REALITYCHEX.COM - Constant Comments - The Commentariat -- November 2

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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.”

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. -- Magna Carta ~~~

~~~ New York Times: “Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946. That is about to change. Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties. It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.... A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.... First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore. He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.”

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Monday

Nov012010

The Commentariat -- November 2

... You've probably already seen the 15-second spot above, urging us to vote. The DNC, Ben Smith writes, is "blanketing the web with $2.5 million worth of online ads -- I think the largest online ad buy anyone has made this cycle."

New York Times reporters are taking questions about the election now, some of which they will answer beginning at about noon ET Tuesday.

Politico has the latest independent polling data for house races as well as for key Senate & gubernatorial races.

Nate Silver has up-to-date election result forecasts here.

The major papers' front-page election-day observations: New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Wall Street Journal. AND from the wire services: Associated Press and Reuters.

"The War the Election Forgot." Faye Fiore & Mark Barabak of the Los Angeles Times: "In this turbulent election season — amid the talk of 'tea parties' and the economy and President Obama's approval rating and the fight to control Congress and bailouts and deficits and fear and anger — there is little mention of Afghanistan or Iraq."

Dana Milbank riffs on professional election prognosticators. Milbank thinks the best bet is to wait for the actual results.

On the Hill, there's this sense that there are three [political] parties, the president, Democrats in Congress and Republicans in Congress. -- House Democratic political strategist, a/k/a Anonymous ...

** ... Peter Wallsten & Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal: "Some high-level Democrats are calling for President Barack Obama to remake his [communications team] or even fire top advisers.... Some Democrats were so unhappy with the White House [strategy] meetings, they started their own. Among the complaints: Mr. Obama conveyed an incoherent message that didn't express what Democrats would do over the next two years if they retain power; he focused more on his own image than helping Democratic candidates; and the White House picked the wrong battle when it attacked Republicans for using 'outside' money to pay for campaigns, an issue disconnected from voters' real-world anxieties."

AP: "Republicans outperformed Democrats getting to the polls in Nevada, a promising sign for Republican tea party favorite Sharron Angle in her dead-heat race with Majority Leader Harry Reid, figures showed Monday. Final tallies for two weeks of in-person voting and a preliminary count of mail-in ballots for the state's two most populous counties, Clark and Washoe, gave Democrats about a 9,000-voter edge. The slim margin stands out because Democrats hold a 60,000-voter edge in statewide registration." ...

Screenshot from Angle's "Amnesty Game" page.More last-minute hilarity from Amanda Terkel of the Huffington Post: "Toymaker Hasbro has sent Sharron Angle's Senate campaign a cease and desist letter, saying the Nevada Republican never received permission to use the rights to Monopoly for its "Harry Reid Amnesty Game" website." As of 10:45 am ET, the Angle site was still up.

... Meanwhile, in nearby Colorado, on the eve of the election Sarah Palin endorses xenophobic loon Tom Tancredo for governor.

Campus Progress gives us a reason to vote (this is a spoof on a conservative ad that YouTube took down because of copyright violation claims):

Michael Kinsley in Politico: "This conceit that we’re the greatest country ever may be self-immolating. If people believe it’s true, they won’t do what’s necessary to make it true."

"Young Republicans with axes! New York firemen run amok!" Adam Goodheart, in a New York Times op-ed: You think this election cycle is characterized by a lack of civility? "Welcome to election week, 1860"!

Absurdity Is Reality. On one of Krugman's posts some weeks back, I hypothesized, mostly in jest, that tea partiers who railed against President Obama's "Keynesian economics" were really expressing their opposition to his "Kenyan economics." Maybe tea partiers are smarter than the people who rallied for sanity last Saturday. In any event, watch this video of Andy Cobb of Second City interviewing folks who attended the Rally to Restore Sanity:

Bob Herbert: "... political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of the University of California, Berkeley, argue persuasively that the economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich." ...

... I think my pal Karen Garcia has made the smartest observation of the day in her comment (#6) on Herbert's column:

We're finally beginning to realize that the two-party system - indeed, the whole three-part government system of checks and balances - has collapsed into itself to form one plutocratic whole.

The corporations run the executive branch, the legislative branch and now the judicial branch with the Citizens United case - which has given corporations their own human rights status. Even the so-called "fourth estate" of a free press has begun to be subsumed by the propaganda machine of News Corp and other media conglomerates. -- Karen Garcia

Darrin Bell finds a couple of guys who agree to disagree. Is this what Jon Stewart had in mind?

Click image to enlarge.

ABC News Gets Its Just Desserts. Greg Sargent. "Andrew Breitbart ... is now accusing the network of lying about whether they had tapped him to do on-air election night analysis. ABC News ... adamantly denied Breitbart's latest attack. But it appears he will still have some kind of role with ABC's coverage. This is worth noting, because it shows how insane it is for any serious news organization to play footsie with this guy." ...

... Eric Boehlert of Media Matters remarks that ABC News execs & Breitbart are feuding over the meaning of their e-mailed correspondence. Boehlert asks, "If ABC doesn't think Breitbart can read emails, why do they want him to comment on Tuesday night's election results?"

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