“Did you see the notes he put on Canvas?” she wrote, referring to the university’s software platform for hosting course materials. “He made it with ChatGPT.”
“OMG Stop,” the classmate responded. “What the hell?”
Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings.
I’ve used AI two meaningful times:
To remember the name and director of House of the Devil. It hallucinated multiple movies before producing the correct answer.
To quickly build an excel formula to drop the lowest three values. It overheated my laptop cause it was wrong.
It’s a bit too long, a tight 90 movie here would’ve been perfect. Regardless it’s a solid weekend movie playing on tv and you watch it just because it’s on kind of film.
The Gen Z lifestyle subsidy isn’t entirely like its Millennial predecessor. Uber was appealing because using an app to instantly summon a car is much easier than chasing down a cab. Ride-hailing apps were destructive for the taxi business, but for most users, they were just convenient. Today’s chatbots also sell convenience by expediting essay writing and meal planning, but the technology’s impact could be even more destabilizing. College students currently signing up for free ChatGPT Plus ahead of finals season might be taking exams intended to prepare them for jobs that the very same AI companies suggest will soon evaporate.
“We didn’t use to have to decide if our students were human, they were all people. But now there’s this skepticism because a growing number of the people we’re teaching are not real. We’re having to have these conversations with students, like, ‘Are you real? Is your work real?’” Maag said. “It’s really complicated, the relationship between the teacher and the student in almost like a fundamental way.”
On TikTok and YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, paranoia circulates freely because it seems easier to indulge in a smaller, more private version of reality with fellow travelers than to come to a shared consensus on why everyday life feels so awful. There is a banal truth in what conspiracy theories offer to their adherents on these platforms: They arise from the powerlessness to enact change in life on a collective or individual level, and what emerges, then, is a feverish hunt for explanations.
As large corporations and algorithms tighten their grip to a clenched fist, I think we’re long past due for a second DIY Media Renaissance. But in order for that to happen, we first need to change our habits and expectations around media consumption—starting with deprogramming this idea that media is something that should be unlimited and available at all times through a digital faucet.
This is the musical version of Crash. It's a French guy using any number of stereotypes and tropes in the hopes of making some kind of enlightened movie. But every single time they try to address something serious it breaks out into some of the worst musical numbers I've ever heard. The fact that Karla Sofía Gascón had really bad tweets is actually pretty fitting for this movie.
Find something that treats trans-parenthood with some respect or find a film on cartel violence done by a Mexican director with Mexican actors.
Zoe Saldaña is good in it, but even she has to undermine her part with absolutely ridiculous musical numbers.
Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.
“Tribal Nations, Nobel Peace laureates, former law enforcement officials (including the former U.S. Attorney whose office oversaw Mr. Peltier’s prosecution and appeal), dozens of lawmakers, and human rights organizations strongly support granting Mr. Peltier clemency, citing his advanced age, illnesses, his close ties to and leadership in the Native American community, and the substantial length of time he has already spent in prison.”
