Category: ideas

There is “a growing effort to generate art through a set of A.I. techniques that have only recently come of age. Called deep neural networks, these complex mathematical systems allow machines to learn specific behavior by analyzing vast amounts of data. By looking for common patterns in millions of bicycle photos, for instance, a neural network can learn to recognize a bike. This is how Facebook identifies faces in online photos, how Android phones recognize commands spoken into phones, and how Microsoft Skype translates one language into another. But these complex systems can also create art. By analyzing a set of songs, for instance, they can learn to build similar sounds.”

But, science says, it’s only good if you take the photos “for the right reasons.” That’s because “when you’re searching the visual field and trying to decide what to photograph, that volitional process of trying to capture a moment actually draws you into experiences.”

Basically, we shouldn’t understand the backstory behind evil forces, or we lose our sense of fear. “When filmmakers, writers and producers give us the tools to comprehend a monster, the monster becomes perceptible, and, in becoming perceptible, it becomes considerably less, well, monstrous.”

Uh, y’all, the system is capitalism, and that means that “the moral ballyhooing or furious condemnation of mainstream art and pop culture often seems undercut by the very fact that, presumably, the process by which most of these works were made will inevitably play into inequality-perpetuating systems in ways that have just as critical — and in some ways, a more direct and immediate — impact on the world as what we’re seeing onscreen.”

What people who own a nonprofit are doing at the border of Hamtramck and Detroit: “They’ve got eight open lots. They garden on a few of them, but that still leaves plenty of space for other stuff. And in this part of the city, there aren’t any playgrounds. So this summer, Lerman and some neighborhood artists started a free, week-long day camp.”

This is how film criticism changed forever: Kael “was on her way out the door at TNR when she penned a lengthy (roughly seven thousand words) essay on Bonnie and Clyde, which the magazine politely declined. Too long, they told her. Her agent, Robert Mills, reached out to William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker; they had published a more free-form Kael essay, “Movies on Television,” earlier that summer. Maybe he’d like to take a look?”

That’s the case, at least, in the U.K., according to a new report: “The systematic eradication of arts education in schools, sky-high drama school audition fees, chronic low pay and a lack of diversity behind the scenes are all contributing to a diversity crisis on our stages and screens.”

Reporter Jacob Brogan talks with researcher Janelle Shane – who created a neural network to tell knock-knock jokes, only to have it become fixated on the Cow With No Lips joke – about “what’s going on under the hood, what her creations might teach us, and why it’s so funny when neural networks go bad.”

“Copious research, from my lab and others, shows that faces and bodies alone do not communicate any specific emotion in any consistent manner. In addition, we now know that the brain doesn’t have separate processes for emotion and cognition, and therefore one cannot control the other. If these statements defy your common sense, I’m right there with you. But our experiences of emotion, no matter how compelling, don’t reflect the biology of what’s happening inside us. Our traditional understanding and practice of emotional intelligence badly needs a tuneup.”