From Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal about the abysmal architecture of American embassies:
The new American embassy in Maputo (Mozambique) ... [has] a facade that looks as if a giant Parmesan cheese is expected to fall from the sky at any moment and will need grating as it lands.
The offending building (click the image for a larger view from the US State Department's Web facilities):
One can only cringe in sympathy with Mr. Dalrymple . . .
Peter
We know artificial intelligence (AI) can be a very useful tool for good. Sadly, it can be used for evil as well.
Police have launched a criminal investigation into an officer accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to "create evidential material in a number of cases".
The Derbyshire Police officer has been removed from front-line duties, pending the outcome of the investigation, the force said.
The officer is alleged to have perverted the course of justice, but no arrests have been made, police added.
A Crown Prosecution Service spokesperson said they were working with police, adding: "We are engaging with defence teams and the courts in appropriate cases."
There's more at the link.
I hadn't given this enough consideration, but thinking about it, it's potentially a very serious problem. Perverting the course of justice is bad enough, but think about how a group with a particular ideology can fabricate "evidence" to persuade their government to act in a certain way towards another country? The neocon outrage at President Trump's announcement of a deal with Iran is a good example. What if the outspoken pro-war ideologues could concoct their own evidence to "show" that the deal is a lousy one, and should be abandoned? What if they could "create" evidence to persuade Iran to start hostilities again, because it was convinced America was about to attack it again?
This adds a very worrying dimension to AI. It will probably be almost impossible for a non-specialist to figure out whether or not the evidence presented is authentic or fabricated. Indeed, it may contain just enough truth to be persuasive, and add enough falsehood to lead to a wrong conclusion. How would one prove it false when it contains at least some truth?
This adds new complexity to the issue of censorship - of news, of social media, of whatever. First Street Journal gives us examples.
It was just over four years ago that we wrote about The New York Times publishing an article by a member of their own Editorial Board, Greg Bensinger, telling readers of that august supporter of Freedom of the Press that it was bad, bad, bad that Elon Musk was trying to buy Twitter, and that his promise to make the social media service an “inclusive arena for free speech” and that “Twitter Under Elon Musk Will Be a Scary Place.”
. . .
We pointed out that The New York Times gave OpEd space to Chad Malloy[2] to claim that restrictions on speech actually promoted freedom of speech. They also published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence ... And today? There were riots in Belfast, Northern Ireland, following the attempted beheading of a Scotsman by a Sudanese asylum seeker, and the Usual Suspects complained not about the attack, but about Twitter not censoring people writing about it! There’s more of that here and here and here.
The United Kingdom’s Secretary for Northern Island Hilary Benn said, following the knife attack in Belfast:
Social media companies have a very heavy responsibility. It’s why we’re going to bring forward new powers next week to make it clear that social media companies need to take down illegal content, particularly when we are facing circumstances such as the ones we’ve seen in Northern Ireland over the last two days.It’s simple: our good friends on the left are afraid, deathly afraid, that if the people in general have the information Our Betters would rather not see disseminated, people might, horrors! draw conclusions from that information of which the left would disapprove!
Again, more at the link.
Imagine that the sources quoted by First Street Journal had been "massaged" by AI to give a rather different emphasis to the news than the reality? For that matter, what if the journal itself used AI to give a particular propaganda twist to its presentation of the news? Merely by selecting words and phrases that "shaded" the presentation in one direction or another, its impression on readers could be significantly altered; and AI systems, with their vast resources of language, facts, figures and news, would be in an ideal position to shape and form that impression.
Hmmmm . . .
Peter
Gathered from around the Internet over the past week. Click any image for a larger view.
I've played this track before, but it's just so good I can't resist playing it again. It's perhaps the definitive example of how a master of hard rock can take the electric guitar to a whole new level, a master class in expressive musical genius. Here's Steve Morse and Deep Purple at the Montreux Festival in 1996, playing "When A Blind Man Cries".
Sheer rock guitar genius! To think that was 30 years ago, this year . . . Steve Morse retired from Deep Purple a few years ago, to take care of his wife during a long illness. Sadly, she died in February 2024. Morse is now back in the saddle with his own group.
Peter
I was struck by an article in RealClear Books & Culture, titled "A.I. Panic Hits Music City". Here's an excerpt.
Suno is the AI music app sweeping the music world and raising serious questions about the future of the industry. By typing a few prompts into a text box, you—or rather, the algorithm—can generate professional-sounding songs. If you upload your own melodies or lyrics, it can create new versions of your original content. As one song after another plays in the pitch meeting, more of these AI-produced tracks appear, most carrying that same disorienting quality: songs that sound better than they actually are, polished to a high gloss by machine production.
As Barack Obama once said, you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig. Likewise, you can have Michelangelo paint a mural on the ceiling of your uncle Ned's double-wide trailer, but that doesn't make it the Sistine Chapel. Whatever one thinks of the songs, one thing is certain: AI is alarmingly good at producing music at a quality level that, until now, required highly-paid professionals who had spent their lives honing their craft.
Songwriting, Nashville style, is a craft, and a slow-burning one at that. You spend years learning how to write a great bridge, how to make a hook land, how to fit your whole life into three minutes and fifteen seconds. I had heard friends in the business grumbling about what AI was doing to all of that. But I knew I had to find out firsthand. So I went home and fed my song into the machine.
Confronting AI for the first time as a musician can be harrowing. I'd recently watched a video posted by a local touring guitarist—the kind of sideman Nashville produces in abundance—who described receiving an AI guitar track from a client as a reference. The problem: the AI-performed track was so good, he wasn't sure he could match it. He felt there might be only five human beings in the world who could play it so well. This is coming from a professional in a city that represents perhaps the greatest concentration of musical talent in the world.
So it was with some dread that I picked a pop-country tune I'd written recently and uploaded it to Suno, instructing it to “Make a dark, soulful indie country cover of this song with a driving beat.” The platform can generate a complete song from scratch. Meaning, a person with zero talent and almost zero effort can make songs. People are currently creating more than 7 million songs per day on that platform alone, enough volume to surpass the entire Spotify catalog every two weeks. But the technology can also be used more subtly, to create faithful covers of work you've already recorded. It's like having your own band of professional musicians in a box, ready to take direction. That's what I chose to do: I uploaded my rough demo, along with my lyrics, asked it to make a faithful cover, and clicked "generate."
The results were all over the place. One early experiment produced something that sounded like a hit single. The AI singer was so soulful that I would have pulled over to Google him had I heard the track on the radio. But the same version had a hideous, wildly inappropriate drum sound that started firing in verse two, as if Christopher Walken had possessed the algorithm and started demanding more snare. Other versions produced strange discordant moments or went emotionally flat. Working effectively with AI in music isn't a single push of a button. It's an iterative process of trial and error. But after making many versions, I found two keepers.
. . .
There was only one problem: the AI singer had possibly sung my song better than I ever could. In a town full of great singers, I'm considered at least a good one. But the AI voice had everything—incredible control, emotional nuance, and a back-country drawl I'll never have as a Florida native ... Still, the AI offered something genuinely useful: production ideas I wouldn't have thought of myself. A minor chord in the bridge that improved the arrangement. Taking the final chorus up an octave for power and exuberance. A cool twist on the background vocals in the outro. Killer mandolin parts injecting energy into the choruses. These are the kinds of ideas I might have paid a top producer to provide. I was getting them for the price of a $15 subscription.
There's more at the link.
I haven't looked into AI in music in any depth, so this article came as a surprise to me. Intrigued, I looked for AI country music on YouTube, and found innumerable examples. Try this one for size. The source blurb for the collection from which it's drawn notes: "Made with AI. Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated."
It's a good song, IMHO, and I enjoyed it . . . but I'm left feeling empty, because behind that powerful singing and memorable tune, behind those excellently-played instrumentals . . . there's nobody. The inspiration it offers is artificial.
Would I feel different if I hadn't known it was AI music? I don't know, but I think I would. A song composed and performed by a human being connects heart-to-heart, I guess. Synthetic songs can imitate that, and if they're as good as the one above, they can fool people, but . . . it just feels wrong.
What say you, friends?
Peter
This extraordinary report on the BBC has me goggling.
Whale graveyard dating back five million years discovered
An enormous whale graveyard around 1,200km (745 miles) long has been discovered in the south-eastern Indian Ocean.
The site, which is 7km (four miles) deep, has been found in the Diamantina fracture zone, a range on the sea floor of ridges and trenches.
But it is the age of the remains - some from 5.3 million years ago - that has prompted huge excitement in the scientific community.
The underwater necropolis, which was discovered by a team of researchers from China, Italy and New Zealand, is teeming with organisms and species that "may be new to science", according to journal Nature.
One of the study's authors Xiaotong Peng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said: "Discovering a necropolis of this scale was completely unexpected.
"The size of distribution, the depth and the age range were far beyond anything we had imagined."
During 32 dives to the site, explorers collected samples from 485 whale-fossil sites and active whale falls, and found a treasure trove of remains, including one extinct whale's skeleton.
The beaked Pterocetus benguelae, which is 5.3 million years old, was discovered to be one of the fossilised skulls in the graves.
A five-metre long Antarctic minke whale's carcass was the largest discovery made.
A new species which the team has called Pterocetus diamantinae, after the site, was also uncovered.
Jellyfish, worms and crustaceans are among the community of creatures living off the huge spread of carcasses.
"Peng and colleagues' encounter with a vast fossil graveyard is a truly unique discovery," Stephen J Godfrey of the Calvert Marine Museum wrote in Nature.
There's more at the link.
There's also this video report on the discovery.
How on earth did so many whale carcasses end up in such a relatively small area? Is it possible that some species of whale may deliberately go to that part of the sea to die, just as elephants were reputed to go to the "elephants' graveyard", a hidden valley where they lay down to die? The elephant myth has long since been refuted, but I'm willing to bet some will raise it again in connection with the whales.
This is absolutely fascinating. I daresay there are decades of research ahead in that area.
Peter
