More Books for the Bots
AI companies are buying (and destroying) rare booksAI companies are using physical books to train them for their large language models since these texts aren’t already ridden with AI-generated writing.
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Chicago Sun-Times Used AI to Create Fake Summer Book List
The blind trust in AI continuesHumans write the only books worth reading, and, as we’ve now seen, they’re still the only ones who can come up with an actual list of readable books.
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The Artist is Stronger than the Censor
Salman Rushdie and standing up for free speechTalking about censorship, for Rushdie, is a conscious choice. We must talk about it too or we will find we can no longer take free speech for granted.
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Smartphone: The “Experience Blocker”
Experience is the key to emotional development and a fully human lifeSmartphones are distracting and addicting, but according to Jonathan Haidt, and supported by our common experience, they can also keep us from a basic ingredient of human life: Experience. Sometimes I wonder if the worst aspect of the “dopamine culture,” as culture critic Ted Gioia calls it, is not that we no longer have the attention spans to focus on our work, but that we no longer seem able to enjoy activities that aren’t based on screens. Simple pleasures like a good meal, meant to savor and digest at a slow pace, or going through a rich and complicated novel that yields real insight and literary joy, or even kissing an actual person in an affectionate way are all “old-school” Read More ›
Another Autumn Season of Cinematic Remakes
The state of our culture is set on negativity and reruns. Can we shift direction?It’s the TV shows, the music, the broader culture that sways public assumptions more than a cut-and-dried public policy.
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Live Music is Making a Comeback, and So is Bob Dylan
People still want to experience music in person.This past summer, 110,000 people convened for a George Strait concert in College Station, TX, the biggest crowd ever recorded to hear live music. Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” has amassed over a billion dollars in revenue, with the pop star traveling the world to sold-out amphitheaters. Coldplay, another massive musical act, is gearing up for the release of their tenth studio album, Moon Music, set to drop on October 4th. They plan a world tour for the album and are also known to fill up stadiums far and wide. So, whatever plights the world of arts and culture might be facing, and given AI’s incursion into the creator economy, one thing remains evident: people still want to experience music in Read More ›
Fan Tries Programming AI Jazz, Gets Lots and Lots of AI…
Jazz is spontaneous, but spontaneous noise is not jazzAs Gioia says, jazz depends on the “personality of the individual musician.” And the blindspot of AI creativity is: There’s no one home.
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AI Can’t Do Jazz Because Spontaneity Is at Jazz’s Core
AI “artists”—in all the forms presently available — merely replay their programmingAs Ted Gioia makes clear in his discussion of jazz, swirling a bit of randomness into the mix will not help.
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