About book lists

Of course the news that an AI-generated summer reading list for the Chicago Sun-Times was weighted heavily in favour of books that, er, don’t actually exist has embattled meat-and-mucus critics crowing over another thing that our new digital overlords have royally arsed up.

But hang on a minute. We don’t need ones and zeroes to invent new works from the likes of Isabel Allende or Percival Everett. Remember Jim Crace’s Useless America, which owed its (non-) existence to a mangled phone conversation with someone at Penguin? Or indeed my own Lady Gaga biography, which never progressed beyond a few weeks of research, but still garnered five stars on GoodReads. 

In any case, even when the product is real, do you really think the (human) author of such thumbs-up compendia has made a series of informed decisions about what should or should not be included? I spent several years on a strange planet called Lifestyle Journalism and, trust me, very often you have little to go on bar a press release and an advertising exec suggesting forcefully that it would be very helpful if specific products from her client might be included, or else. So, yes, this book (or holiday or necklace or vodka or cardigan or chi-chi gluten-free bistro or invasive surgical procedure) is good and you should buy it, because we say so, even if we’ve never been in the same room as the bloody thing.

Ultimately, AI succeeds not by doing things better than humans, but by doing them equally badly.

PS: Another example from the archives: in defence of the Black Crowes review that was more like an educated guess.

About these new-fangled mobile telephone things

I’m teaching a group in their late teens/early 20s (Brazilian, Korean, Swiss) and the increasingly preposterous textbook entreats me to throw out the following gem as a prompt to discussion:

Do you think the internet / smart phones have affected how you read?

Except that, given their age, this is a bit like asking whether their reading habits have been affected in any way by breathing.

About AI

In the New York Times, the neuroscientist Eric Hoel argues that the increased use of artificial intelligence is forcing any notion of intellectual or aesthetic quality into a death spiral, prompted as much as anything by human laziness. For example he refers to researchers at a conference on AI using AI to conduct peer reviews on AI-related papers, taking any human critical intervention out of the equation. Which is a problem, because one thing AI is very bad at detecting is bullshit, which is ultimately what peer review is for.

Of course, most of us don’t hang around at AI conferences, but Hoel suggests that the process is far more prevalent than that, eroding the fabric of culture itself, to the detriment even of people who reach for their weapons when they hear the word:

Isn’t it possible that human culture contains within it cognitive micronutrients — things like cohesive sentences, narrations and character continuity — that developing brains need? 

In other words, the processes by which people engage with all the gubbins of society is as significant as the content itself, and that’s what AI is stripping away. But it’s not as if the purveyors of AI are doing this deliberately, is it? They’re not consciously proposing policies that will make humanity that bit more stupid are they oh wait hang on...

PS: And even if you’re not that bothered about AI destroying the canon of Western literature, you might want to know what it’s doing to your fridge. 

PPS: And, following on from Musk’s tweet, I think this is supposed to be an April Fool’s gag but these days, who knows?

About Christmas books

When I was in primary school, the first Friday afternoon after the Christmas holidays was a toy day, in which each of us was permitted to bring one thing we’d received from Santa and enjoy it with our friends and/or enemies. (It was a couple of years before I realised that the kids who regularly went down with diplomatic illnesses on these days were also the kids with holes in their shoes; I suspect these festivals of conspicuous consumption wouldn’t be permitted now.)

I wasn’t one of the deprived kids although I was at a slight disadvantage in that most of the things I wanted, and got, at Christmas were books. So while everyone else was mucking around with Buckaroo or Sindy or that wind-up Evel Knievel thing, I just sat and pored over some new tome about dinosaurs or pirates or cowboys or flags or clowns or Greek myths, or maybe the latest Raymond Briggs, or something Doctor Who-related. It wasn’t clear how I could adapt this to a shared activity, unless someone else was prepared to have me read to them. There was no hostility from my classmates as far as I recall; I just did my thing.

Fast-forward. Christmas as an event means even less to me now than it did when I was eight, and if I want a book I’ll usually buy it myself (although whether I read it is another matter; I’m the poster boy for tsundoku) but it still gives an unexpected pleasure to give or receive a book, the transaction being based around that very special feeling (do the Japanese have a word for it?), not of “I needed to buy you something because it’s December” but rather “I saw this and thought of you”. Which, as we ease into an ever more digital future of downloads on demand, gets rather lost. An unfortunate victim of progress or a conscious decision by those who stand to profit from a pervasive intellectual dullness and absence of curiosity? As one user of BlueSky (where we are unless or until Twitter lances its own boils) puts it:

(Pic by Tom Gauld)

About reading

A study at the University of Valencia has cheered up grumpy Luddites everywhere by concluding that reading printed texts improves comprehension more than reading digital matter does. But they’re not entirely sure why. One theory is that the “linguistic quality of digital texts tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts.” In other words, to mangle McLuhan, it may be about the message rather than the medium; if I print out this blog post, it doesn’t miraculously get better. Or, as techies have asserted since the days of Babbage, garbage in, garbage out.

About Wrapped

The years when your musical tastes truly mattered to your identity are long gone, we are constantly told. The younglings no longer define as metalheads or b-boys or goths or disco queens or indie shambles; they just leave themselves at the mercies of the blessed algorithm and let the music play, a title that only comes to mind because I heard Radcliffe and Maconie play it yesterday on their 6Music show, which shows how old I am, doesn’t it?

And yet... and yet. The continued success of Spotify’s annual Wrapped, which gives users a handy summary of their listening habits over the past year and – this is the important bit – encourages them to share it with everyone else, suggests that people think the things they listen to do actually matter, do actually express something about the listener, even if they happen accidentally. To this extent:

About Elon Musk

Twitter is now official the place where irony eats itself.

About postcards

(At the Royal Academy shop.)

We’re now so deep into a digital version of reality that consumers need advice on how to use postcards.

About stolen books

Authors including Michael Chabon and Sarah Silverman are taking action against Meta (which owns Facebook) for using pirated copies of their books to train generative AI. In The Atlantic, Alex Reisner has published a searchable database of the authors who’ve been similarly exploited and many of these have expressed their annoyance.

As well they might. But do spare a thought for those authors whose words weren’t considered worth stealing. Because I’m bloody furious.

About Linklater

Richard Linklater, in the course of discussing his new movie in Hollywood Reporter, tries to be optimistic about the state of cinema but I’m not convinced: 

Some really intelligent, passionate, good citizens just don’t have the same need for literature and movies anymore. It doesn’t occupy the same space in the brain. I think that’s just how we’ve given over our lives, largely, to this thing that depletes the need for curating and filling ourselves up with meaning from art and fictional worlds. That need has been filled up with — let’s face it — advanced delivery systems for advertising. It’s sad, but what can you do? I also don’t want to go through life thinking our best days are behind us. That’s just not productive. So, in your own area, you just have to persist and do what you can on behalf of the things that you believe in. You have to believe that everything can change and that things can go back to being a little better. Isn’t that what we all want for everything these days, from democracy on down? Can’t we just go back to being a little better?

PS: Paul Schrader holds forth on the way modern audiences approach, not films, but film criticism and, as one might expect from the movies the two men make, his approach is a little more, uh, forthright than Linklater’s: “Audiences are dumber. Normal people don’t go through reviews like they used to. Rotten Tomatoes is something the studios can game. So they do.”

About the Beatles

I asked ChatGPT to identify the worst Beatles song and this is what happened:

It’s important to remember that opinions on music are highly subjective, and what one person considers the “worst” song by The Beatles, another might enjoy. The Beatles are widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential bands in the history of music, and their catalog includes a vast array of songs spanning different genres and styles. Rather than singling out a specific song as the “worst,” it's more constructive to acknowledge that The Beatles had a few songs that were less popular or less critically acclaimed than their most iconic tracks. However, even these less celebrated songs have their own merits and are appreciated by some fans. Musical taste is personal, so what one person may dislike, another may find enjoyable. Ultimately, The Beatles’ legacy is defined by their many legendary and groundbreaking songs that have had a profound impact on the music industry, and their contributions to music far outweigh any individual song's perceived shortcomings.

There are all sorts of rumours that AI will take over from yer actual meat-and-mucus critics but this takes things in an even more worrying direction – it’s effectively decided that critical faculties are a bit impolite, actually, because you might be casting aspersions on somebody’s favourite. So it’s more “constructive” to acknowledge that some of the songs wowed the critics less than others did, provided you remember to assert the Fabs’ absolute centrality to the canon.

And it’s an easy question anyway. The answer‘s ‘What’s the New Mary Jane’, isn’t it?

PS: Elif Batuman asks ChatGPT a question about Proust and is told to, er, read Proust.

PPS: In American Songwriter, Jacob Uitti uses AI to imagine a Dylan/Cohen collaboration and, guess what, it’s dreadful. That said, much of the content here is as bad, even when it’s nominally written by humans. In a discussion of Paranoid Android we are blessed with this gem: “Despite the hurdle posed by censorship, the video managed to retain its audience’s captivation.” When I am king, bad writers, human or digital, will be first against the wall.

About ChatGPT, again

Self-Googling is dangerous enough, but throwing oneself into the maw of AI is... well...

Tim Footman is a British author, editor, and journalist who has written on a variety of topics, including technology, culture, and history. Some of his notable works include:
"The World According to the Simpsons: What Our Favorite TV Family Says About Life, Love, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Donut" (2006) - a book that explores the cultural impact of the popular TV show "The Simpsons."
"International Guy: Paris, New York, Copenhagen" (2017) - a series of novels co-authored with Audrey Carlan that follows the adventures of a globetrotting male escort.
"The Mindfulness Workout: A Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World" (2021) - a self-help book that provides practical tips and exercises to help readers reduce stress and live more mindfully.

PS: Also, from several months later, this: 

About Nadine Dorries

For no particular reason, I asked ChatGPT to write a sonnet about Nadine Dorries and, intriguingly, it’s just about bad enough to be a sonnet written by Nadine Dorries (if the former Culture Secretary knew what a sonnet was). 

Fair Nadine, who in politics finds her place,

Her voice is heard with vigor and with grace,

She stands for values, for freedom and for right, 

And battles those who seek to dim the light. 

With passion, she defends the common folk, 

And fights for justice, always without cloak, 

Her heart is true, her mind is clear and bright, 

And with her words, she challenges the might. 

Her spirit soars, unbound by fear or doubt, 

And with her strength, she leads the righteous rout, 

For she believes in truth and in what's just, 

And in her cause, she puts her sacred trust. 

So let us hail fair Nadine's noble heart, 

For in her work, she plays a vital part.

About ChatGPT

Music critic Simon Reynolds is sanguine regarding the threat that an AI program such as ChatGPT might present to his trade:

...A.I. has no need to write, either — no deep-seated motivation to put words on paper or on screen. The kind of texts it generates resemble what I think of as “motiveless” writing, like school homework, or advertorial. Proper music criticism, even if done to earn a living, is closer to the sort of willed writing that fills diaries, journals and poems — where the compulsion to write is internal rather than externally imposed.

Except that what he (and, if you were to put a gun to my head, I) would define as “proper music criticism” has been in retreat for years, squeezed out by the twin monsters of economics and technology in favour of, well, advertorial. Mr Reynolds may well survive the onslaught, but any number of lesser names may not be so lucky.

In other news, I had a go with the program, and this happened:

PS: Also this, from The Times. “Artistic types” indeed.

About listening to music

An article by Liz Pelly about how that quintessentially middle-class problem, how one might discover and listen to new music after quitting Spotify, offers six options – none of which involve listening to the opinions of music critics. (One of the suggestions is interviews with musicians, but in that case, the interviewer is merely a conduit to the opinion – whether s/he agrees or not is irrelevant.)

About the singularity

(Note: Small Boo had these thoughts, not me. But she hasn’t got a blog, at least not that I know of.)

There’s an idea knocking about in the tech world called the singularity. Essentially, it’s the point at which artificial intelligence transcends human cognition, where machines become cleverer than brains. It’s long been assumed that the singularity, if it happens, will be a case of machines playing catch-up, of AI’s thinking power developing faster than that of homo sapiens. 

But then a news story broke a few days ago, about the budget airline RyanAir seeking to identify people travelling with fake South African passports by setting them a general knowledge test in Afrikaans. This has inevitably caused great offence as Afrikaans is still seen by many South Africans as the hated language of apartheid; but aside from the PR blooper, it’s a pretty pointless exercise, since only 13% of citizens speak the language – Zulu and Xhosa are more widespread. Add the fact that the questions on the test are littered with grammatical errors and it really looks as if some junior RyanAir apparatchik ran them through Google translate, operating on a vague memory that it’s one of the languages that they speak down there.

And the thought presents itself – could the singularity arrive as a result of AI standing still, while humanity’s intelligence declines to meet it?

About ellipses...

 Zoe Williams:

If you trail off a text with “…”, this situates you right in the middle of generation X, but if you ask a younger acquaintance what is so wrong with ellipsis, you doubly age yourself, first by using ellipsis and second by knowing what it is called.

About albums

In my epic tome about Radiohead’s OK Computer, I floated the idea that this 1997 work might turn out to be among the last of the classic albums, in which each track was intended to matter, in an immutable order laid down by its creators. Napster, iTunes and Spotify have worked to automate the techniques we developed making mixtapes in the 1980s, breaking The Long-Playing Record down into discrete tracks that can be rearranged and redistributed at will, always with the option to leave out the one written by the drummer.

Of course there was always the possibility that an artist would stand up against the shuffle button, defending the sanctity of an album as a coherent, linear work of art. The thing is, I imagined it would be an artist in the serious rock tradition, tracing a line from the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and, yes, Radiohead. I really didn’t expect it to be Adele.

PS: More Adele-related shenanigans - the man who didn’t listen to the album.

About a mask

I’ve always been fairly relaxed about the notion that scary advertising bots know far more about my needs and wants than I’d like; if only because the ads that pop up when I use social media seem to involve only the things I actively wouldn’t want. As an example, this, in an advertisement for Boots, was the first image to assail my eyes when I went onto Facebook this morning. 

Pretty disturbing before the first coffee and not at all the sort of thing I’d consider purchasing... unless of course I aspired to create a low-budget remake of one of my favourite films in the back garden...

Come to think of it, maybe these bots do a better job than I gave them credit for.

About the Olympics

Something I wrote in 2012: 

In 20 years’ time, will athletes be fencing and diving and underclad-volleyballing in near-empty stadia, accompanied only by the tap-tap-tap of a few accredited live tweeters?

(And that was only nine years ago.)