Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

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Young Asian man sitting on stairs outside reading a book

Why You Should Read More Fiction

The mental benefits for reading good stories are many.

When looking for “solutions” to today’s mental health crisis in the United States, particularly among the millions of men who are checking out of society, reading fiction may not immediately come to mind. However, a new article from Psychology Today argues that reading fiction is “essential” for today’s men. The author of the article, psychologist Jett Stone, focuses on men in part because today’s literary market is largely geared towards women, and fiction and femininity are often closely associated. Nonetheless, he believes that reading fiction can benefit both women and men. He writes, Recent research indicates that reading fiction fosters critical thinking by presenting ideas subtly and in more roundabout ways than nonfiction. One study of adolescents found that frequent fiction readers possessed more Read More ›

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demostrator with megaphone and notebook protesting

The Strike is Over

After almost five months, the Writers Guild of America's (WGA) strike against Hollywood has ended.

After almost five months, the Writers Guild of America’s (WGA) strike against Hollywood has ended. WGA and Hollywood came to an agreement that includes higher employee wages and limitations in the ways artificial intelligence (AI) can be employed. AI has been at the forefront of the moviemaking conversation for the past few months, and for good reason. TV and movie writers are concerned with how the technology might take away their jobs or otherwise cheapen the quality of TV scripts. Ryan Faughnder writes for the Los Angeles Times, The new WGA contract includes language that regulates the studio’s use of AI but also provides flexibility to the guild’s members. Companies must disclose to writers if any material given to a Read More ›

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dunes in the mountains

Dune Review, Part One

Despite the cynical ways of the Bene Gesserit sect, a deeper providence guides the story in Dune.

The sequel to Dune was originally scheduled to come out on November 3rd. However, it has since been rescheduled to come out on March 15th of 2024. Still, since I was preparing to do this article anyway, I thought now would be as good a time as any to do a review of the first movie in this most recent remake, and perhaps, later compare it to the original 1984 film in anticipation of the sequel. These movies are based on the novel, written by Frank Herbert in 1965. It is widely regarded as a sci-fi classic. The book opens with Paul Atreides taking the Gom Jabbar test, but we’ll have to circle back to that because the remake’s opening Read More ›

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modern full wall full-length bookshelf filled with colorful paper books, smart book background, generative ai

Novelists Against AI

17 authors are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement

17 prominent authors including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham are suing OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, for copyright infringement and “theft,” according to the Associated Press (AP). The authors are among many in the creative field who are expressing concern over the ethics of AI use. A spokesperson for the Authors Guild said that it’s imperative to stop AI’s theft to preserve America’s “incredible literary culture,” according to the AP. Hillel Italie reports, The lawsuit cites specific ChatGPT searches for each author, such as one for Martin that alleges the program generated “an infringing, unauthorized, and detailed outline for a prequel” to “A Game of Thrones” that was titled “A Dawn of Direwolves” and used “the same characters Read More ›

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Closeup of woman's hand writing on paper over wooden table

Arrival Review, Part 3

Investigating the meaning of time and language

Last time, we finally got to the big twist. Louise has not been having flashbacks of her deceased daughter, but rather, she’s seeing her daughter who is going to die slowly in the future. After dropping this bombshell on the poor woman, the aliens send her back. Ian and Colonel Weber help her into a van while she’s still being bombarded with visions of future events and explain to her that China is on the move, and the Pentagon has ordered them to evacuate. Louise knows she’s supposed to use these visions to stop China, and she eventually does, but before we get to that, we need to talk about this entire setup. First of all, there’s the idea that Read More ›

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UFO

Arrival Review, Part 2

On the strangeness of a language telling the future

Last time we talked about the beginning of the movie Arrival, and how the main characters seemed surprisingly melancholy when aliens visit their planet. But once Louise and Ian reach the military base, everyone starts acting human. As soon as Louise and Ian began translating the alien’s language, the story gets more interesting. Things seem to be going well for the two of them. But the situation changes once Louise decides to tell the aliens her name and takes off her suit. Physically, Louise seems fine, but she begins having visions of a little girl. In the first part of the film, there is a montage where Louise’s child is shown to have died of some unknown disease. The monologue Read More ›

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Back view of man looking at alien invasion, UFO flying in the sky, concept of evidence and sighting, retro illustration. Generative AI

Arrival Review, Part 1

Nobody behaves like they should for the first ten minutes. They act, dare I say, alien.

Arrival is an interesting movie. It’s well-shot, well-acted, and well-written. The trouble is the script makes some strange choices in the beginning and I just wasn’t persuaded by the movie’s twist at the end. The story starts out with a montage where Louise is raising her daughter, but the child tragically dies of some unknown illness, presumably cancer. The viewer is led to conclude that this is a flashback, but if one listens to the monologue Louise delivers, she says plainly that she’s explaining when the child’s story begins, if there are beginning at all, which is something she no longer believes. This basically means that the entire movie is a flashback, but the viewer is not supposed to notice Read More ›

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the young guy playing an acoustic guitar. Shooting backlit

Oliver Anthony, Music, and Human Exceptionalism

Honest music speaks to the heart and brings us closer together.

If you’ve been online at all for the last few weeks, chances are you’ve come across headlines about the folk/country singer Oliver Anthony, whose song “Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral in August. The song, a broad critique of elite power in Washington D.C., (Democrat and Republican) has gained both applause and fierce critique, but for the most part, seems to have deeply resonated with the general American public. Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson recently had Anthony on his podcast, discussing music, entrepreneurship, and virality. One thing is clear about Anthony’s songs: they’re honest, and people are attracted to that. Peterson noted in their conversation that authenticity is a sign of brilliance in artists, and how that sort of honesty Read More ›

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Tourists at Prague Old Town Square, large group of people gathered at the street looking up towards the camera.

The Life We’re Looking For: A Book Review

Andy Crouch's book on technology and human flourishing calls us to resist the urge to control and open ourselves up to deep relationships

Every so often a book comes along that puts a finger on the cultural moment in a way that directs, elucidates, convicts, and encourages. Andy Crouch’s book The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World is one such book, and has shaped the way I view technology, human nature, and the centrality of vulnerable relationships to a life well lived. As implied in the title, the book contains pertinent themes to the concerns of Mind Matters: how do we hold on to human uniqueness in the midst of technological change and upheaval? The question is arguably as dire as ever with the emergence of impressive new AI systems like ChatGPT and Midjourney, which pose possibilities as tools Read More ›

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a robot or a woman half a robot with mechanical technological body parts and upgrades, transhumanism cyborg and artificial intelligence,

Wrapping Up the Westworld Series

Ultimately, the moral of the story is transhumanism

The first time I watched Westworld, I remember enjoying it, but upon revisiting the series, my opinion of it has dropped a great deal. There are a variety of problems. First, it’s a bait and switch. It teases the idea of showing how robots can come to life, and it plays with your expectations for most of the series. It even goes as far as to discuss theories like The Bicameral Mind, and The Turing Test. Then, in the last episode, it confirms what the viewer has been slowly growing to suspect. The robots had been coming to life the entire time, and Ford had been wiping their memories. The show says that Ford programmed the robots to experience everything Read More ›

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Feuer und Eis Adam und Gott

Westworld Episode 10 Review (Part Two)

Welcome to the dark end of the journey

Last time, Teddy had just finished saving Dolores from the Man in Black, who turned out to be William all along. He takes her to the coast because that was where he promised to take her when they were performing their pre-programmed loop. However, the coast is apparently not very far because as Dolores dies in his arms, Teddy starts reciting a campy monologue, and then shuts down while the board applauds the speech. Even when they’re trying to escape their loop, the robots still, somehow, find themselves trapped in yet another one of Dr. Ford’s narratives. Dr. Ford appears, addresses the crowd, then orders for Teddy to be cleaned up, and for Dolores to be taken to a nearby Read More ›

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Nuclear war concept. Explosion of nuclear bomb. Creative artwork decoration in dark.

What Oppenheimer Teaches Us About Today’s Cultural Moment

Let us hope we have the wisdom to take heed of the messages the movie communicates.

Oppenheimer is the best film Hollywood has produced since The Godfather. The movie brilliantly recounts how the theoretical physicist and genius J. Robert Oppenheimer led the urgent U.S. effort to develop the atomic bomb during World War II that culminated in the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and inducted the world into the Atomic Age. The movie is gripping in the (mostly) true story it tells, with acting tours de force by its stars and supporting players, brilliant writing, and terrific cinematography. But, like all great art, it evokes reactions in the viewer beyond what the filmmaker might have intended. For me, even though the story takes place between the 1920s and 1950s, the film highlights two cautionary lessons acutely relevant to Read More ›

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Humanoid robot artist painting a portrait on a canvas in an artist studio showing the concept of science and artificial intelligence technology, computer Generative AI stock illustration image

AI “Art” Can’t Be Copyrighted, Judge Rules

Copyright entails original, human creation, which AI images don't reflect

A federal judge has ruled that AI-generated artwork can’t legally be attributed to the person who prompted the work, according to The Verge. AI-generated artwork systems like DALL-E and Midjourney, despite their impressive capabilities, have sparked debate and legal controversies regarding the rights of artists and whether AI images should be treated as independent and original creations. For United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell, AI art isn’t original and therefore can not be copyrighted. (RELATED: Will Stability AI Go Down in Court? | Mind Matters) In justifying her decision, Howell said that copyright always involves a human hand. Wes Davis reports, In her decision, Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was “absent Read More ›

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Black labyrinth background with dof focus

Westworld Episode 10 Review (Part One)

The maze isn't the only thing that's hard to navigate in this episode.

I’ll start out with the most irrelevant plot first because almost no screen time is devoted to it, and it amounts to nothing in the end anyway. Hale successfully convinces the Board to fire Ford, not that he really cares. But Hale has been convinced this entire time that Ford is going to delete the park’s data out of spite. So, after Theresa is killed, she enlists Sizemore, a jaded writer who works for the park, to smuggle the data out through one of the decommissioned robots. This plan doesn’t work; however, because all the robots wake up by the end of the episode, and the data is lost in the vengeful horde. So, it’s a plot point that goes Read More ›

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Travelers together around the campfire, enjoying the fresh air near the tent under the Milky Way in the evening. Silhouettes of two adventurous people camping in the mountains under the starry sky.

Literature and Personal Consciousness: Why AI Can’t Speak to You

AI can never intend meaning like a human author can

One of the biggest contentions in the current debate over OpenAI’s new Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT is its purported ability to create a story, to speak and communicate narrative like a human storyteller. If you ask ChatGPT to write an Edgar Allen Poe-esque story, it will generate something spooky, gothic, and darkly poetic. Ask it to write a Shakespearean sonnet, and out comes a fourteen-lined poem about nature and romance. Need a horror thriller like The Shining or It by Stephen King? You got it. For all its scary impressiveness, and the guarantee that the technology will only get better, the chatbot extraordinaire fails and will always fail to tell a story. In fact, it can’t be expected to generate meaningful art and literature Read More ›

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pig farm industry farming hog barn pork

A Warning From the Unpublished Preface to Orwell’s Animal Farm

Only discovered in 1971, the Preface offers George Orwell’s critical but neglected insights into the nature of censorship in a free society

George Orwell‘s novella Animal Farm (1945) was a political fable. The cleverly portrayed animals who chase off the farmer and try to run the farm as a utopia slowly begin to replicate all the attitudes and practices against which they had rebelled. The story, summarized here, satirizes the Soviet Union’s transition from revolution to totalitarianism under Joseph Stalin (1878–1953). In fact, the animal characters and incidents are often allusions to historical Soviet figures and events. His Preface, “The Freedom of the Press,” was omitted from the first edition of the book, then disappeared, and was not rediscovered until 1971. From it, we learn that Orwell had considerable difficulty getting his fable published. That wasn’t principally because of wartime issues. There Read More ›

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The Flow of Time: A Close-Up Portrait of an Incomplete Humanoid Android Covered in White Porcelain Skin, Blue Eyes, and Glowing Internal Parts.

Westworld Episode 9 Review

Bernard learns the truth

This episode begins with Maeve being interrogated by Bernard because she had a violent flashback and slit the throat of one of the other robots. At first, she tries to lie to Bernard, but he quickly checks her programming and realizes Felix had been tinkering with her code. It looks like Maeve is finally caught, but then she realizes that Bernard is also a robot. She confronts Bernard about this but quickly learns that he doesn’t know what he is. Thinking fast, she uses her new voice command ability and freezes Bernard in place. Then she tells him the truth. Bernard is convinced and lets Maeve return to the park where she recruits the two bandits she helped in the Read More ›

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ODESSA, UKRAINE - JULY 26, 2023: Barbie doll and barbie doll accessories concept

Barbie: A Subtle Critique of Transhumanism?

Reviews for the new "Barbie" movie abound. But have most of them missed the point?

Since its release in July, Barbie has proved as controversial as it has popular. Its joint release alongside Oppenheimer has had movie theaters across the country teeming with “Barbenheimer” fans, those zealous people who watched both movies on the same day in an unprecedented feat of pink glitz and existential dread. But what is Barbie about? Is it a takedown of the patriarchy, a gentle comedy, or something a bit more subtle and powerful? The reviews have ranged between harsh critique and lavish praise. With the flood of commentary, though, have most people missed a central and yet subtle point? Elayne Allen, writing for Public Discourse, offers an alternative interpretation of the movie which might have bypassed the imaginations of Read More ›

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Sad at Sunset

Westworld: Episode 8 Review

Is misery the key to consciousness?

Episode Eight is one of the stronger episodes in the series. It starts with Bernard waking up after killing Theresa. He is distraught over killing his former girlfriend, and he is also horrified to realize he is a robot. This, of course, means the memories of his son are not real. Ford explains that Bernard is a robotic version of Arnold. The two men were on a quest to discover consciousness, but when Arnold died, Ford needed someone to help him continue his work. So, he built Bernard. This is a change in Ford’s story. Initially, Ford expressed no real interest in Arnold’s work. Now, he says the two were working together to create a version of consciousness. Of course, Read More ›

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Internet broadband and multimedia streaming entertainment

Infinite Jest Revisited

The 1996 book by David Foster Wallace saw the Internet explosion, and its effects, approaching fast

David Foster Wallace was 34 when his magnum opus Infinite Jest appeared in 1996. He tragically took his life in 2008, but the title he’s known for best remains an awe-inspiring, controversial tome. UnHerd writer Sarah Ditum wrote a great review revisiting the book in which she writes, “He did not see the future. But he saw the forces shaping the future, and understood the ways they would deform people in turn.” Infinite Jest, a 1,000 plus page book with 200 pages of tedious endnotes to boot, imagines an American context not so foreign from our own where entertainment has become so powerful that it hopelessly addicts everyone who encounters it. The Internet was already budding in ’96, but the inevitable Read More ›