The following comment appeared recently on one of my YouTube lectures, “Historical Context for American Literature.” American???? So where are: CANADA, MEXICO, GUATEMALA, CUBA, COSTA RICA, BRAZIL, CHILE ARGENTINA, PERÚ, COLOMBIA, PANAMÁ, URUGUAY, PARAGUAY, EL SALVADOR, HONDURAS, VENEZUELA… ETC ETC ETC. STOP SAYING THE UNITED STATES IS AMERICA! Here’s how I responded: Geography and names…
The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and…
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Clanker is a derogatory term used to insult AI and its products and services such as delivery robots, therapist chatbots and automated customer service. Why try to hurt the feelings of something that, oh wait, has no feelings? Like most slurs, it has more to do with the speaker using it than the object of…
Artificial intelligence is making steady advances into subtitling but, say its practitioners, it’s a vital service that needs a human to make it work […] AI is unable to decide which sounds are important. “Right now, it’s not even close,” Deryagin says. He also stresses the importance of the broader context of a film, rather…
If you have ever experienced this, you might recall the feeling of confusion after opening such a document, followed by frustration—Wait, what is this exactly?—before you begin to wonder if the sender simply used AI to generate large blocks of text instead of thinking it through. If this sounds familiar, you have been workslopped. —Harvard Business Review
From an essay that includes a reflection on discovering AI-fabricated quotes while peer-reviewing a scholarly essay for potential publication. (Academics don’t get paid for the labor of pre-reading scholarly drafts for potential review. An author who uses AI is squandering the resources of human peer-reviewers.) Humanistic study once promised — and for many, still delivers…
Rewatching ST:DS9 At dinner with the Siskos, Cadet Nog reluctantly reveals that the B-plot will involve his difficulty getting respect from Klingons. Because this is TV, General Martok shows up at that very moment with this week’s plot-starter: an intercepted message for “Michael” about a terrorist missile launch which threatens to trigger a devastating war.…
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Essays like this remind me why I picked my English major. There are other ways to get facts. Newspapers are full of them, as are podcasts and documentaries. Travel shows proliferate, take your pick. But even then, there is nothing like the view of the world via a novel. Novels can go beyond merely being…
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Rewatching ST:DS9 In the Defiant mess hall, Kira and Dax chat about Kira being single again, and don’t notice Odo’s reaction. Sisko reluctantly lets Dax talk him into a detour to study a random planet’s plot contrivance particle field, and of course things Go Wrong. Instead of staying on the ship to unflabbergast the Defiant’s…
AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on the Narrative of…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir scolds Martok for injuring himself (again) during a holosuite training program. (He’s being reckless and self-destructive, even for a Klingon.) On the Defiant, Nog stealthily pantomimes strangling Worf for ordering him to download an operating system “one file at a time.” (The intended comedy in this scene is a bit awkward; Nog’s…
The illustrations clients bring to her are commonly littered with unclean lines and nonsensical text, and they look like a mess of pixels when blown up beyond a certain size. “There’s people that are aware AI isn’t perfect, and then there’s people that come to you angry because they didn’t manage to get it done…
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Traffic on my website has plunged over the past few years. In 2019, my site attracted almost 1.5 million visitors. The content on my site has not gotten this bad, this quickly! Back in 2016, a single popular page on my website attracted almost 1 million visits — about as many visits as my entire…
Journalists who can’t verify their sources, or their own humanity, face consequences. Multiple news organisations have taken down articles written by an alleged freelance journalist that now appear to have been generated by AI. On Thursday, Press Gazette reported that at least six publications, including Wired and Business Insider, have removed articles from their websites…
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Fences was performed in the backyard of August Wilson’s boyhood home.
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