Author of Sheila Says We're Weird and Defenders of Dirt. Promoting creativity, craft, cooperatives, and communities of care. I believe ideas can inform and inspire positive actions.
"I think, that we should have the luxury of observing one object slowly. I hope, that my sculptures could be such soul-resting objects." Kinga Földi, fiber artist Last week, I shared an essay by L.M. Sacasas, entitled "Lonely Surfaces: On AI-generated Images." I
"I suppose, then, that these are the sorts of questions I have for us just now as we navigate the flood of machine-generated media: How will AI-generated images train our vision? What habit of attention does it encourage? What modes of engagement do they sustain?" L.
How much does AI training move in two directions, with the models using our output for their training, while AI's output is, in turn, also training our perceptions? Can we act to create results that are not simply superficial? I agree with AI ethicist and philosopher Shannon Vallor
"Still, AI doesn't have to help us save the world to be a socially legitimate technology. As long as the objectives and outputs of AI models are transparent and contestable, their benefits, costs, and risks justly distributed, and their environmental footprints justifiable, AI systems have a place
In my last post about avoiding technologic overreach, I introduced ethics and philosophy professor Shannon Vallor's 2024 book, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. I also added to some lines of questioning I'd broached in my November 7
I need to go outside. To remind myself of the sky. To admire clouds and trees, their shapes and surfaces, and to think about how they come to be. I need to walk. To feel my muscles moving in relation to earth and air, and to sense the rhythms of
Well, we're in month eleven now, and it doesn't get easier, does it? How are you coping? What's helping you get through your week? What do you need help with? These essays have been helping me structure and track my experience of this time.
"I know that I will always be haunted by the larger, vaguely remembered reality of the circumstances surrounding my childhood" George Takei In How the State Creates Enemies (Post #13, June 13) I discussed They Called Us Enemy, George Takei's graphic memoir as I wrote about
"The concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands is arguably the single greatest threat to social and personal well-being. And the most effective remedy to this is the equalization of wealth and power by extending democracy in our economies. Not by a top down process of government command
"Regardless of how we choose to grieve or cultivate hope, we know that we are living in disastrous times and that we will need one another. We are wading through hell and high water, tasked with dreaming new worlds into being while the worlds we have known fall down
"America's free speech tradition is predicated on the idea that fact and falsehood will meet in the marketplace of ideas, that both will be heard, and that good ideas will overcome the bad. However, our current communication ecosystem actively stymies that process. We have not a public
"Now, as the propaganda machine and the rumor mill have violently smashed together like two ancient galaxies, something fiery and perilous has emerged. And what has emerged is still growing, even as we struggle to accurately define it" (41). Renée DiResta In my post of May 9, "