My chatbots will be talking to their chatbots
The past few months, I had been thinking about something that I felt might teach me something: why does photomontage lead to insight whereas images created with generative “artificial intelligence” (GAI) do not? And why does the far right love those images so much?
Sometimes, it takes me a little while to figure things out, and I think I just did. You can find the result here, a longish essay in which I discuss images made by GAI in the context of photomontage.
Of course, you might not find the time to read 3k+ words. If you only have a little over a minute, this video might amuse you.
Speaking of Nazis, the latest documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, a close friend of Hitler’s who after the war denied all of that, sounds really interesting. Read more about it here.
I didn’t know what the “Jesus glow” was until I read this article.
By the way, last weekend I went out into the world with my new camera, and for the first time in over a year I felt a connection with making my own photographs again.
It’s not much, but it’s something.
I like this picture of the landscape I live in (I live at the foot of the mountain that’s just slightly to the left of center).
People have been arguing about translating one language into another forever, and it’s likely they will continue doing so. I like reading about this, because it connects me with language in a way that reminds me of why and how we use language in the first place. I suppose you’d have to speak at least two languages to feel the same way; but maybe even if you just speak one, reading about translation can help you appreciate translation (and the merits of your own language). Here’s a recent article.
If you need just one argument why you don’t want to use generative “AI”, here it is: it makes shit up.
Such as when a Coca Cola ad Coke used a quote from a J.G. Ballard book, except the quote isn’t real, and the book doesn’t even exist.
Or a law firm used a chatbot to create a fake reference.
This is all embarrassing, of course, but just try to keep all those students in mind who rely on chatbots now. How much of their “knowledge” is actually fake?
More AI Nightmares: a translator found that his painstaking translation of a Chinese novel about a dystopian AI world was being “reviewed” in real life by, well, you guessed it, AI:
The trilogy’s translation was the culmination of five years of work—during which I painstakingly labored through more than 1,300 pages of difficult text, all the while tweaking language, playing with different word choices, experimenting with different styles—and the first podcast review discussing the final volume was a dialogue between two AI-generated robots who (that?) couldn’t even get the sequence of the trilogy correct (they described Dead Souls as volume two of the trilogy).
All of this might end on the following note: their chatbots (let’s say someone calling to sell you some crap) will talk to my chatbots (let’s say the chat function on the phone you can’t switch off any longer and that you now use to answer calls since real people do not call each other any longer), and we can go about doing the things that we really enjoy.
Well, who knows. In any case, this is the ending of yet another email from that strange man who lives at the foot of Mount Sugarloaf.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg