CSotD: Errors and Omissions
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Ann Telnaes originally posted this a year ago, but brought it back recently to comment on the flourishing of AI. Then someone re-posted this segment with a link to the full piece:
That fragment zeros in on the main problem with AI. Whether it’s graphic art, writing, music or whatever, the essence of art is translating experience, of making the individual universal. The subject may or may not be exotic: An artist can depict a trip to the store in a way that resonates, but I once read a book by an autistic author that helped me get inside her skin and see her unique perspective.
But, as Telnaes says, trying to imitate someone else’s experience doesn’t work. It can be obvious, as when a guy tries to create a female character and doesn’t hit the mark, or it can be subtly false, like when I left the theater after watching The Big Chill and, by the time I got to the car, realized it was about 67% bullshit and the rest was an upscale ripoff of The Return of the Secaucus Seven.
Which is the same feeling you get from AI — it feels okay for a minute and then you realize, no, it isn’t right. As Gertrude Stein put it, “There’s no there there.”
There’s a lot of AI around, and it’s not as clownish as it was at the start, with too many fingers or impossible postures. But the best of it comes across as mediocre, even if the person who directed it knew just the right prompts.
One destructive factor is that if magazines and newspapers start using AI instead of hiring artists to create illustrations, I don’t know how young artists will feed themselves while they develop their own style and find their voice. Even cheesy work can pay the bills and buy you some time.
The other side of that coin is that we’ve always had technological change. I’m currently reading Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, which traces how we have translated information from Sumerian clay tablets to the modern era. Each of those innovations brought pain for somebody: Illuminated manuscripts were more elegant than typeset pages.
And we’ve always had more crap than good art. In Ulysses, Molly Bloom reads best-sellers by Paul de Cock, who sold millions of books, none of them worth a damn, while Joyce himself sold far fewer, far better works.
As for cartooning, some of it is elegant and much of it is crap, and you can’t tell me that the 27th ghost working on an 80-year-old strip is producing anything less commercial than the wrapper of a candy bar.
But it will be a shame when someone can just tell the computer “An explorer in the jungle has a huge lion behind him and is saying ‘Don’t mumble, Smedley.'”
Because that lame gag used to be good for a few days groceries while its creator worked on something more worthwhile.
I got a laugh out of this screw-up, in which the Chicago Sun-Times ran a special section created by a freelancer who used AI and wound up recommending a reading list of imaginary books. Busted!
When I was first learning to lay out pages, one of my jobs was to create “advertorials,” which are pages of stories about, for instance, modular homes, paid for with ads for, you guessed it, modular homes.
It was good training and lousy writing, but we made no bones about it. It had a different typeface than the rest of the paper, and there was a disclaimer saying it was an advertising supplement. It obviously wasn’t part of the rest of the newspaper.
The Sun-Times newsroom ran this slop as news, and admits that they didn’t read it before publishing. They’re blaming the syndicate they bought it from and the syndicate is blaming the freelancer who assembled it and either everybody’s gonna wise up fast, or we’re going to be seeing a lot more like it.
Juxtaposition of the Day
This is something of an asked-and-answered pairing. Ramirez offers the debatable theory that high prices allow companies to conduct research and development, though giving grants to universities is another way to accomplish some of that. Grants also allow young chemistry buffs to become the kind of people who get hired to develop essential medications.
In any case, Clyde’s counter is that we are supposed to be in a free market economy, whatever Tovarich Trump’s central government decrees. Dear Leader can’t decide if he’s a commie or a libertarian and you sure can’t tell from here.
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
Ah, well. these things happen. Usually with an idea that was pretty lame to begin with, but this was a good concept. That’s rarely the case.
By contrast, Varvel is in no danger of anyone duplicating this idea, because as far as I can tell, he is the only person in the world not named Karoline Leavitt who thinks Ramaphosa came out on the short end of that botched ambush attempt.
Kids here still respect the college dean
Not gonna go along with Jones’s put-down of voc tec students, since I was a big fan of those schools even before my granddaughter met her husband at one. As it happens, she was studying health sciences there and now works at the Mayo Clinic, so phooey to you.
But she wasn’t researching cures for cancer and probably works with some people who did, and did so on the kinds of grants Dear Leader wants to end. So phooey to him.
The idea that grants are just big, undifferentiated chunks of money is yet another indicator of why Wharton doesn’t brag about its most famous alumnus. He may not understand how tariffs work, but, as Anderson notes, he’s an expert at putting a school out of business and has proven it.
If his Big Beautiful Bill passes as is, the Medicaid cuts will ensure that hospitals won’t be able to hire those health sciences kids from the voc tec, while the results of his tariffs will mean nobody else will be able to find jobs either.
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