ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

Is There Any Privacy-Protecting Way To Use New AI Tools?

Maybe, but probably not. "It's worth putting some guardrails in place right at the start of your journey with these tools, or indeed deciding not to deal with them at all, based on how your data is collected and processed." - Wired

A Rebellion Against AI Stealing Content

Fan fiction writers, "social media companies such as Reddit and Twitter, news organizations including The New York Times and NBC News, authors such as Paul Tremblay and the actress Sarah Silverman have all taken a position against A.I. sucking up their data without permission." - The New York Times

David Brooks: Why AI Won’t Replace Us

 Over the past few months, I’ve become an A.I. limitationist. That is, I believe that while A.I. will be an amazing tool for, say, tutoring children all around the world, or summarizing meetings, it is no match for human intelligence. It doesn’t possess understanding, self-awareness, concepts, emotions, desires, a body or biology. - The New York Times

Science Fiction Is Chockablock Full Of Aliens. But “Alien” Is So Hard To Comprehend, So We Describe Them In Human Terms

“A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings,” Jaime Green writes in her new book, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Universe. - The New Republic

AI Is Coming For Us. So What Could Go Wrong?

With all this talk of killer robots, humanity may be overlooking the more immediate dangers posed by AI. - The Atlantic

Google’s New AI Search Tool Could Break The Internet In Significant Ways

Sort of like ChatGPT, it pulls information from various websites, rewords it, and puts that text on top of your search results—pushing down any links you see. In the process, it stifles traffic to the rest of the internet, lessening the very incentive to post online. - MSN (The Atlantic)

The Five Most Common Delusions Worldwide

One possibility is that “they reflect the common existential issues or dilemmas of living which preoccupy all human beings,” they write. “Another is that they reflect abnormalities of social-cognitive processes that, because they are important in everyday life, are universal.” - Nautilus

The Idea Of A Global Town Square Is Dead

The dream of the internet’s bipartisan “town square” is ending, transforming into many town squares tucked in alleys and behind buildings, because the actors in charge couldn’t stop seesawing in terms of who held the power, and because they always took that power too far. - The Intrinsic Perspective

Why It Might Not Be Good Strategy To “Expect The Worst”

Folk wisdom suggests that if you expect the worst, then you won’t be disappointed. This advice is pervasive; it can drive meteorologists to over-promise rain and companies to overestimate delivery times. - Psyche

The Boomers Never Had A Chance

The Boomers’ careers followed behind a glut of Traditionalists still in their prime. Disproportionately, the Baby Boomers never made it to the seats of power at the top of the business world. - 3 Quarks Daily

A Thumbs-Up Emoji Can Be A Contract, Court Says

"The ruling shows how ingrained emojis are in modern culture, also that so much of our daily communication happens via text. The playful symbols and faces are an accepted way of expressing emotion, but they’re also used so commonly, they even show up regularly in straightforward business deals." - Fast Company

The Set Used For The Banshees Of Inisherin Is Now A Real Pub, Open For Business

"The film set pub lay for a year-and-a-half in a yard on Achill Island - and when Luke offered to buy it from his brother-in-law, he was told he could have it for nothing. ... He already had a pub licence - ideal." - BBC

Tearing Down Old Buildings To Build New Ones Is So Pre-Climate Emergency

The second word in the three Rs of environmentalism is reuse for a reason, writes Rowan Moore of planned London construction. "The most sustainable building is the one that is already there, as the now-fashionable saying goes." - The Observer (UK)

The Difference Between Nationalism And Patriotism

The words nationalism and patriotism are sometimes used as synonyms, such as when Trump and his supporters describe his America First agenda. But many political scientists, including me, don’t typically see those two terms as equivalent – or even compatible. - The Conversation

Why The French Idea Of The “Good Life” Is Irrational

France has long been associated with a specific version of the good life, from haute cuisine to haute couture. In the global imagination, the French excel not only at putting quality before quantity, but also in distributing the finer things more widely than their Anglophone counterparts. - Aeon

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