In the 2000s, male artists routinely excavated the popular culture of their boyhood for imaginative repurposing in their art. Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay traces the lives of two men who become comic-book creators. In Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, two boys find a magic ring they use to take on superpowers; the title itself evokes the fictional fortress of Superman. Back then, I remember feeling that the equivalent was not possible for women artists, that the popular culture of American girlhood (horses, dolls, gymnastics) was still considered silly, juvenile—impossible to recuperate as adult art worth taking seriously.
Greta Gerwig seems at last a counterexample. Her entire career as a filmmaker has, in a sense, been a campaign to make art of girlhood materials. Her 2019 film, Little Women, remakes the 19th-century girlhood classic, rendering it freshly urgent for a 21st-century audience. (“I’ve been angry every day of my life,” Marmee, the saintly mother of the novel, says in Gerwig’s version.) Her directorial debut, Lady Bird (2017), captures the angst of a 17-year-old girl’s coming-of-age in all its granular reality.
And now here is the Barbie juggernaut. Barbie dominated the box office on its opening weekend, grossing a stunning $155 million: a post-pandemic high, and the biggest opening for any feature film directed by a woman. Grown-up art about girlhood really can be an economic and cultural powerhouse. In the past week, women I barely know and women I have known for years have texted me their excitement about the film—and then shared their response, which has been in many cases the same: They loved watching the film, and yet more than one felt oddly disappointed by it.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
As soon as I sit down to write, I feel compelled to scrub my bathtub and reorganize my filing cabinet — the most tedious chores suddenly become more appealing than the task at hand. Writing can feel so daunting that we’ve invented the term writer’s block to describe the unique sensation of its challenge, and we debate whether the ability to write well is learned or simply innate. The work requires long stretches of intense focus and undivided attention, and doing it well usually involves a prolonged process of revision. For many of us, writing feels like one of the most burdensome activities we can do.
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT offer the seductive possibility that we can optimize this laborious process. But while it can clearly optimize the time and effort of writing, ChatGPT cannot necessarily optimize writing quality. The program produces highly competent prose that usually passes as human-generated, but so far, the quality of its writing — beyond the novelty of being authored by an algorithm — is mostly unremarkable.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach writing, the common sentiment among faculty is: “Sure, ChatGPT can write — but it can’t write well.” Some professors caution students against using the tool by appealing to their egos: “You could use AI to cheat on your essay, but do you really want a C+?”
Read the rest of this article at: Noema
On weekdays, between homeschooling her two children, Michelle Curtis logs on to her computer to squeeze in a few hours of work. Her screen flashes with Google Search results, the writings of a Google chatbot, and the outputs of other algorithms, and she has a few minutes to respond to each—judging the usefulness of the blue links she’s been provided, checking the accuracy of an AI’s description of a praying mantis, or deciding which of two chatbot-written birthday poems is better. She never knows what she will have to assess in advance, and for the AI-related tasks, which have formed the bulk of her work since February, she says she has little guidance and not enough time to do a thorough job.
Curtis is an AI rater. She works for the data company Appen, which is subcontracted by Google to evaluate the outputs of the tech giant’s AI products and search algorithm. Countless people do similar work around the world for Google; the ChatGPT-maker, OpenAI; and other tech firms. Their human feedback plays a crucial role in developing chatbots, search engines, social-media feeds, and targeted-advertising systems—the most important parts of the digital economy.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
Subomi Mabogunje fell for Nkechi Egonu within hours of meeting her in 2004, in his hometown of Ijebu- Ode, a trading hub in southwest Nigeria. They worked at a state-run broadcast TV station, thrown together by the National Youth Service Corps. He was speechless on the day Nkechi first walked into work. While Subomi was thin and bespectacled, she was petite and zaftig, with her hair in a ballerina bun, and coldly immune to the stares that trailed her across the office. Her swaggering personality was also the opposite of his reserved one; she was outspoken in the station’s weekly news meeting, and top brass quickly promoted her to program presenter. She was the most exciting person, Subomi felt, who had ever walked into his hometown.
He found the courage to speak to Nkechi one weekend when they were assigned to do community service, clearing overgrown grasses near a government building. Subomi went, despite his habitual avoidance of strenuous physical activity. “You’re too good for this kind of work, ehe?” Nkechi teased, furrowing her brows. “Locals’ discount,” he joked, and she laughed. With his hollow cheekbones, frail body, and elongated fingers, he was clearly what some uncharitable onlookers would call a “sickler”— one of up to six million people in Nigeria with sickle cell disease, a group of inherited blood disorders that turn red blood cells from soft discs into rigid crescents, frequently leading to blood clots that can cause pain episodes, called “crises,” and serious complications in most major organs. But Nkechi never shied away from him. A few days later, the office’s radio transmitter stopped working, so Nkechi and Subomi had nothing to do except talk. After work, they made a beeline for a local dive bar housed in a car wash. Within a few weeks, they were inseparable.
Read the rest of this article at: Harper’s Magazine
When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. Helpfully, there was a song whose lyrics consisted precisely of this aesthetic theory: “Input Output.”
Input, output,
What goes in is what comes out.
Input, output,
That is what it’s all about.
Input, output,
Your mind is a computer whose
Input, output daily you must choose.
The search for the “inputs” of secular artwork sometimes took a paranoid form—such as the belief in subliminal messages recorded in reverse, or in isolated frames from Lion King where smoke allegedly forms the word sex. Most often, however, the analysis was more direct. Portraying a behavior or describing a belief, unless accompanied immediately by a clear negative judgment, is an endorsement and a recommendation, and people who consume such messages will become more likely to behave and believe in that way.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
