The creative team of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler who brought us the Anatomy of an AI System have created a much more ambitious long wall sized infographic called Calculating Empires: https://calculatingempires.net.
Screen shot of Calculating Empires
I saw this at the Jeau de Paume exhibit on The World Through AI. I feel it is the sort of thing I would like a large poster of so I could carefully read it, but … no luck … no posters.
Anyway, it is a fascinating map of communications technology.
How to Write Poetry Using Copilot is a short guide on how to use Microsoft Copilot to write different genres of poetry. Try it out, it is rather interesting. Here are some of the reasons they give for asking Copilot to write poetry:
Create a thoughtful surprise. Why not surprise a loved one with a meaningful poem that will make their day?
Add poems to cards. If you’re creating a birthday, anniversary, or Valentine’s Day card from scratch, Copilot can help you write a unique poem for the occasion.
Create eye-catching emails. If you’re trying to add humor to a company newsletter or a marketing email that your customers will read, you can have Copilot write a fun poem to spice up your emails.
See poetry examples. If you’re looking for examples of different types of poetry, like sonnets or haikus, you can use Copilot to give you an example of one of these poems.
The Musée d’Orsay set a record attendance of 793,556 visitors to its exhibition ‘Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise’.
ARTnews has a story about how the Musée d’Orsay’s Van Gogh Exhibition Breaks Historic Attendance Record. The exhibit included a virtual reality component (Virtual Reality – Van Gogh’s Palette) where visitors could put on a headset and interact with the palette of Vincent van Gogh. You can see a 360 degree video of the experience here in French. It takes place in the room of Dr. Gachet who treated van Gogh. It starts with the piano at which his daughter Marguerite posed for a painting. Her character also narrates. Then you zoom in on a 3D rendered version of his palette where you hear about some of the paintings he did in the last 70 days of his life. They emerge from the palette.
It isn’t clear if the success of the show is due to the VR component or just the chance to see originals. We can only experience the 360 video which has limited interactivity. That said, I don’t find the video of the VR experience convincing. It is a creative documentary and it is hard to see how being immersed would make much of a difference. Was it just a gimmick to get more people to come to the show?
MONTREAL — The last cyclorama in Canada has been hidden from public view since it closed in 2018, but a small group of people are hoping to revive the unique…
Cycloramas are the virtual reality of the 19th century. Long paintings, sometimes with props, were mounted in the round in special buildings that allowed people to feel immersed in a painted space. These remind us of the variety of types of media that have surpassed – the forgotten types of media.
Released in 1978, a socialist alternative to Monopoly sold over 200,000 copies and was translated into multiple languages.
Mental Floss has a nice piece of floss with The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game. Class Struggle, the board game, was developed by a political science professor, Bertell Ollman, who wanted an alternative to Monopoly, which ironically was based on the Landlord Game which had been originally designed to show the evils of property. Class Struggle was sold to Avalon Hill who eventually discontinued it. It looks like you can find copies on eBay.
With the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT the other big AI companies are teasing us with their AIs. For example, Verge tells us that Google’s new AI turns text into music. Alas Google doesn’t seem to want to let us play with the AI, just admire the results.
Free to roam through the post-apocalyptic game, one intrepid group has taken to performing the Bard. They have found an intent new audience, as well as the odd mutant scorpion
It seems to me that this is related to the various activities that were staged in Second Life and other environments. It also has connections to the Machinima phenomenon where people use 3D environments like games to stage acts that are filmed.
Of course the problem with Fallout 76 is the performers can get attacked during a performance.
For 4,600 years, a mysterious game slept in the dust of southern Iraq, largely forgotten. The passion of a museum curator and the hunger of young Iraqis for their cultural history may bring it back.
The New York Times has a story on The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record. A curator at the British Museum, Irving Finkel, connected the translation of a tablet with the rules with an ancient board game of which there were copies in museums (see picture above). More recently the game has been reintroduced into Iraq so that people can rediscover their ludic heritage.
The nice thing about the NYTimes article, beside the video of Finkel who has an amazing beard, is that they include a PDF that you can download and print to learn to play the game.
The article and Finkel’s video talk highlight how influential a game can be – how a set of rules can be a meme that helps rediscover a game.
The developer of the text-adventure game on how, at 20, she overcame 1980s misogyny to turn a Tolkien book into one of the most groundbreaking titles in the gaming canon
A new art-generating AI system called Stable Diffusion can create convincing deepfakes, including of celebrities.
TechCrunch has a nice discussion of Deepfakes for all: Uncensored AI art model prompts ethics questions. The relatively sudden availability of AI text to art generators has provoked discussion on the ethics of creation and of large machine learning models. Here are some interesting links:
Ars Technica has another article on various projects to be able to see what original images might have been used in training AIs like MidJourney. Have AI image generators assimilated your art? New tool lets you check. The provenance of some of the training sets is documented here. It remains to be seen what you can do if your images have been used.
It is worth identifying some of the potential issues:
These art generating AIs may have violated copyright in scraping millions of images. Could artists whose work has been exploited sue for compensation?
The AIs are black boxes that are hard to query. You can’t tell if copyrighted images were used.
These AIs could change the economics of illustration. People who used to commission and pay for custom art for things like magazines, book covers, and posters, could start just using these AIs to save money. Just as Flickr changed the economics of photography, MidJourney could put commercial illustrators out of work.
We could see a lot more “original” art in situations where before people could not afford it. Perhaps poster stores could offer to generate a custom image for you and print it. Get your portrait done as a cyberpunk astronaut.
The AIs could reinforce visual bias in our visual literacy. Systems that always see Philosophers as old white guys with beards could limit our imagination of what could be.
These could be used to create pornographic deepfakes with people’s faces on them or other toxic imagery.
