Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
What would it take for AI to write a credible poem? I pose this question because, when I first heard about ChatGPT nearly a year ago, the first thing I asked it to do was compose a Shakespearean love sonnet to Donald Trump. The result was utter shite: O Donald, Donald, my love for thee,Is…
We watch discrete acts of consciousness unspooling themselves on every page. Like you and me in mid-thought, there is less attention to grammatical propriety. Instead, we have choppy bits. Subjects gone missing. Or implied. More fidelity to emotional states and to memory than to the logic of algorithmic prose.
To the extent that our reality is increasingly defined by our connection to virtual environments, the function of our (facial) identity will be increasingly restricted to concerns of social control and commercial opportunity.
I wonder if there is such a thing as a literature of self-isolation. I suppose there is if I say there is. All I have to do is find examples and thread them together in some coherent account.
Whenever I embrace the future, there inevitably follows a feeling of disappointment as I discover that the future is just the past wrapped in a shiny new package.
IBM reveals that it has developed its so-called Diversity in Faces dataset, a face database of approximately one million images to assist researchers in developing less biased facial recognition algorithms.
By one of those innumerable coincidences that seem to shape my life, I started reading Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges, on the same day that I photographed Robarts Library alongside its distorted image reflected in one of those convex parking garage mirrors. One of the stories, “The Library of Babel”, opens in this way …
I have a great idea for a new tech startup and am thinking I could finance it with a kickstarter campaign. Maybe $10 would do. I want to develop ass detection software. A specialized algorithm would scan digital photographs and identify all asses. Once the algorithm had learned the generalized task of locating an ass, it would go on to the more specialized task of identifying the “owner” of the ass. I’m proceeding on the assumption that each person has a unique set of identifying markers: shape, roundness, proportions, depth, that sort of thing.
I recently bought a suite of photo “enhancement” apps from MacPhun. I use the word enhancement in quotes because I feel conflicted about such tools. They make it easy to inflict an endless array of cheesy effects on unsuspecting photos.
It seems everyone who has their hands on a 5DS has been posting samples so people can download giant image files (50 megapixels) to see how giant an image file can get. I’ll offer a couple images here (just to get it out of my system), then side step the whole giant image thing which, after all, is nothing more than a photographic pissing contest.
Remember these things. They’re called payphones. In the olden days, people would put coins in them and use them to make telephone calls. Now, they are display cases for graffiti and old coffee cups.
On Christmas day, I intend to commit an act of love by deleting my Facebook account. My reasons aren’t terribly mysterious. They relate to concerns that have been widely discussed by all sorts of people. You may not find all my reasons relevant to your own Facebook situation, but I’m sure you’ll identify with at least of few of them.
More than 500 authors from around the globe have signed a petition demanding the creation of an international bill of digital rights. This is a response to the revelations of whistleblower, Edward Snowden, about the extent to which US and UK intelligence organizations engage in online surveillance.
Following Jaron Lanier’s advice, I’ve taken a summer sabbatical from social media. His advice comes from his latest book, Who Owns The Future? I’m pleased to report that, as promised in his book, the curtailing of my social media habits has not resulted in any nasty consequences.
One of the things I like to do here at nouspique is pay homage to instances of extraordinary prescience. One such instance came forty years ago from the late Michael Crichton with his film, Westworld.