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Hubris. One would think that a married man smart enough to start up and operate his own tech company was also smart enough to know that you don't take your girlfriend to a public concert where the equipment includes a jumbotron -- unless you want to get caught on the big camera with your arms around said girlfriend. Ah, but for Andy Bryon, CEO of A company called Astronomer, and also maybe his wife, Wednesday was a night that will live in infamy. New York Times link. ~~~

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts.

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

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Saturday

Dec042010

Grumpy Old Bigot

Maureen Dowd says Grumpy McCain is "erratic and intolerant." Since the New York Times moderators chose to axe my comment again, you can read it here, modified to return it to its Times-unfriendly form. I home in on an issue Dowd overlooks in her criticism of McCain's opposition to repeal of DADT:

For all of McCain’s supposed advocacy for bending to the whims of the rank-and-file soldiers, for all of his sudden interest in “troop morale,” for all of his concern about the dangers of initiating change in wartime -- which obviously is a time the military must make changes – for all of his knocking the leadership abilities of Adm. Mullen, for all of his questioning of the wisdom of the civilian Secretary of Defense Gates, he sure doesn’t seem to care much about national security.

Oh, down in Arizona, he wants us to “build the danged fence” to keep out ferriners who are driving around purposely causing accidents when they’re not decapitating Americans & burying their heads in the Arizona desert. But if any of the National Guard who are patrolling the Arizona-Mexico border are gay, they’d better keep quiet about it. Wonder how the morale of gay soldiers is doing? Ah, well, McCain doesn’t care about that.

As Daniel Drezner wrote in Foreign Policy, "The rigorous enforcement of DADT is preventing competent and patriotic soldiers from serving their country, particularly in high-demand positions like, say, Arabic translators.... I just want to know why the ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services committee [i.e., McCain] is throwing national security, civilian control of the military, and the hierarchical chain of command under the f**king bus."

I never liked the “old” John McCain. I thought his phony “maverick” status, the one he denied during the 2010 campaign, was just evidence he was an unprincipled loose cannon. But the new, reconstituted John McCain is not just a blind old bigot; he poses a continuing threat to national security.

(You can read my comment on Frank Rich's column here. It's #5. The other comments on this page are very good.)

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