Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Fiction, Non-fiction, Reading

Let The Words Wash Over You

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Reading Passively: “One of the problems of shouldering one’s way through books—worldview machete in hand—is that we become the kind of readers who get from a book only what we bring to it.” Professor Jermey Larson writes about reading for experience and enjoyment and letting active learning take a back seat. He leans on C.S. Lewis’s effort to equip readers of medieval literature to stay with the story instead of looking at commentaries every other page.

And the Gulag Remains: The Gulag Archipelago in English is 50 years old this year. Gary Saul Morson writes, “Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been ‘repressive,’ but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: ‘I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!’ ‘The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.’ Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.”

The Past that Binds: Gina Dalfanzo reviews The Blackbird & Other Stories by Sally Thomas. “Our pasts are always part of us, shaping who we are, and that includes the people in them.”

Remembering How We Cooked: Writer Megan Braden-Perry talks about authentic New Orleans gumbo and how strangers change historic recipes. “To me, the composition of gumbo is a topic serious enough to invade my dreams. Recently I had the most awful nightmare, that I made gumbo and forgot all the ingredients and spices. It was just a roux and broth.”

The Steel Man Cometh: How the music business can course correct on artificial intelligence. “I guess training AI to replace human musicians is evil—unless they can make a buck from it.”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

Nostalgia for that Long Ago Galaxy

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Whenever I think of Star Wars in a general sense, not a particular scene or story line, but when I’m recalling the essence of it or imagining myself walking as an unknown Jedi through the parking lot to my speeder, the music I imagine is The Force Theme or Ben Kenobi’s theme from the original movie score. Most often, it’s the slow, mourning arrangement you hear in this sunset moment.

The Force Theme from Star Wars: A New Hope

Until today, I thought this was Luke’s theme, but Mark Richards corrected me with this post.

I loved Star Wars growing up. My primary toys were several action figures and an awesome Millenium Falcon, like the kind they don’t make anymore. We had a two-record set of the first movie’s score, which I played regularly. When I had a friend two-houses down, I remember bringing over the records and running around the room with our X-wings. He may have had a tie-fighter—details, you know. I didn’t have one of those.

I was never the biggest fan by a long shot. (That category just isn’t my thing. I’m reluctant to pick favorites of anything even though I’ve played the fan for many things.) I have not read any of the novels, though I may pick up the Thrawn trilogy this year. I’ve heard they are the best of the 381 novels the breeders have spawned. I watched the original movies several times, but the new ones—I may find time for three new ones I haven’t seen (episodes 2, 3, and 9).

I write this today because early in the week I watched Jenny Nicholson’s lengthy video about her experience at Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel. It was billed as immersive and interactive, like being a character in a Star Wars story. They closed it last September after an 18-month run. Hearing Nicholson’s story provoked sad feelings for what might have been, not just with that failed venture but with many of the new Star Wars stories lately.

I remember enjoying The Force Awakens. I said so here, though I can’t find the photo I used to fully express my feelings. I’ll just have to recreate it.

Star Wars figures stand in solidarity

Thinking back on The Force Awakens, I see it wasn’t a great story, but it wasn’t terrible. It set up something that could have been great fun, but the people in charge either don’t know how to tell fun stories like this or actually hate the property. (Let’s hear a variation on The Force Theme to soothe our angst.) That theme could be a dirge for all of the promise Star Wars offered us and didn’t deliver. Maybe the dark side has clouded our vision for the past some years–likely throwing the galaxy out of balance. But if the Tao of the Force means anything, it means the Jedi will return to restore balance.

Could be a long time coming.

Sciency Writing: “The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” an evolutionary psychologist told City Journal. “By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, ‘the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.′”

Monsters, Us Men: Author and professor Thomas Fuchs writes in The New Atlantis, “… we increasingly believe in the superiority of our own artificial creatures. We begin to be ashamed of our existence as all-too-earthly beings of flesh and blood. And the grandiose self-exaltation ultimately turns into pitiful self-abasement.”

Discovering a Great Writer: Patrick Kurp writes about the one magazine issue that lit a fire in him.

Photo of Millenium Falcon entrance by Josué AS on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks

A Con Artist, Betrayal, and Artificial Intelligence

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If the Christian life is one of continual repentance, then what do we do with a minister who has lived in sin for many years, justified his sin with spiritual abuse, and disqualified himself from ministry–most of which was learned after his death?

One of my friends brought up an apologist who recently passed away and was subsequently exposed as having lived an abusive life for years. Before his death, we thought he was a great Bible teacher. Now, we slough off his books at the used bookstore. Aren’t his books still as good as they were before? He compared the apologist to King David, who sinned far more extensively than we usually give him credit for. We overlook Solomon’s gross sins too.

I didn’t say anything this time. I’ve argued my case before, and maybe it doesn’t sit well with me.

The comparison to David doesn’t work. He and Solomon are categorically different. We look to them and see the Lord’s saving grace unbound.

Should we reject a man’s published work for a pattern of sin mostly uncovered after his death? Does known sin raise any theological questions? The man wrote a book on living the faith we profess, and we should consider its merit on the words of the books, not the life of the author? If this were a local pastor, would we continue to distribute his books, studies, and recordings as if it’s all academic? No. If he were a local pastor, we would expect him to be excommunicated were he still alive. The filth of his sin touches everything.

But that argument doesn’t sit easily with me, because I think of readers down the road who won’t know of the sin. They’ll only know the books, and perhaps the Lord will demonstrate his unbounded grace yet again.

I assume you know whom I’m talking about. It still hurts to remember it. Why do I feel betrayed by someone I didn’t know personally? I don’t know. It isn’t academic for me.

What else do we have today?

Deception: I recently listened to the first season and a little more of a well-produced podcast by Brian Brushwood called “The World’s Greatest Con.” Brian is a good storyteller, and this show is dynamite. The first season is on Operation Mincemeat, a scheme from WWII to deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allied would attack Italy.

Artificial Intelligence: “With every passing day, OpenAI looks more like Napster or the many defunct piracy platforms—it relies on the creativity of others to make a buck. And there are plenty of laws against that.”

This rings true to me. Microsoft’s Bing AI presents itself as if you’re talking to an intelligent friend, but it doesn’t give answers any better than regular search results. Microsoft seems to think we all want to search as if we’re talking to someone IRL, but if it doesn’t understand us like a friend could, it’s pointless.

Orthodox Church: St. George’s Church in Drohobych, Lviv Oblast (west Ukraine), is a gorgeous work. It “is a unique monument of Galician wooden architecture of the late 15th – early 16th centuries. It is one of the best preserved monuments of old Ukrainian sacral architecture.”

Also, St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv (via The Cultural Tutor).

Coffee: I don’t mind pumpkin spice, but I don’t drink it either. “Six bucks is a small price to pay (apart from still being scandalous and highway robbery) for the appearance of agency.”

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Religion

AI-Driven Bible Knowledge

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Writing for Christianity Today, Adam Graber suggests problems with artificial-intelligence-driven Bible reading software.

“As a digital theology expert, I believe these kinds of ‘BibleGPTs’ will continue to advance, proliferate, and eventually become proprietary systems. And as this happens, the church and its leaders will be prompted to make some momentous decisions about the Christian canon. This will, in turn, influence how we interpret the Bible and impact the future of our faith and practice.”

He goes to describe how AI-driven research tools could become like the knowledgeable friend who always has a ready answer for any question but who isn’t grounded enough in the Word to answer wisely every time. It may become another easy way to quickly survey the Bible, thinking we understand more than we do.

If you read the whole article, it doesn’t end as sensationally as it begins. He concludes saying we need to understand the Bible for ourselves, but the tone of the whole leans too much on people’s laziness. That isn’t new. We’ve always been lazy. I doubt AI will usher in more lethargy than we already indulge with the Internet.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

No Fear of Sleep, the Internet Gone to Pot, and Hollywood Noir

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Lee Yong-ju’s 2021 film Seo Bok is a standard sci-fi thriller about a cloned man with telekinesis. It opens with an ex-secret service agent, Min Gi Heon, being offered an outside job, one that’s dangerous enough to require deniability if it goes wrong. He’s asked to deliver an asset, and when he arrives at the lab to pick it up, he learns the asset is a young man, Seo Bok, whom the scientists introduce as undying. He is a lab-created human being who will not die if properly cared for. They say his cells are the key to healing many, if not every, human disease. Not only that, his brain waves are off the charts, enabling him to push and guide material around him. But, what could go wrong with that, eh?

I could tell you more of the plot, but I bring up this movie because of a couple minutes that appear right before the final act.

At one point, Seo Bok reveals he doesn’t need to sleep. Later, when exploring part of his backstory, he and Gi Heon go to a Christian mausoleum. With several crosses on the walls and light shining through stained glass, Seo Bok asks, “Do you believe dying is really like sleep?”

“Maybe,” Gi Heon replies.

“Then how come people aren’t afraid of falling asleep? It’s like dying a little while.”

“Because they’ll wake up the next day.”

“How do they know that?”

“They just believe it. They believe they will wake up in the morning.”

In the context of the story, that dialogue had me wondering if this was the seed for the whole. The scientists think they’ve created a cure for disease and even natural death in one man, and in the mausoleum another man suggests we can wake up after death if we put our faith in the cross. It’s subtle but stands out as the moral of the film.

Let’s move on.

Internet: 30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse. Here are the first two.

  1. “Create a society that rewards influencers more than truth-tellers—and turn every digital platform, large or small, into a boosting pad for these influencers.
  2. “Make plagiarism, cheating, and deception totally acceptable, so nobody gets fired from a media job, even for the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics.”

Also from the signs above, over 33% of people hired to train AI for better, more truthful output are using AI software to do the training faster, folding in errors that will be baked in if they aren’t removed soon enough.

Democracy: “This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the paperback release of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man.” How has his argument that democracy had and would continue to win over world civilizations panned out?

Hollywood: Brian Patrick Eha recommends the work of Alfred Hayes. “Money promises to give substance, in Hayes’s novels, to those without it; for those with it, though, material wealth proves unsatisfying, even oddly insubstantial. The vast sums that flow from the movie business have a ‘phantasmal quality.’ . . . Laboring for America’s dream machine, his men and women are made to bear, in the end, too much reality.”

(Photo by Hammad Siddiqui on Unsplash)

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Publishing, Reading

One War Began a Year Ago, And Bots Are on the Way

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The Brandywine Tradition: “A Wolf Had Not Been Seen at Salem for Thirty Years,” an illustration by Howard Pyle for Harper’s Monthly, 1909.

Ukraine: February 24, 2022, was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Yesterday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki five lessons Western countries should take into the coming years.

The distance from Kiev must not be used to appease our conscience. I am sometimes afraid that the West is indeed populated by many for whom having a lunch in a favourite caffe or watching a Netflix series is more important than the lives and deaths of thousands of Ukrainians. We can all see the war happening. No one will be able to claim that they did not know about the genocide in Bucha. We are all watching the atrocities being committed by the Russian army. This is why we must not be indifferent. Russia’s imperial plans go beyond Ukraine. This war concerns us all.

Art-Intel: Lincoln Michel notes ChatGPT doesn’t have to generate good writing to cause problems for writers. The sci-fi/fantasy magazine Clarkesworld stopped taking submissions this week after receiving a glut of AI-written submissions. They shared a graph on Twitter of the number of users they’ve banned from submitting since 2019. Just eyeballing it, they seem to have averaged only a handful per month. This month, they banned over 500.

Art-Intel: Amazon is selling AI-written shlock on its Kindle store, books that may or may not acknowledge ChatGPT as an author. Reuters describes one YouTuber who is selling his e-book for $1. “In the video, White says anyone with the wherewithal and time could create 300 such books a year, all using AI.”

In completely unrelated news, the U.S. Copyright Office has decided it won’t copyright AI-generated images. “To justify the decision, the Copyright Office cites previous cases where people weren’t able to copyright words or songs that listed “non-human spiritual beings” or the Holy Spirit as the author — as well as the infamous incident where a selfie was taken by a monkey.”

Publishing: Roald Dahl’s publisher has announced it will also publish the author’s original text in a new Classic Collection after publishing its bowdlerized one (HT to Lars for reminding me of the word “bowdlerized”).

Reading: Is it better to have a reading plan, like the great classics starting with Homer, or to read as chance would have it? “My reading has always been happily chaotic, governed more by whim than central planning.”

Non-fiction, Reviews

2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, by John C. Lennox

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Professor Joseph McRae Mellichamp of the University of Alabama, speaking at conference at Yale University to an audience that contained the Novel Price winner Sir John Eccles, famous for his discovery of the synapse, together with a number of the pioneers of AI, said: “It seems to me that lot of needless debate could be avoided if AI researchers would admit that there are fundamental differences between machine intelligence and human intelligence — differences that cannot be overcome by any amount of research.” In other words, to cite the succinct title of Mellichamp’s talks, “‘the artificial’ in artificial intelligence is real.”

What was the last thing you heard about artificial intelligence? Maybe it was about ChatGPT, an open AI web app that invites people to ask the computer to write anything they can think of.

Chris Hutchinson on Twitter asked it to rewrite the Gettysburg Address in the style of the psychedelic funk band Sly and the Family Stone. The AI said it would be disrespectful to rewrite such a historic speech in this style. Then he asked for a rewrite of the speech as a haiku, and the AI complied. Later, another user was able to get the speech in the style of Sly and the Family Stone by wording the request differently (and possibly by his preceding requests). Maybe ChatGPT had a change of heart after refusing the first request.

Educators have been worried that this program (and others produced in its wake) will allow students to task their computers with writing papers for them with minimal chance of detection, but educators are prove to worrying and are probably assuming too much AI language proficiency at this point. Writers worry this program threatens their jobs, and those who work for any of the click-bait sites on pop culture, movies, and games should worry. The garbage prose ChatGPT spits out is totally on par with their daily posts.

You won’t find this in Lennox’s book, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. It was published in 2020. Developments in this field will be fast and fierce (no, frenetic. Wait, it’s fast and feverish, right? Fulminous?) Lennox couldn’t deal with the very latest news, but he does deal with the ideas and claims many in the field of artificial intelligence are making.

Current advances in AI have sparked hopes and fears similar to George Orwell’s 1984, but instead of INGSOC controlling our society, it would be supercomputers that had developed themselves beyond their creators’ imagination. If it came to reality by 2084, supporters ask, wouldn’t it be poetic?

Lennox explains some of the benefits of current machine learning and some of the changes we see coming as robots take over select jobs. For example, the freight industry could be transformed by trucks that drove themselves. (How would they refuel? Could criminals take advantage of them?) He also explains some of the dangers we can already see in AI’s current uses. China’s surveillance state already looks resembles an episode of Black Mirror in which approved behavior and social media influence controls a society of people constantly monitored by unseeing eyes. Facial recognition programs may violate privacy by design and are only as good as they are accurate. False matches have already gotten a few people in trouble.

Continue reading 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity, by John C. Lennox →
Blogs, Socials, Poetry, Publishing

Southern Hospitality and Artificial Translation

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Recently I had a conversation about something related to Southern culture, and a friend originally from another state asked me to define Southern hospitality. Having lived in the South my whole life, I was disappointed I couldn’t say more than I did. I have actually read a bit about manners and what it means to be Southern. I still know a thing or two about the history of the English language in the South, but I couldn’t define this hospitality thing.

It would be easy, if you took a superficial route. You could say Southern hospitality is fried chicken, corn bread, and iced tea, but that isn’t essentially different than, say, krauts and beer or hot dish and dinner rolls. (What do Midwesterners drink with a casserole? I always drink water, but I know I’m supposed to be drinking tea.)

Southern Living lists six qualities of Southern hospitality in this article from earlier this year: politeness, good home cooking, kindness, helpfulness, charm, and charity. I’m going to call this a puff piece (and maybe the whole magazine is too). This is the kind of thing we say about ourselves no matter who we are. Dang! If we ain’t the best, you know it? But if these are true as Southern characteristics, not Christian characteristics, then it demonstrates that Christ still haunts the South.

That’s part of what I said to my friend. I have a hard time distinguishing Christian hospitality from Southern or Yankee or any other kind of hospitality you might define. The differences seem only superficial b/c the virtue is found in Christ.

And maybe Southern hospitality is what it is because we’ve had the best branding.

In other news, Artificial Intelligence already works on video captioning and language translation. Now, a Japanese student of the Korean language has won translation award by editing an AI translation of a webtoon. She doesn’t know Korean enough to translate the work herself, but using AI and research tools, she got through it well enough to win Rookie of the Year from LTI Korea.

Kim Wook-dong, emeritus professor of English Literature and Linguistics at Sogang University, told The Korea Herald that AI can translate technical writing “almost perfectly,” but is has “limits in capturing the subtle emotions, connotations and nuances in literary translations. It can help and serve as an assistant to translators but AI cannot replace humans in literary translation. I doubt it ever will.” [via The Literary Saloon]

Normal Living, Extraordinary Prose: “Clean-shaved and conservatively dressed, with no oddities of posture or gait, he should have merged imperceptibly into a street crowd. But he didn’t. He stuck out, for reasons almost impossible to capture and fix in words. The best one can say is that he stood and walked and talked like other men, only more so. He was conspicuously normal.” 

This description from H.L. Mencken reminds me of H. Matisse in Ray Bradbury’s story about “a terrifyingly ordinary man.”

Poetry: The great Dana Gioia has a new collection of poems called Meet Me at the Lighthouse.

Photo by Sunira Moses on Unsplash

Music, Poetry, The Press, Uncategorized

The Silent Night Coming, Deep and Shallow Fakes, and a Jazz Medley

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But peaceful was the night
Wherein the Prince of Light
         His reign of peace upon the earth began:
The winds with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kist,
         Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean,
Who now hath quite forgot to rave,
While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave.
...
The Oracles are dumb;
No voice or hideous hum
         Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
         With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance or breathed spell
Inspires the pale-ey'd priest from the prophetic cell.

Two stanzas from John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity“

Obituary: “And I feel so sorry for him, I feel so sorry for this tender man,” Nabokov writes, “that suddenly the line I am writing seems to slip into mist.”

Easy Photo Fakes: With advancing artificially intelligent image generators, creating convincing pics from a handful of social media posts is fairly easy. The better images AI can create, the more dangerous it is to everyone. Maybe we should take our photos offline.

Artificially Created Videos: In a few years, an Israeli company may be able to produce computer generated video avatars that look as real as actual video.

Why Journalists Fall for Hoaxes: “Every hoax in America the past 200 years originated in the news business, or passed through it. When the world moved much slower, hoaxes were publicity stunts carried out by newspapers.”

Not Allegory: “The Twelve Days of Christmas” celebrates the meaning of Christmas and Christianity

Beethoven and Christmas: “If beauty will save the world it must be qualified that love will save the world. Because in beauty we find love. In finding beauty and the love that governs it, we are always directed to the Christ who came into our lives and taught us how to love. St. Augustine said that we often first come to know God (who is Love) through the love of others and the love that others show us.”

And though this is not Beethoven, it’s a good Christmas share.

Three original arrangements by Tony Glausi, “A Christmas Jazz Medley”

Photo by Angela Roma/Pexels

Religion

Intelligence — the low kind and the artificial kind

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It reached 27 degrees today where I live, and that feels pretty good after the cold stretch. Yesterday I was able to wear my Mad Bomber hat with the ear flaps up, and today I was able to switch to a flat cap with ear flaps. The sun doesn’t go down till about a minute after 5:00, which means I can at least begin my homeward commute with the car lights off, sparing my battery a little work. (I’m thoughtful like that.)

I’ve been listening to a bit of Glenn Beck in the mornings recently. I’m not a big fan of his, but I had to stop listening to his competitor on the other talk network, Mike Gallagher. Mike is a very nice guy, I’m sure, but I’ve grown more and more to suspect that he isn’t terribly bright. He thinks with his heart, which annoys me. It’s like a conservative operating with a liberal’s equipment. What made him dead to me, though, was a day some time before Christmas, when a listener called in to his show to repeat the canard that goes, “Well, you know, Abraham Lincoln owned slaves.”

[For the record, in case it comes up, Abraham Lincoln never owned a slave. Not one. Nor did his father, who was an abolitionist. Lincoln’s wife’s family owned slaves, it’s true, but the Lincolns never did. I’ll reconsider the argument if the person making it is willing to take responsibility for all his own in-laws’ actions.]

But Mike Gallagher, with his national microphone and a staff of assistants, didn’t bother to refute the assertion. He just said, “Well, Lincoln had a lot of problems in relation to black people.” Then when angry listeners (like me) called in to complain, he just said, “I didn’t say he owned slaves.”

In my opinion, all conservative talk show hosts are morally obligated to let no one ever get away with saying Lincoln owned slaves. That obligation is right up there with shooting down the “Bush blew up the Twin Towers” theory.

Anyway, as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, I listened to a piece of Glenn Beck’s program. He was talking to a science fiction writer about the concept of Artificial Intelligence. They were agreed that humanity is in grave danger, in the fairly near future, of being surpassed and perhaps enslaved by something like androids. The Singularity, it’s called – the day when machines become smarter than humans.

Let me go out on a limb and say it – I am not worried about the Singularity. Continue reading Intelligence — the low kind and the artificial kind →