I’ve enjoyed Alex Garland’s work over the years, both as writer for Danny Boyle on 28 Days Later, Sunshine and The Beach and as writer-director of Ex Machina and Annihiliation. His thoughtful, visually striking, near-future science fiction (as most of his films are) is my kind of entertainment. So I had been thinking I’d get along to Civil War, even though its reception had been mixed. My cousin was visiting last week and had liked it, so I took that as my prompt to go along on Saturday night.
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22 April 2024 · 1 Comment · Film
An op-ed in Haaretz recently discussed Israel’s unconscious drive for self-destruction. There doesn’t seem much that’s unconscious, however, in an article that appeared recently on its use of AI to direct the bombing in Gaza, which must be the most horrifying article on AI this year. +972 Magazine, an independent site run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists, reports that Israel’s Lavender targeting system has been deployed with “little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties”. What oversight there is typically involves “twenty seconds to authorize a bombing … just to make sure the target is male”.
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21 April 2024 · Events
I asked DALL-E to show me “a step-by-step tutorial on how to draw hands”. Explains a lot.
24 March 2024 · Infotech
Today was the Day For Rejoin, with modest events held around the UK. It’s a start, but it’s going to be a long road back. I wouldn’t expect us back in the Single Market before the election after next, and the EU itself, who knows. But I can still remember getting a mad-looking flyer in the 2005 election from some bunch of no-hopers called UKIP, and look what they achieved.
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23 March 2024 · Politics
By now, the whole world has heard about Willy’s Chocolate Experience in Glasgow (archived), or as the page title has it, “Willy Choclate Experience”, which sounds like something quite different and not at all for the weans. That mangled English is in keeping with the AI-generated graphics promising “a pasadise of sweet teats”, “enigemic sounds” and “ukxepcted twits”, which is the usual xepctation in the uk these days.
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4 March 2024 · Art
Harry Harrison’s classic dystopia Make Room! Make Room!, written from the vantage point of a world of 3.4 billion in 1966, predicted a world of seven billion people by 1999. He was only a billion over, or twelve years too early, depending which way you look at it. (He overestimated the rate of US growth, though. The book ended with a Times Square billboard on new year’s eve announcing that the US had reached 344 million citizens. The chances are it’ll reach that figure this year.)
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4 March 2024 · Environment
The New York Times reports that Amazon is being flooded with AI-generated biographies every time a celebrity dies, with such compelling titles as Tom Smothers: Revealing 4 Untold Truth About Half of Smothers Brother. As you’d imagine, they’re badly written, full of errors, and shameless money-grabs that take advantage of Amazon rules around only allowing partial refunds on Kindle ebooks.
How could this possibly be? Surely the entrepreneurs behind them aren’t using an AI author bio generator or AI Biographer™ or a free AI social media bio generator or Simplified’s bio generator or the professional bio generator Jasper or 10 AI professional bio generators to try in 2024. Surely.
19 February 2024 · Infotech
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