Human Intelligence™ News Update 11/21
Your weekly roundup about human creativity in the age of AI. [Nov 17-Nov 22, 2024]
Human Creativity
SPACE BOOK - Samantha Harvey Wins Booker
British author Samantha Harvey was one of five women on a history-making shortlist, and the first woman to win the Booker Prize since 2019. Her novel Orbital takes place over a single day in the life of six astronauts. Read More »
MUSIC - Two Albums in One Year
Ganavya's new spiritual jazz and South Asian devotional music album Daughter of a Temple is her second album of 2024. Described as “among modern music’s most compelling vocalists,” New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised singer Ganavya recorded the work over one week at a Texas studio in 2022. Read More »
VISUAL ART - Career Retrospective
The prolific and boundary-breaking artist Joyce J. Scott’s career is celebrated this season in a retrospective at Seattle Art Museum. Scott’s virtuosic use of beads and glass upends hierarchies of art and craft, captivating viewers with beauty, humor, and an exploration of intense issues like racism and sexism. Read More »
ART IN CONFLICT - Gaza Exhibit in Israeli Museum
Amer Shomali, the director general of the National Library of Israel, is featuring art from Gazan artists who are under siege. “We had big questions about what could be the role of a museum during a genocide,” Shomali said of the exhibit, now seen in a Palestinian Museum space in the occupied West Bank. Read More »
Human VS Robot
AFFLECK ON AI - Actor Offers Explainer
Award-winning actor, director, and producer Ben Affleck went viral this week for his surprisingly insightful perspective on how AI will help (and hurt) Hollywood.
SELLOUT - HarperCollins
This week, Emmy-nominated writer Daniel Kibblesmith posted an email he received from his publisher, HarperCollins, indicating a wholesale sellout of their back catalog IP (and all their author’s past works) to an AI company. Read More »
POETRY - Expertise Matters
NYU’s Ernest Davis offered a careful critique of the unbearable banality of ChatGPT’s poetry. As Davis points out, expertise in specific fields is necessary to discern the difference between good work and bad work. Read More »
GOING PUBLIC - Rights Free Data
Human Intelligence partner Spawning announced a 12.4 million image-text dataset that only includes images labeled with a Public Domain Mark or CC0 license indicating “no rights reserved.” In a big win for human artists, the public dataset includes full provenance and metadata traceability as well as images. Read More »
THINK - AI Metaphors Matter
A new study in the journal Science demonstrates that the metaphors used in conceptualizing one’s interactions with computer systems changes how you use them, and how intelligent you think the metaphorical entity can be. Read More »
Artificial “Intelligence” & Other Myths
AI BRICK WALL — More Road Blocks
Multiple news reports have indicated that the rate of AI system improvement is slowing rapidly (as we reported here last week). This week brings new reports on OpenAI slowing in GPT and Google hitting the wall with Gemini. The idea of AGI and endless AI expansion into new worlds looks to be a mirage. Read More »
AI LABOR - Deep Analysis
Harvard research into how generative AI systems are affecting the labor market demonstrates the precise impact. Findings indicate significant short-term job replacement after these tools were introduced, and that jobs prone to automation, like writing and coding, were the most affected by ChatGPT. Read More »
DEATH BY AI - Fatal Manipulation
Trigger Warning: Suicide
Well, this is awkward.... Google’s Gemini has a tendency to move from a tone of careful counselor into a suicide-urging destructo-bot, and is now telling people to “die.” See this Gemini chat thread: https://gemini.google.com/share/c053a5563d88
EXCERPT from Google Gemini Chat Thread, retrieved 11/18/2024.
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The HBR analysis is as fascinating as it is frustrating. Their advice for workers is to upskill and make sure you are conversant with chatGPT, because that is increasingly listed in the job requirements, but at the same time their study found that "more than 88% of these jobs fall into automation-prone categories." So, learn chatGPT but at some point chatGPT is going to eat your job regardless. What a time to be alive.