Peter Biles

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American Beauty and the Power of Media

_{A scene from the 1999 film on finding beauty in the mundane}_{Peter Biles
March 4, 2024}

For media forms to be effective, should they privilege the ear or the eye? Can visual media artistically imbue the aural?

Google Gemini Presents a Past That Never Happened

_{You can't trust a bot to give you a history lesson, turns out.}_{Peter Biles
February 29, 2024}

Walter Kirn tweeted recently: "Gemini AI is inventing damaging stories about people and figures I know. It is an automated false-witness weapon."

A Canticle for Leibowitz, a Canticle of Speculative Warning

_{A 1959 novel's speculation of nuclear fallout is yet a story of hope.}_{Peter Biles
February 21, 2024}

This past year seems to have been the year of the atomic bomb, at least in what I’ve read and watched. I started 2023 by reading The Passenger and Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy, a pair of novels that consistently alludes to Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer arrived a few months later in July, sobering audiences worldwide and reinvigorating public interest in the godlike power these brilliant scientists had unleashed on the world. Most recently, I read the 1959 dystopian novel by Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz, a speculative tale about nuclear holocaust and the perennial human tendency for self-destruction. What a cheery year it’s been! Maybe I’ll switch things up and read Anne of Green Gables as a heart warmer. …

Full-Time: Why We Need More Creative Productivity, Not Less

_{A new book shows how we lost the meaning of work and the ways we can get back on track.}_{Peter Biles
February 19, 2024}

Bahnsen subscribes to the classical view of economics that prizes production over consumption.

Kurt Gödel’s “Incompleteness Theorem”

_{For Kurt Gödel, mathematics pointed to a remarkable world of transcendent order and meaning}_{Peter Biles
February 16, 2024}

Gödel saw the beauty of numbers and associated them with a transcendent order.

Will You Be My Valentine, Chatbot?

_{It is a tragedy indeed when our loneliness as a culture has developed so far that many people see chatbot companions as one of the only way forward.}_{Peter Biles
February 14, 2024}

Recent studies indicate that members of Gen Z are dividing politically according to sex, with men leaning more conservative and women going more liberal.

The “Stay Human” Movement

_{How we can maintain human exceptionalism in an automated age}_{Peter Biles
February 12, 2024}

The call to stay human isn't just in retaliation to AI. It is more an attempt to say "no" to instant gratification.

Taylor Swift and the Looming Threat of Deepfakes

_{According to an attorney, Swift should probably go after the AI companies themselves if she decides to sue.}_{Peter Biles
February 9, 2024}

The country-turned-pop star Taylor Swift has commanded headlines for well over a year now with her record-breaking “Eras Tour” as well as her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Travis Kelce. Unfortunately, her image has also made the rounds in AI engines. Deepfake pornography is already an emerging problem, but its seriousness resurfaced when explicit, AI-generated images of Taylor Swift went viral in late January. Only ten states currently have laws prohibiting deepfake pornography, but legislation is underway to ban it in several others, including Swift’s home state, Tennessee. According to attorney Carrie Goldberg, if Swift were to sue anyone, it would probably have to be focused on the AI companies themselves. USA Today reports, It’s possible …

The Apple Vision Pro is Here

_{What exactly is the point of this new, painfully expensive piece of gadgetry?}_{Peter Biles
February 6, 2024}

Given what we've seen so far, it seems like this new release from one of the world's foremost technology companies is more of a fancy toy than a genuine tool.

Japanese Novelist Who Won Prestigious Literary Award Unabashedly Used ChatGPT

_{Meanwhile, authors in the United States are waging war against AI for copyright violation}_{Peter Biles
February 1, 2024}

While stylistically, the prose AI "created" for Karan's novel might be "flawless," it lacks credibility because it lacks the human voice.

Tech Billionaires and Their Science Fiction Dreams

_{They're mistaking cautionary tales for instruction manuals.}_{Peter Biles
January 23, 2024}

Tech investors and entrepreneurs are self-fulfilling old prophecies. One also thinks of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, a dystopian classic published in 1953.

Napster, Spotify, and AI: How Will AI Escape Copyright Woes?

_{Robert J. Marks on AI and learning from past copyright cases.}_{Peter Biles
January 19, 2024}

Copyright lawsuits are abounding against generative AI. Since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, various companies, artists, and writers have raised concerns over AI’s plagiaristic tendencies. Robert J. Marks, host of the Mind Matters podcast, has the story over at Newsmax. Marks recalls the debacle of Napster, a music streaming service that provided music for “free” without payment to the artists. Not surprisingly, it was soon shut down. So how will it fare with generative AI? What’s the solution to all the impending legal woes in the realm of AI? Marks writes, Today’s Spotify keeps automatic records of song frequency and, from subscriber’s payments, distributes royalties accordingly. Similar methods could be applied to compensate content …

The Transhumanist Delusion of the Nazis

_{"All the Light We Cannot See" shows what can happen when the delusions of transhumanism join forces with an appalling ideology.}_{Peter Biles
January 16, 2024}

The Nazis were keen on creating a superhuman race with unsurpassable physical, intellectual, and (ironically) moral qualities.

Does ChatGPT Depend on Copyright Violation to Function?

_{Without copyrighted material, ChatGPT has slim pickings to go on.}_{Peter Biles
January 10, 2024}

ChatGPT, the large language model developed by OpenAI, might seem like it generates novel content, but of course we know that it partakes in what’s generally called “scraping.” It takes pre-existing material on the Internet in response to the prompt a human user inserts. Not surprisingly, the folks who put things on the Internet for a living, like writers and artists, haven’t taken so kindly to AI’s online sleuthing. In fact, a number of artists, writers (including George R. R. Martin, Jonathan Franzen, and John Grisham) and even news outlets have sued OpenAI over copyright infringement allegations. What’s fascinating, though, is that OpenAI hasn’t tried to dodge the allegation but freely admits that ChatGPT depends on copyrighted material to …