Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagArts & Culture

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Golden Ring and Mountains Digital Art 3D Render

Don’t Turn The Lord of the Rings into Star Wars

When you have something as good as the world of Middle Earth, it becomes ever easier to injure the original vision and trade quality for commercial success

Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which is based on the appendices in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was an ambitious and expensive project that arguably provided little more than a surface-level and underdeveloped interpretation of Middle Earth and its characters. The show, while entertaining and with its strengths, exemplified a flaw many fans feared: commercializing Tolkien inevitably leads to compromise. Even Peter Jackson’s highly praised rendition of the fantasy epic has its critics, including Tolkien’s son and heir of the family estate, Christopher. The show was visually stunning but had some storytelling issues. For one, we don’t ever get a sense of Middle Earth’s size. Characters pop in and out of different places as if it’s a five-minute Read More ›

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looking upward the sky

The Last of Us, Episode 3 (Part 2)

Why were we subjected to this episode if it wasn’t going to contribute to the narrative?

Last time, we discussed how episode three started out relatively strong then unexpectedly shifted to another story altogether. It’s important to note that we are not watching a ten-minute flashback or some b-plot involving a couple of supporting characters. Almost all of the episode is devoted to Bill and Frank, and frankly, their story goes nowhere. As I mentioned before, the subject of this random entry into the series is Bill and Frank’s romantic relationship, and given the fact that this little deviation from the source material contributes nothing to the plot as a whole, it is strongly suspected that the only reason the writers chose to tell this story was to gain the admiration of critics who share their Read More ›

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hands

Observing and Communing

What human art and literature do that AI can't

AI image generators like Midjourney or DALL-E are generally adept at capturing the accuracy of the human form. The concerns over copyright, job infringement, and general degradation of the visual arts via such AI are ongoing concerns for many artists and practitioners. However, a new New Yorker article by Kyle Chayka identifies a noticeable flaw in AI artwork: human hands. Missing the Big Picture Chayka begins by recalling an art class where he was asked to draw his own hand. It’s an assignment for beginners, and as behooves a novice, tempts the artist to focus more on the specific contours of the hand instead of the overall structure and form. The forest gets lost in the trees, so to speak. Read More ›

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Book drop-off zone

Wesley J. Smith on Why You Should Read Dean Koontz

The bestselling novelist's work is both entertaining and profoundly insightful into our cultural moment

Wesley J. Smith, Chair of Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, wrote an article praising the prolific literature of his friend Dean Koontz, whose books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Smith finds Koontz both a unique writer and a remarkable person with a powerful story of redemption. Born in poverty in Pennsylvania under the hand of an abusive father, Koontz persevered and pursued novel writing with the help of his wife’s encouragement. The rest is history. Through daily discipline, keen research, and profound imagination, Koontz has written dozens of bestsellers. First and foremost, his books entertain and delight. In addition, however, they deliver their fair share of social commentary and critique. Much of his work explores the Read More ›

cyborg eye
Human android cyborg eye futuristic control protection personal internet security access.Concept robot dna system, future scientific technology innovation science. Blue polygonal vector

Klara and the Sun: A Review

The sci-fi bestseller asks us: can machines become humans?

Klara and the Sun is novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, a dystopian story told through the lens of an “artificial friend” (AF) named Klara. Ishiguro is known for his provocative speculative fiction, including the novels Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day. Klara and the Sun similarly alludes to a dark, post-industrial, futuristic world, but it is told through the innocent lens of an artificial mind, highlighting the vestiges of human behavior and brokenness in ways that perhaps an “ordinary” narrator might not be able to manage. The novel starts out with Klara on display in a store waiting to be purchased. Eventually, she’s chosen by a girl named Josie and her mother, and thus begins her Read More ›

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portrait of a woman in a black hat on a black background black and white photo

Photographer Who Used Midjourney Calls His Own Bluff

The lifelike portraits gained attention, but alas, weren't real

Joe Avery started posting portraits on his Instagram page in 2022, getting attention and gaining followers at a surprising pace. His pictures were aesthetically pleasing, rendered in black and white, and given captions that assumed the faces in the pictures were legitimately human except, oops. Turns out, they were all AI-generated. Richard Whiddington writes at Artnet News, The problem, one Avery struggled to disclose to his 28,000 followers, was that he was creating the images using Midjourney, an A.I. image generator. Avery made the images by entering a text prompt into Midjourney and then fine-tuning them using Photoshop.” -Richard Whiddington, A Photographer Who Found Instagram Fame for His Striking Portraits Has Confessed His Images Were Actually A.I.-Generated (artnet.com) Avery claimed the images Read More ›

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Flat design cartoon World Book Day illustration. Open book with stories coming out of the pages. AI generated

Roald Dahl is Safe (For Now)

How long until making revisions turns into full-blown censorship, and what impact will that have on the creative arts?

Publishers decided last week to revise certain aspects of beloved author Roald Dahl’s books, like James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. They said the decision was intended to make Dahl’s books more inclusive. The decision sparked controversy and outrage in the literary community, and now, Penguin Random House has changed their minds and will preserve the original texts. ABC reported: The updates to Dahl’s works under Penguin had meant to be more inclusive, progressive and more acceptable to today’s readers. Phrases like ‘mothers and fathers’ in Dahl’s ‘Matilda,’ first published in 1988, could have been replaced with ‘parents’ while some descriptions of ‘fat’ characters could have been edited or removed entirely. Description of women’s jobs Read More ›

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Landscape illustration with rocket taking off, vaporwave style. Generative AI

Developing a Penchant for Pynchon

The bizarre novel on the impact of tech on society turns 50 this month

50 years ago this month, writer Thomas Pynchon published the 1973 National Book Award Winner Gravity’s Rainbow, a 700-page novel/biopic on the absurdity and technocratic madness of modern life. While I haven’t personally read the book, I now plan to this year after reading an entertaining memorial review of the book over at Wired. Pynchon was famous for being un-famous—that is, for evading the limelight while making an indelible mark on the unfolding postmodern literary landscape. Along with tomes like Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, Pynchon’s book often seems devoid of a storyline with its cacophony of events, characters, and nebulous sub-plots. An Almanac of its Time But that might be kind of the point, according to this review Read More ›

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Aerial view of Frankenstein Castle in southern Hesse, Germany

The Prophecies of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Andrew Klavan explores the world of the Romantics in new book and finds special insight in Shelley’s classic horror story

Andrew Klavan, acclaimed novelist and host of the Andrew Klavan Show at the Daily Wire, wrote a book about his profound encounters with the Romantics of the 19th century, called The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus. The Romantics include literary figures like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and John Keats. While it’s common to highlight the Romantics’ veneration of nature, they were also living in the throes of the Enlightenment, in which atheistic materialism was becoming a minority alternative to theism. Klavan writes, “The wonderful success of science at explaining the material world threatens to create in scientists a bias towards Read More ›