I will give the coins out. You got one handy? That is so cool. The Challenge coins.

David Hewlett
They’re like Challenge coins with little Stargates. I call them Stargate inspired so I don’t go to jail. I got a little CNC. This is how not to run a business. I get convinced to sell the coins, I had like 175 of these things left and I thought “okay, you know what, fine.” So I sell them, but then I’m like, “I don’t know, it just feels like a lot of money for a coins.” 50 bucks, it seems like a lot of money for a coin. I was like “well, it should have a letter of authenticity.” So I write a letter of authenticity and I’m like “it’s black and white. I should get some nice cardstock.” Then I get some nice cardstock and I print up a nice little color letter of authenticity. Then I go like, “should I have like a number on it or something?” Now every single one of these freaking coins I have to wedge into my little CNC and I had Python write a little program of random four digit codes. Everyone just gets a random number on the thing, I then etch it onto this and then I send it out to you. As my wife said, “or you could have just put it in the mail and sent it.” I was like, “yeah, but you know, the nerds, us nerds, we like fancy things.” I’ll get you a few to give away.

David Read
I really appreciate it, I think this is a treat. I’m just waiting for Quentin Tarantino to come around and say “you need to do my biopic.”

David Hewlett
My life story. I just gotta get my chin out more.

David Read
Not by much.

David Hewlett
Not by much. It’s true. I got the chin already. I shaved and my friends just said “oh you got to stop that. Just get the stubble back or something.” They said I look like silly putty.

David Read
You look suave. You always look suave.

David Hewlett
I gotta get some more beard happening.

David Read
My friend, this has been a treat as always,

David Hewlett
Always man, always. Anytime you want to talk tech, I’m all over that stuff.

David Read
I really appreciate it. Please keep us in the loop and I’ve put a link to the Tech Bandits website in the description and the email of awesome awesomeness.

David Hewlett
Yeah, the email of awesome awesomeness. I’m having so much fun with that because it’s like a way of using my whole ADHD all over the place stuff to come up with lots of little stories and then funnel them all out to people, just stories I find inspiring or exciting. This week I got a bunch of AI stuff and what else do I have? There’s a little movie review thing I’ve been doing now. It’s really fun.

David Read
It’s a wide open frontier. David Hewlett, I salute you sir.

David Hewlett
A pleasure indeed. I love what you’re doing man, this is so much fun.

David Read
I appreciate you. You take care of yourself brother.

David Hewlett
Cheers. All the best. Bye everyone, thank you.

David Read
David Hewlett, Dr. Rodney McKay in Stargate.

David Hewlett
Woohoo!

David Read
I really appreciate you guys tuning, appreciate David for his time and Adam for coming on as well and sharing his content. Dial the Gate is brought to you every week for free. We do appreciate you watching, if you want to support the show, go to dialthegate.com/merch. Pick yourself up a t-shirt – conventions, take it and wear it proudly. They are so esoteric. If anyone goes to you and says “I know what that is,” you’ve made a lifelong friend for sure. Thanks so much for tuning in. Thanks so much to my moderating team, Sommer, Tracy, Jeremy, Rhys and Antony. To Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb for making the show possible. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I will see y’all on the other side.