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The story of Pandora’s box isn’t about closing it. AI music is already a part of the technological landscape we live in; however, it won’t dominate that landscape forever. In fact, I would suggest its dominance may be very brief indeed.
Why? Cause it sucks.
I’m not going to link to the fully generative AI “country” song that supposedly topped a Billboard chart recently, cause I don’t want to give it any more clicks. Let’s just assume it’s as bad as you imagine, cause in fact it’s worse. As is most everything that AI churns out. It’s beyond imagination because it doesn’t come from one.
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Can AI tell us anything meaningful about Bob Dylan’s songs? | Aeon Essays:
One theme steadily rises over the entire course [of Dylan’s career as a songwriter]: time. Its persistent ascent through the decades aligns intuitively with Dylan’s own aging and increasing preoccupation with legacy, and the passage of years.
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Kingsnorth knows full well that this hermit’s path is closed to most of his readers, just as he knows that he himself is no purist. He acknowledges that he makes his living off The Machine as a Substacker: “Even we romantic Luddites are doing much of our lamenting on the internet.” What is most provocative about Against the Machine is not Kingsnorth’s diagnosis of modernity but his insistence that, if you are troubled by a culture of no limits, you can still take some stands, even if they’re only small ones: Shun the chatbots and don’t engage with AI unless you have no choice. Lose the smartphone and “bring your children up to understand that the blue light is as dangerous as cocaine.” Seek out wild places and remember that your body is not made to be hacked or optimized but to connect you to the earth beneath your feet. Touch grass, quite literally, and do your best to connect with other people who want to do the same.
Beautiful new tune by Julian Lage — with John Medeski on organ! ♫
I’m not a Jacob Collier fan, but if you’re a guitarist, this conversation with Paul Davids is riveting and enormously generative of musical ideas. Now I’m wanting one of his five-string guitars. ♫
To me our neighborhood is not just the middle-class moms with their expensive pushchairs or my writer friend across the park, but instead a place of many layers, where people are going through all kinds of struggle, many of whom I now know personally. The [local parish’s food pantry] makes me ask myself: How do you want to be connected in the world, and how do you want to be in communion with people?
Anglicanism is meaningful to me in that way. I’m not in any way an effective, good, or faithful Anglican. I am at the larder far less frequently than I should be. But I’m interested in the idea that this particular space in Willesden provides something which, at least in contemporary capitalism, seems very hard to find elsewhere. (I cannot speak for Anglican churches elsewhere.) It’s meaningful to me, in the radically local sense Philip Larkin got at in “Church Going,” as a specific place where for hundreds — or maybe thousands — of years, people have gathered for this purpose: to be quiet, to be in communion, to be with one another. These human souls can be abject, they can be lost, they can be rich or poor, hold a great variety of political views or none at all. The door is open.
As an Anglican who, unlike Zadie Smith, has “metaphysical concerns,” heck, even a set of beliefs, I say: This is a good start.
Last spring, it became clear to me that over half the students in my large general education lecture course had used artificial intelligence tools, contrary to my explicit policy, to write their final take-home exams. (Ironically, the course was titled Contemporary Moral Problems: The Value of Human Life.) I had asked them about some very recent work in philosophy, parts of which happened to share titles with entirely different ideas in medieval theology. You can guess which topics the students ended up “writing” about.
Well, of course they did! What I just can’t get over is the number of professors who think that making an “explicit policy” against AI use will have any effect at all on students’ behavior. The overwhelming majority of college students will have chatbots do their work for them unless we teachers make it impossible for them to do so. Certum est.
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica:
When the professors realized how widespread this was, they contacted the 100-ish students who seemed to be cheating. “We reached out to them with a warning, and asked them, ‘Please explain what you just did,'” said Fagen-Ulmschneider in an Instagram video discussing the situation.
Apologies came back from the students, first in a trickle, then in a flood. The professors were initially moved by this acceptance of responsibility and contrition… until they realized that 80 percent of the apologies were almost identically worded and appeared to be generated by AI.
So on October 17, during class, Flanagan and Fagen-Ulmschneider took their class to task, displaying a mash-up image of the apologies, each bearing the same “sincerely apologize” phrase. No disciplinary action was taken against the students, and the whole situation was treated rather lightly — but the warning was real. Stop doing this. Flanagan said that she hoped it would be a “life lesson” for the students.
Seems to me the most likely “life lesson” would be that there are no bad consequences for cheating with AI.
(By the way, Nate, a staff writers for Ars, is yet another of my former students doing cool stuff in the world.)
Re-upping my 2023 essay on Murray:
My thesis can be simply stated: There is today no more important writer for North American Christians to read than Albert Murray — a man who, as far as I know, had no religious belief whatsoever. But he held as his guiding principle an idea that Christians today cannot flourish without adopting: “the blues idiom” — otherwise known as life in the briar patch.