The sun has been shining again today but the temperature around here was -3° at 9.00 this morning. Fortunately, because it’s not rained most pavements are reasonably free of ice so running was not a problem. I missed out the path round by duck-ponds. We walked there yesterday afternoon and had to pick our way carefully to avoid some serious icy patches. The lane down to the duck-ponds obviously doesn’t get gritted.
It’s been a very good day to be out and about, even into the afternon as the sun prepared to go over the hill, so long as you were wrapped up. The weathermen keep telling us some warm (or at least warmer) air is moving in. It has clearly not reached out bit of the UK yet. We shall see.
I was reading about place names. According to this article the UK abounds with places whose names lend themselves to often filthy interpretations. There’s a place called Twatt which has removed its roadside nameplate because visitors kept stealing it. Now they have a souvenir shop where you can buy old photos of name plates of former years. Twatt is really a corruption of Thwaite, which means village. There you go.
I’ve been hearing quite a lot about artificial intelligence this week.
Apparently Nick Cave has been getting hot under the collar. Someone sent him some lyrics written “in the style of Nick Cave” by the ChatGPT AI system. He wasn’t impressed:
“With all the love and respect in the world, this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human, and, well, I don’t much like it.”
It’s understandable, I suppose. If you’re a singer -songwriter you expect songs to have meaning, to reflect a felt experience. And maybe A.I. Can go through the motions, follow the ideas and methodology but not have that deep feeling. It’s perhaps not unlike the difference between a bunch of friends who make music together and a bunch of people selected almost at random to become a manufactured boy-band or girl-band
It’s not just music either. An A.I programme called Dall-E has been used to produce works of art in the style of Rothko, Manet and others. These were then shown to experts, art historians and the like to see if they could spot the fakes. The results were mixed.
It brings us back to the question: what is a work of art? If you stop your toddler from daubing paint on paper at the moment when to your eyes it actually looks beautiful - rather than letting him/her decide when to stop turning it into a greyish-black mess - is the result a work of art? Or a happy accident? Does true “art” need conscious thought?
And does A.I. have conscious thought?
But might it not be used to produce masterpieces that the man in the street can afford to hang in his living room? Or will someone find a way to make even A.I. work unaffordable?
Just a little conundrum!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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