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AI That Writes Prose And Poetry Is Getting Stronger (Uh-Oh)

“The more text to which an algorithm can be exposed, and the more complex you can make the algorithm, the better it performs. … The model that underpins [the AI software] GPT-3 boasts 175bn parameters, each of which can be individually tweaked — an order of magnitude larger than any of its predecessors. It was trained on the biggest set of text ever amassed, a mixture of books, Wikipedia and Common Crawl, a set of billions of pages of text scraped from every corner of the internet.” That means, alas, that GPT-3 has picked up some of the uglier material found in some of those corners. – The Economist

Reckoning With The Ugly Racist Origins Of Some Of American English’s Most Common Expressions

“‘Sold down the river.’ ‘Cakewalk.’ ‘Master and slave.’ American English is riddled with words and phrases with racist origins or undertones. Since the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and the flurry of protests his and other Black Americans’ deaths have inspired, a growing number of public and private institutions are reevaluating their reliance on language with racist connotations or history.” – The Boston Globe

Black Dancers Are ‘Reclaiming’ Richmond’s Robert E. Lee Monument

Here’s one instance from last month: “Standing at the base of the three-story pedestal supporting the Confederate general’s likeness, [Janine] Bell, the artistic director of Elegba Folklore Society, welcomed a small sea of drummers, dancers and bystanders banging on plastic buckets to an event she called the Reclamation Drum Circle. ‘We are not playing today,’ she said, and invited all present to move and sway to the music. And so began an extended jam session at a park long considered a whites-only space.” – The New York Times

Reporter At DC’s WAMU Harassed Female Colleagues For Years — And Kept His Job After Two Final Warnings

Martin Di Caro, an award-winning transportation correspondent at Washington’s public radio news station from 2012 to 2017, was outrageous enough in hitting on junior employees at WAMU, local transportation advocates, and even staffers at the City Council and Metro that seemingly every woman in DC’s transport community had “a Martin story.” Many of those women are now speaking out. (And there are now calls at WAMU for the resignation of general manager JJ Yore for having kept Di Caro on staff for so long.) – DCist

Stop Panicking Over The Age Of Classical Audiences, Says NY Times Chief Critic

Anthony Tommasini: “Elements of dismaying ageism run through the chronic bemoaning over the graying of classical and opera audiences, something that bothered me even before I entered this older demographic myself. … But images and television broadcasts make plain that even back in the 1960s, when Leonard Bernstein was galvanizing the Philharmonic and attracting young people like me to his concerts, audiences were dominated by those in their 50s and older. Yet, year after year, devoted older fans continued to appear.” – The New York Times

Staffers At Philadelphia Museum Of Art Vote Overwhelmingly To Unionize

The vote tally was 181 to 22. “While organizers said there were many reasons behind the union drive, complaints against two Art Museum supervisors provided the movement with energy. Organizers hoped that union representation would ’empower staff in the face of incidents of harassment and discrimination like those publicized in January of this year.'” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

What’s The Definition Of ‘Museum’? The International Council Of Museums Is Tearing Itself Up Over That Question

“In recent months, several people working on the committee to revise the body’s definition of what a museum is have resigned, and there have been accusations of ‘back-alley political games.’ The Council’s president has also quit her post. For some, these disagreements reflect a wider split in the museum world about whether such institutions should be places that exhibit and research artifacts, or ones that actively engage with political and social issues.” – The New York Times

Mao Zedong’s Home Province Is Now The Hotbed Of Chinese Commercial TV

“Making waves is what Hunan Broadcasting System does best. … That is striking for an outfit run by the government of a province that is better known as China’s largest producer of rice and the birthplace of Mao Zedong — ‘red tourism’ centred on Mao’s formative haunts draws devotees of the chairman from around the country. But Changsha, the provincial capital, has become a font of China’s popular culture. It is home to over 12,000 companies involved in creating it. … At their heart in Hunan is a broadcaster with a knack for cranking out programmes that are watched throughout China.” – The Economist