Technology

Low cost AI “video scraping” can now extract knowledge from any display screen recording

Video scraping is only one of many new tips attainable when the most recent massive language fashions (LLMs), resembling Google’s Gemini and GPT-4o, are literally “multimodal” fashions, permitting audio, video, picture, and textual content enter. These fashions translate any multimedia enter into tokens (chunks of information), which they use to make predictions about which tokens ought to come subsequent in a sequence.

A time period like “token prediction mannequin” (TPM) could be extra correct than “LLM” lately for AI fashions with multimodal inputs and outputs, however a generalized various time period hasn’t actually taken off but. However it doesn’t matter what you name it, having an AI mannequin that may take video inputs has fascinating implications, each good and doubtlessly unhealthy.

Breaking down enter limitations

Willison is much from the primary particular person to feed video into AI fashions to realize fascinating outcomes (extra on that beneath, and this is a 2015 paper that makes use of the “video scraping” time period), however as quickly as Gemini launched its video enter functionality, he started to experiment with it in earnest.

In February, Willison demonstrated one other early software of AI video scraping on his weblog, the place he took a seven-second video of the books on his bookshelves, then obtained Gemini 1.5 Professional to extract the entire e-book titles it noticed within the video and put them in a structured, or organized, checklist.

Changing unstructured knowledge into structured knowledge is vital to Willison, as a result of he is additionally a knowledge journalist. Willison has created instruments for knowledge journalists up to now, such because the Datasette venture, which lets anybody publish knowledge as an interactive web site.

To each knowledge journalist’s frustration, some sources of information show proof against scraping (capturing knowledge for evaluation) as a consequence of how the information is formatted, saved, or introduced. In these circumstances, Willison delights within the potential for AI video scraping as a result of it bypasses these conventional limitations to knowledge extraction.