Artificial Intelligencce – Page 12 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

Sunday Morning Reading

On the road spending time with the grandson this weekend. So I’ll be brief. But these writers and articles are worth spending some time with this Sunday morning. A few of them writing about, well, writing.

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I’ll kick off with a controversial piece by Adam Thirlwell in The Guardian who takes a look back to the French Revolution to perhaps find clues into why we’re writing and expressing ourselves quite so much today. Too much writing? Too much self-examination? Depends on what you call writing if you ask me. Anyhow, check out ‘We’re Gripped by graphomania’: why writing beame an online contagion and how we can contain it. I’m not one for containing any of this. The terrific examples below I think illustrate why.

Baldur Bjarnson is one of the thinkers I’m following when it comes to the topic of AI. He’s written a terrific piece called Authorship, in which he explores what happens when creative work, in this instance he’s using film to illustrate, becomes less about the author and more about the aggregator.

One of my most recent discoveries NatashaMH has written two excellent pieces that I recommend. The first is The Need To Write And The Will to Heal From Our Traumatic Experiences.It’s quite a journey. The second is A Portrait of A Woman and is also more than worth your time. Great stuff.

Natasha tells us this piece by David Todd McCarty, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For inspired her to sketch A Portrait of A Woman. I’ll take her word for it. It damn sure stands on it’s own and sorta makes me hope he never does find it.

Talking at The Texaco is another McCarty piece worth your time. As you read it and you think you know where it’s headed, hang on. You don’t.

So much, too much, of our energy is being taken up with all of the news surrounding the orange buffoon and the shit he’s dragged us all into. It’s worth remembering we’ve been here before. While I’m not a fan of Rich Lowry, this look back at Huey Long is a good reminder. We’ve been here before. Damn shame we’re so good at burying those memories.

And to close this out and look ahead, the Farmer’s Almanac is out with it’s predictions for the winter. If they’re correct, many of us might be bundling up this winter.

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.

Sunday Morning Reading

Here’s some Sunday Morning Reading to share. From arts in space and on the stage, to booby trapped tombs and age-old pathogens thawing out of the ice, here’s an electic mix of topics that might or might not connect together as we sweat and swelter through the Dog Days of Summer. Enjoy.

The Lunar Codex is an archive of various forms of creativity including contemporary art, poetry, podcasts, film, images, and other Earth bound cultural artifacts that’s on it’s way to the Moon. Headed up by Samuel Peralta it will travel on several rockets and include works of 30,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers from 157 countries. J.D. Biersdorfer tells us about it in the New York Times.

Back to Earth it seems that archaeologists are afraid to look inside the tomb of China’s first emperor. You know the one guarded by the Terra Cotta army among other things. Apparently it’s not just what might be disturbed by digging or what might be disturbing if they do, but there’s a theory that the place is booby trapped. Sounds very Indiana Jonesish. Tom Hale writes about it in IFLSCIENCE.

The Stage Is Yours according to Natasha MH in this Medium post on Ellemeno. It’s a great piece about arts, artists, dance, theatre, authenticity, and those hidden fears and secrets inside of us all. You know, the ones we choose not to share when we offer ourselves up. Or do we?

The strikes by the actors and writers unions have pointed a spotlight on AI and how that might replace creatives in film, TV and other industries. Studios see financial savings from reduced costs. But maybe they should take a look at Michael Grothaus’ piece in Fast Company as he theorizes that AI might even replace the studios themselves.

In what sounds like science fiction, scientists have woken up a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost. Carolyn Y. Johnson in the Washington Post tells us about that. But if tinkering with what many might think should be left alone doesn’t sound John Carpenterish enough for you, we’re also hearing about frozen pathogens that are waking up on their own in cold places that are warming up. (Can you say Climate Change?) Corey J.A. Bradshaw and Giovannie Strona wrote about this in The Conversation and I caught the article from Science Alert.

Ryan Busse is a former gun company exec who is now warning about the dangerous growing radicalization in his former industry. Corey G, Johnson talked to him for this article in ProPublica.

The social media world is certainly in a state of flux given all the damage Elon Musk has done to Twitter and the scramble by others to provide venues that might offer some of what Twitter used to be before it was X-ed out. Craig Grannell has a great piece called X Marks the Rot. Don’t Buy Into Elon Musk’s Lifelong Crusade.

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.

Sunday Morning Reading

On the road this weekend, so this edition of Sunday Morning Reading will be a little brief. There’s always something to share though.

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On the Artificial Intelligence beat, Catherine Thorbecke at CNN reports that AI might not be quite the time saving boon some have promised. Imagine that.

Who knew Country Music would get embroiled in the so-called “Culture Wars.” Well, unless you haven’t been paying attention, just about everybody. Because hey, just about everything gets caught up at one time or the other. Emily Nussbaum has a terrific long read in Country Music’s Culture Wars And The Remaking of Nashville. FYI: No mention of some guy not born in a small town but singing as if he was.

If you’re looking for a collection of good writers and good writing you won’t go wrong with Ellemeno Magazine on Medium. Some top notch and provactive stuff going on there. Because there’s so much quality writing, I don’t feel so guilty for not recommending more this selections this Sunday.

If you’re interseted in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.

Hollywood on Strike: Nothing Artificial About This Intelligent Move

Balls and Strikes.

SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA by going on strike against the Hollywood studios. This sounds and feels like it’s going to be quite a show. The issues surround the pieces of the compensation pie, but also everyone’s favorite new tech-bug-a-boo, Artificial Intelligence.

The studios, like many other industries see AI as a way to reduce costs. Set aside the issue of replacing labor, introducing AI also affects creativity. We’ve been heading here for quite some time and this is certainly a moment when lines need to be drawn because the precedents set down now will have an effect for who knows how long.

Here’s SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s speech announcing the strike. She says it better than I, or just about anyone could.

And for history and political buffs if history does indeed repeat, Fran Drescher will be elected President of the US down the road. Ronald Reagan was the last president of the guild when it went on a similar strike with other guilds.

Peter Brook Takes on Artificial Intelligence (Well, Sorta Kinda)

News on so-called Artificial Intelligence continues to fill up the digital pages, social networks, air and cable waves with more words, words, words than you can shake a Complete Works of Shakespeare at. Abridged or unabriged. It’s truly amazing how ravenous the appetite for info on this is. But then again it isn’t.

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The purveyors of AI are running so fast with something so incomplete that while the technology is impressive on one hand, they are welcoming the slight of the other. It’s not all smoke and mirrors, but there’s certainly enough smoke to make any reflection feel a bit hazy. We’re told AI is everything from our salvation to the end of it all. There’s a lot of sound and fury from all sides, signifying not much more at the moment than a lot of sound and fury.

I was re-reading some of legendary director Peter Brook’s writings this morning and I stumbled on this quote. I think it comes extremely close to pinning down what’s missing in this moment. Keep in mind this quote was published in his 2013 book, The Quality of Mercy: Reflections on Shakespeare.

Yes. You read that correctly. 2013. Brook left us in July 2022.

Once a computer was asked, “What is truth?” It took a very long time before the reply came back, “I will tell you a story…”

/end scene.

Sunday Morning Reading

It’s been a week. But they usually are. I don’t think there’s a theme to this week’s Sunday Morning Reading other than that things continue along the same path of craziness that for some reason we just continue to accept as somehow normal. So perhaps it is.

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Kicking things off is a great piece by M.G. Siegler about the Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg let’s have a cage mage nonsense called These Used To Be Serious People. I think that title could be applied to just about any field of human endeavor in this current moment.

Moral Panic? Mabye. But then maybe you’re just in a moral panic about moral panics. Interesting read from Pamela Paul.

Annalee Newitz says Ben Franklin Would Have Loved Bluesky as Twitter and Facebook lose ground to federated platforms. She says we’re in a social media era of chaos that sociologists woujld call a “legitmation crisis.” While the title uses Bluesky and Ben Franklin for attention grabbers she burrows down a bit into how the decentralization desires for some in social media, government and life tend to get thwarted by money. She goes deeper than that in a worthy read.

And speaking of money making the world go around Emma Roth says the FTC wants to put a ban on fake reviews on Amazon. Pick your favorite metaphor for being late to the party and good luck with that one.

A couple of interesting reads on so-called Artificial Intelligence. First up is The Age of AI: Everything You Need To Know About Artificial Intelligence by Devin Coldewey. Good explainer. I’m not sure if an AI bot could have done it better or not.

And Casey Newton says The AI Is Eating Itself. I’m very much in line with his thinking here.

Did you know that Samuel Beckett and Buster Keation collaborated on a film? They did. Thomas Leatham tells us about it in The Film Created by Samuel. Beckett and Buster Keaton. You can check out a small clip of it in the article.

And to wrap things up this week here’s a bit of fun and curiosity. Jisha Joseph highlights an interesting bit of Victorian news and comedy commentary from Tit-Bits Magazine:

a competition that offered a reward to unmarried women who could provide the best answer as to why they were yet to find themselves a husband. The page-full of responses published on April 27, 1889, made one thing abundantly clear: Women in Victorian England had a badass sense of humor.

If you’re interseted in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.

The Missing Link in the Artificial Intelligence Story

I’ve written and linked to a bit about Artificial Intelligence. I see the upsides and the downsides. The mislabeling (marketing.) The gold rush. The warnings. And I’m starting to see a bit of tarnish on this shiny new object of desire. It’s fascinating.

What’s starting to puzzle me in this ongoing discussion is what we’re not seeing.

But first a few themes.

One of the biggest stories is how AI is going to give us more freedom to enjoy our lives and be more creative by assuming many of the mundane drudgery of our lives. What immediately follows that is how many jobs we’re going to lose and stories of “too eager for the quarterly results” CEOs cutting jobs.

The next recurring story is how this will affect creativity by replacing artists, stealing from artists, and generally reducing creativity to bits and bytes created by bits and bytes.

And then there’s our continued march away from knowledge and facts to one where we don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Especially once the supposed AI bots and Large Language Models start feeding on themselves instead of just on the stuff we make up.

Those three themes seem to predominate the conversation. But back to what I’m not seeing.

Why aren’t we seeing the tech bros advocating ways to use AI to help us get rid of the some of the scourges of the Internet and our lives?

A few examples:

A tool to indentify and remove spam from email, texts, phone calls, etc…
A tool to indentify scams and scammers.
A quick label on any web page that tells us how many trackers there are and where they are from.
A tool that always puts the “Continue Watching” queue at the top of the home page of streaming apps.
A tool that kills ads for products we just purchased.
A tool that actually lets users unsubscribe from content.
A tool that points to which company sold our data to the new content in our in-boxes.
A label that justs says “Bullshit” on content that is bullshit.
A tool that tells us when our ISP is throttling bandwidth.
A tool that always links back to the original source for regurgitated content.
A tool that identifies and labels bots.
A tool that tracks and reports the origin of evil doers on the web.
A tool that actually deciphers error messages, tells us the real problem, and connects us to useful solutions that don’t require wading through scores of bogus and out of date webpages and videos.
A tool that actually lets us vote advertisments up or down and lets us say I never want to see this ad again.

And of course:

A quick label that says this content was created by artificial means.

I’m sure there are others.

Of course this kind of “intelligence” would devastate so many business models that the global economy would probably collapse. But then perhaps there could be an AI tool that tells calls bullshit on the stuff economists and politicians tell us about that as well.

Sunday Morning Reading

As the picture says, I’m on lake time this Sunday morning. So the list of suggested Sunday Morning Reading topics is a shorter one. Here’s hoping you find a little weekend time to chill as well.

Theatre and opera director Adele Thomas talks about her beginnings, her art and her career and how artists and the challenges (financial and otherwise) that directors face trying to get a career going. Good interview by Fiona Maddocks.

A great piece from Lisa Melton: My Coming Out Party

A couple of interesting pieces on Artificial Intelligence:

Artificial Stimulated Stupidty by Robert E. Wright and Is AI a Snake That Eats Itself? by Om Malik both reflect some of my thoughts on the topic.

And while the world is watching Orcas attack yachts and other sea-going craft, here’s a piece on The Giant Whale That Terrorized Constantinople.

If you’re interseted in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.

Sunday Morning Reading

Some Sunday Morning Reading for Father’s Day. There’s no real theme to this week’s edition. Which is fitting. We used to joke that my Dad had a new hobby every six months. He did. But that just demonstrated his endless curiosity about the world around us. I think I got some of that tossed into my mix. So here’s a pot-pourri of topics to share.

Humans aren’t mentailly ready for a lot of things. So called Artificial Intelligence is certainly one of them. Thor Benson tells us why that might be the case.

Nicholas Casey tells a great spy story in The Spy Who Called Me.

Barbara Kinsolver is a great writer. Her latest book Demon Copperfield brings a dive into Dickens for a tale from Appalachia. Lisa Allardice has written a terrific profile on Kingsolver.

Pennsylvania apparently is one of the key stomping grounds for the Christian Right’s desire to spin us back to the dark ages. Frederick Clarkson gives us an excllent look into this.

Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On? Devin Gordon offers up some answers. Mine’s simple: Selfish stupid filmmaking.

What came first the chicken or the egg? Well that age-old riddle leaves the rest of the egg-laying species out of the question. Intriguing piece by Nisha Zahid.

And while we’re talking about the riddles that plague humans about the non-humans sharing our planet, Ari Daniel highlights an article in Cell that says an Octopuses can tweak the RNA in their brains to adjust to warmer and cooler waters.

This is a scary and sad tale. Gina Dimuro tells us about Blanche Monnier. Her parents locked her in her room for 25 years after she fell in love with the wrong kind of guy.

If you’re interseted in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here.