opinion

Opinion: AI Art in Blogs.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Years ago, I saw ‘This Space Intentionally Left Blank’ in a technical document in a company, and I laughed, because the sentence destroyed the ‘blankness’ of the page.

I don’t know where it came from, but I dutifully used it in that company when I wrote technical documentation, adding, “, with the exception of this sentence.” I do hope those documents still have it. The documentation was dry reading despite my best efforts.

I bring this up because some artists on Mastodon have been very vocally negative about the use of AI art in blog posts. I do not disagree with them, but I use AI art on my blog posts here and on KnowProSE.com and I also do want to support artists, as I would like artists to support writers. Writers are artists with words, after all, and with so much AI generated content, it’s a mess for anyone with an iota of creativity involved.

Having your work sucked into the intake manifold of a generative AI to be vomited out so that another company makes money from what they effectively stole is… dehumanizing to creative people. Effectively, those that do this and don’t compensate the people who created stuff in the first place are just taking their stuff and acting like they don’t matter.

There has been some criticism of using AI generated imagery in blog posts, and I think that’s appropriate – despite me using it. The reason I got into digital photography decades ago was so that I could have my own images. Over the years, I talked with some really great digital artists and gotten permission here and there to use their images – and sometimes I have, and sometimes by the time I got the permission the moment had passed.

When you have an idea in the moment, at the speed of blog, waiting for permission can be tiresome.

These days, a used image will still likely get stuck in the intake manifold of some generative AI anyway. There are things you can do to keep AI bots that follow ‘rules’ at bay, but that only works if the corporations respect boundaries and if you follow the history of AI with copyright lawsuits, you’ll find that the corporations involved are not very good at respecting boundaries. It’s not as simple as putting up a ‘Do Not Scrape’ sign on a website.

So, what to do? I side with the artists, but images help hold attention spans, and I am not an artist. If I use someone’s work without permission, I’m a thief – and I put their works at risk of getting sucked into the intake manifold of an AI.

I could go without using images completely, but people with short attention spans – the average time now is 47 seconds – should be encouraged to read longer if the topic is interesting enough – but “TL;DR” is a thing now.

So yes, I use AI generated images because at the least they can be topical and at worst they are terrible, get sucked into a generative AI intake manifold and make generative AI worse for it, which works to the advantage of digital artists who can do amazing things.

Some people will be angry about this. I can’t help that. I don’t use generative AI for writing other than for research and even then carefully so. I fully support people’s works not getting vomited out of a generative AI, but that involves a much larger discussion regarding the history of humanity and the works that we build upon.

How To Be Unpopular.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Information, opinions, misinformation and misinformed and irrational opinions flood us every day and it seems to be accelerating. When I wrote about the lack of comprehensive human rebuttal about Noam Chomsky’s take on AI, it accidentally seeded this post because it’s about something we just don’t seem to have the opportunity to do much of anymore.

Reflect. Consider. Think things through.

I was looking through Facebook reels as I unfortunately do, and looking at the comments on them. There’s a lot of value signaling going on about videos that don’t give the greater contexts of the situation. It’s amazing, really, how because of that value signaling people go about constructing strong opinions without rationale. In turn, people want views because if you don’t have views, what’s the point of doing it?

For me, the point of doing it would be to share good knowledge. We didn’t get where we are today as a society by not sharing good knowledge, but the signal to noise ratio has become… well, a noise to signal ratio. Add into that the up and coming role of artificial intelligence in the mix, with the US Presidential election coming up and the continued aggression of Russia against Ukraine, the tragic affair of Hamas and the state of Israel with a lot of humans in between… things aren’t going to be better soon.

It’s time to be unpopular. To think things through. To find the meat that is hidden in all this tasty, cholesterol-ridden fat presented to us because people want views, likes, shares, etc. It’s a good analogy, actually, because some people have more trouble with cholesterol than others. If I walked past a steak my cholesterol would increase, so I won’t tell you what I had for dinner last night.

Some people are more gullible than others. Some people are more irrational than others. We know this. We see this every day. I often make jokes about it, as I told a cashier a few days ago in a store, because it’s my way of coping with the gross stupidity that we see.

So how does one become unpopular? It’s pretty simple.

Worry about being wrong. Decide not to do something because you’re not sure the impact it will have. Humanity tends to gravitate to strong opinions, however wrong they are. Marketing tends to maximize that, and marketing has become a part of our lives. I see lots of videos and ‘hot takes’ on Dave Chapelle and Ricky Gervais, but they tend to take them out of context and beat them with an imposed context – and somehow, despite all of that, they are popular and no one stops to consider why. Why are these comedians still held in regard? Because they dared to be unpopular. They, and I dare say this, dare to be authentic, thoughtful, and funny despite how many people think that they are unpopular.

All too often people are too busy value signaling to think about whatever it is. They need to have an opinion before they watch that next video, read that next tweet (It’s Twitter, Elon, it always will be)…

Slow down. That’s how to be unpopular. Think things through before communicating about it. The world will not end if you don’t have an opinion right now.

Once upon a time, there was value in that.

I’ll let you in on a secret: There still is.

Here’s what to do: Watch something/read something. Find out more about it. Think about it in different contexts. Maybe then do something or say something if you think there is value, or maybe just don’t say anything until you do.

On Disagreement With Noam Chomsky’s Opinion On AI.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

Recently Noam Chomsky‘s opinion on AI as published in the New York Times has been making the rounds again, and the arguments against what he wrote are… aspiring to juvenile when it comes to the comments sections.

While he’s probably best known for his social activism, Chomsky is one of the founders of cognitive science and is by no means someone whose opinions should be dismissed lightly.

I disagreed with him on Ukraine and unless his opinion has changed I still do. He seemed to be focused on the quantity of life, whereas in listening to Ukrainian voices I heard them more concerned about their quality of life. “Life free or die” could summarize what I was hearing, with their option of being annexed in any way or form being something that didn’t seem like something they were willing to do. And why should they?

The point is that when you’re disagreeing with someone who has certainly demonstrated a high level of thinking, it should be at least at a similar level of thinking.

In that regard, searching for a rebuttal to his points was sad. The top result on a Google search was Jon Cronin’s asking ChatGPT what it thought about it.

The answer itself was evasive and went to it’s talking points like a politician. It glossed over much of what he said.

This rebuttal, written by a human and found much lower in search rankings, is guilty of pretty much the same thing by ignoring the points raised and starting off with, “but it’s good for the global economy…”

Which, amusingly, is sort of Chomsky’s point – that in pushing this advance in technology, which he did not deny, the chasing of the bottom line is somehow supposed to make up for a lot of rubbish.

That’s kind of what got us here, and where this is isn’t that palatable for everyone. He also pointed out the deficiencies.

His points are valid, whether liked or not, and true. This is why I wrote ‘A Tale of Two AIs‘. In Chomsky’s opinion piece, he’s discussing the reality, and in every rebuttal I have read so far which includes ChatGPT’s response posted on a LinkedIn page (people still use it to post stuff!) is about how AI is being marketed.

It’s not a disagreement. It’s just trying to talk over the reality of what these generative models actually are… so far.

That’s not debate.

A Good Result

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Back in the early 1980s, my father had one of his rare talks with me where I understood him. I wasn’t doing well in school, he didn’t understand why and I wasn’t certain why I should care other than my father being angry with me. He was always angry with me, so it wasn’t something I felt I could change anyway.

What he said was, “A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.”

There’s plenty of potential for each one of those sentences to be wrong, but what he was communicating was the responsibility. He was trying to explain to me that I was responsible for my own education. The grades were my fault, but I never had to work in school before then, and I’d fallen behind by a few years.

When people talk about teachers and students, I find myself hearing about poor parenting or bad teachers. Strangely, they never say both are the problem and that could actually be a part of the problem, but I digress.

All of that robs young students – children to teenagers. It robs them of the responsibility that they can take for what they learn, as well as the rewards that come with it beyond silly grades to pass silly tests to impress silly people.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where we have to impress silly people to get silly jobs which, in turn, allow us to earn income so that we might pay for our place on the planet.

We quite literally charge rent for a planet that doesn’t really belong to us, which we’re collectively only now beginning to consider that we might have to manage a bit better. To that end, people with pieces of paper roll out the alphabet behind their names.

If only that alphabet worked in our collective interests. In the name of paying our rent on a planet we don’t really own, we do a lot of strange things. We sell people stuff that they don’t need, things that generally are supposed to elevate the experience of being on the planet from trinkets to games.

We spend a lot of time teaching ways to earn a living to pay that rent. We don’t spend a lot of time teaching about how to learn, about how to progress as a species because we’re so caught up in our own worlds that we don’t really see the world around us.

The education system could help with that, but… if we want a good result and we consider the education system our teacher, maybe we need to consider that individually we are students.

A good student and a good teacher will give you a good result. A bad student and a bad teacher will give you a bad result. A bad student and a good teacher gives you a bad result. A good student and a bad teacher gives you a good result.

On Affirmative Action.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

This is necessarily a touchy subject and one that I generally haven’t written much about despite how interesting it is to me. It’s a polarizing issue, and when issues get polarized the people in the middle generally get pushed against a wall and shot.

I don’t like being shot, really, but I’ve stewed on it.

Here’s the thing. I’m a tribe of one. My genetics come from a lot of people from all over the world that were productively sexual. A read on my genetics will link me to Genghis Khan, as an example, and I’m not Mongolian by any stretch. When it comes to prejudice, I have known many and none were actually about who I am but who I looked like.

I have never been judged on my genetics.

I have always been judged based on appearance. When I went to college so many years ago, the financial aid office had stuff for people of African descent, Native American, and even for people of Hispanic descent (it was just beginning)… but there I was, a guy with a West Indian version of an East Indian surname whose genetics included a slave trader, indentured laborer, a famous artist… the list goes on. My genealogy is a history of the world in some regards. The financial office had nothing special for me because I wasn’t black enough or hispanic enough. Later on I would find I might have claimed hispanic because of the Portugese of my great great grandmother, but even that would have been a stretch.

Affirmative action never helped me. When asked what ‘race’ I was, I always said, “other”, and when asked to explain, I simply put, “None of the above”. Affirmative action to me was just a thing where some people got a step up on the ladder and I had to climb it myself from the ground. It never bothered me because it was rare for me to find someone who didn’t merit that step up and I never understood tearing someone down to get ahead. Yet in a way, and this may sound horrible to some who are grounded in decades of affirmative action… affirmative action does much the same.

And.

It was also arguably necessary because of a bunch of racist policies at the time, so the argument that it was necessary is not something I will ever argue against. I have seen racism, I have even experienced it as someone mistaken for one group or another.

And.

Re-evaluating it’s necessity now is something we should consider. The grounding of affirmative action has been that people deserve opportunity based on merit, and there were those not getting that opportunity despite having the merit because of racism – racism, manufactured from the stupid human concept of ‘race’ which has no scientific basis whatsoever. If you send someone a copy of your DNA and nothing else, they cannot guess what you look like… yet? Maybe in the future, but not in the conceivable future.

I read the interview with Edward Blum, and it was not what I expected. It echoed my own sentiments, which I have kept to myself because I lacked enough knowledge. Affirmative action is a big red button I simply did not want to push because I’ve never benefited from it, and I was also aware that race was an issue. I was reminded every time I was mistaken for Mexican, Puerto Rican or Cuban, depending on facial hair, and even that is not a race. Even Latino is not a race. The diversity of those groups is astounding.

Just like ‘white people’. What is called ‘white’ wasn’t always considered ‘white’. The Europeans brought with them their own stigmas to the United States, and the Irish and Italians as examples were not considered ‘white’. Jews are Middle Eastern in origin themselves, they’re not ‘white’, and nowadays when we talk about ‘white’ we’re talking about some mix of European ancestries – unless you go to far East from Europe and start getting to the confusing areas where Asian and European merged thanks largely to the Mongol Empire.

What we do know is that if you stick two different people together, they have sex and their children are neither and both at the same time while becoming… unique.

That said, I’d suggest a read of this interview with Blum, and do so with an open mind. Look at the points he makes, the rebuttals, and consider it. If anything, it’s fodder for discussion.

Bigotry based on ‘race’ will eventually get screwed out of society, of that I’m sure, but in the interim, the next decades are what we need to look toward. Affirmative action as it stands may need to be looked into, not because we want to make things unfair, but because we do honestly want to make things fair for everyone.

Including mixed up genetic soups like me who make no claim to the major minorities. The answer is not more systemic bigotry, it’s less, and we need to take a hard look at that.

Repetition: Trinidad and Tobago

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

Nothing To HideI don’t comment much on Trinidad and Tobago because there’s not really that much to comment about. It’s all the same thing over and over again. To write commentaries on most things is simply to repeat myself.

I hate repeating myself.

I hate repeating myself.

I hate repeating myself.

I hate… well, that’s my threshold. I can’t find myself doing it again.

There’s only one thing that’s worse than being wrong: It’s being right.

Reading B.C. Pires’s Thank God It’s Friday, I can’t help but wonder how he has handled this over the years. There are others who comment as well, and they too continue to repeat themselves – a litany of the ills, a litany of what could be changed, a chorus sung at one time only on paper and now more interestingly on the Internet.

Through the volume of share ideas and opinions on things in T&T, if you hit squelch the same solutions keep popping up. Emotional opinions, grounded in nothing more than how something is said or written, drive the rational underground into caverns where they shake their heads. Rum talk, all of it.

In this way, Trinidad and Tobago is the planet in microcosm.