There Are Already A Huge Number

of totally fake AI generated videos supposedly of Pope Leo giving sermons he never gave and saying things he hasn't said.   I get a lot of "catholic" as well as Catholic content foisted on me by several sites algorithms in the languages I do searches in and I've seen them in English, French and Spanish so far.

I hope that someone as internet savvy as Leo assigns a couple of People at the Vatican to get on that because if the comments on such fake videos are anything to go by,  they will be a major burden to his papacy as they, in fact, are in every area of activity online and, so, in real life.  

This is a real danger for reality being what determines human culture.   It didn't start with AI or even the internet but both of those have made things worse by an enormous factor.   

For Once A Welcomed Commercial - A Quick Post Which May Lead To More In Time

WILLIAM BLAKE is one of my favorite poets and one whose poetry has often resisted my understanding.   I've tried a couple of interpreters of Blake, E.P. Thompson was the last one I tried, and, while I've found some persuasive things in them, none of them has ever really convinced me they really got him.   I did come to the conclusion that you probably couldn't get to him unless you shared at least some of his belief in God and Jesus which even such devotedly sympathetic secularists reject.   It would be like someone studying modern physics without believing in electrons or current biology without believing in the things that Barbara McClintock discovered (which, clearly, many of the big names in the popular understanding of science, today, don't).   

I will note that in the last several months of reading Scripture, especially the New Testament,  I have come to the startling conclusion that love is a central force in existence, both our only hope of the survival of death - and I mean literally that, continued conscious existence after bodily death, not some remembered existence or other transient metaphor - but also as the reason any of us or the universe exists at all.  I haven't developed any great Scriptural or reasoned arguments to support that,  so huge is it that I would guess you'd have to say it in Blakean language and that might not have the force it needs without Blakean pictures in color, as well.  Blake is also one of my favorite artists.  

I hadn't thought of Blake in my thinking about this until listening to this new short essay "Enemies of the Human Race" William Blake on the disaster of atheism, by Mark Vernon - which has an announcement of his upcoming book Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination which, alas, won't be published here in the States until September and who knows if any of us will have enough money to buy it by then.   

I may go into some of what Mark Vernon says when I have time to work out a better copy of the machine transcription (AI is a so-so stenographer as well as being essentially stupid) and I'd have to re-read the two long and difficult poems he discusses.   What he says about Blake's condemnation of what amounts to modernism and, in my thinking, the inadequacy of republicanism and secular, non-egalitarian democracy and the impossibility of that when there is enormous disparity in the actual having of physical, material wealth.    I think Blake got it right when he said, "One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression".    The pretenses of our law that pretends that there is "Equal Justice Under Law" when there never has been and the Lockean framers of the Constitution and the judges and "justices" have made it even more so have certainly come to its real reality in the criminal triumph of Trump and Republican-fascism.   I might note that you could state it more clearly by replacing "lies" for "Lion" and Truth for "Ox,"  only one such substitution of terms to prove the validity of the relationship - if you wanted to try to do it mathematically. 

Update:  Don't know why it didn't occur to me that you might be able to read the essay at Mark Vernon's Substack.   You can but it requires a subscription,  you can get a free one with a link through his website.  I will be reading through what he said on the video and might have some comments on it later. 

Hey Hey RFK How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?

If someone deserves to die that way it's Little Bobby,  I just hope he doesn't take innocent children along with him.  

 Notice how Chris Hayes discerned a definitely eugenic statement about only "sick children" dying of measles and advocating "choice" for parents to allow their children to be one of those "sick children" - no doubt the "sick children" might have a different opinion about their parents ignorantly or malignantly taking that chance for them just as those who have fallen for the anti-vaxx cult lies taking such a chance.   Put on top of his call to register those who are said to have autism - something his fellow Republican-fascists USED TO claim to fear as a prelude to . . . . something BAD.   At least when they gave that as their excuse to oppose Social Security.

The irony in the new eugenics goes very deep, all the way back to a belief in the theory of natural selection and its long and immediate history of generating eugenics as a "science."  One of those huge ironies is the enthusiasm that the haters of Darwin have for his most consequential product.   I'm sure Little Bobby is a true believer in not only the reality of evolution but in a particularly crude and primitive conception of Darwinism, natural selection.  With him the common cause he has with the Protestant Fundamentalist anti-evolutionists is his love of money.   When it comes to anti-vaxx,  he got into it and stays in it and promotes it because it enriches him. 

The Absurd Idea That "AI" Can Have Rights Will Swamp Democracy

I HAVEN'T HAD THE TIME to look much at what Pope Leo has to say about "artificial intelligence" but thinking about the little I've heard has brought to my mind something that I haven't heard anyone address, yet.   He does seem to have at least some of the problem with it that I also have, which is yet another good sign. 

Talking about the product of "AI" in the context of journalism forces me to talk about the stunning amount of "AI" that presents not only fiction but lies as a highly dangerous,  convincing simulacrum of fact or even truth.  A HIGHLY CONVINCING PRESENTATION OF TOTAL FICTION INCLUDING SOME OF THE MOST HATEFUL CONTENT IMAGINABLE, AND PERHAPS UNTIL NOW UNIMAGINABLE.    That was, of course, not something that waited for AI or the internet or even electronic media but it is possible to generate lies so fast and so fecundly lies that can be sold with the same kind of software that Google and other media use to sell.  That was something done with direct mail before the internet became a thing - but it expanded enormously with the spread of low-cost computer and computing but it is something that has expanded enormously feeding off of the enormous amounts of data that People give up stupidly and willingly or that which is mined without any of them knowing their activity is being monitored and complied.  

It is insane to think that the assumptions of the framers of the First Amendment and even those who developed other theories of "free speech" and "free press" in the ink on paper and through snail-mail technology can possibly match the new reality that the media of today presents for democracy, self-government, and the possibility of a decent society.   It won't surprise that anyone I doubt the legal systems of old democracies or the most allegedly up-to-date law will be able to cope with it,  the self-interested complicity and compliance of lawyers, law-makers, judges and "justices" are already destroying the possibility of egalitarian democracy.

The question I have yet to hear anyone ask or address is where the "right of free speech" or "press" in AI generated content is born or resides.    The idea that anyone but a living being can have rights is not only absurd but it is dangerous.  The criminally insane 19th century Supreme Court invented "corporate person-hood" has literally deprived real human beings of their rights, their property AND THEIR LIVES over and over again, it has been a Court erected juggernaut attacking equality and democracy.   Are they going to invent such "rights" for computers?   For software programs?   For the inhuman production of their simulation of "speech" which appears to be being published online without so much as a human reviewing or editing or even directly publishing the content on Youtube or Google or other venues that will, also, not monitor or control their content?  

I have every convidence in the stupidity of the law, the courts, the Supreme Court, the "civil liberties" industry which has a long record of cynical service to even some of the most homicidal and destructive of industries, peddling gun violence, peddling alcohol, tobacco, addictive prescription drugs, and even industries that endanger the health and minds and lives of those who are employed by them.   I have every confidence that the ACLU would oppose any questioning of the idea that "AI" cannot have any of the various "rights" listed in the First Amendment.  

But it's well past time someone brings up the absurdity, the superstition, the self-serving nonsense that the product of "AI" can be said to possess 'rights".  

P.S.  I recently listened to several novels "read" by "AI" including some phrases in French among the English text.   I suppose the more than absurdly laughable "French" ("S il vou plat and other worse than an English speaker trying to phonentically render French text) and repeatedly mis-reading words spelled the same way but pronounced differently ("read" is only one of those).   I'm afraid that human-read audio books are going to be a thing of the past, throwing large numbers of human voice-actors out of work.  Like MP3 and online streaming destroying the recording industry and doing huge damage to the music profession,  this is going to really have a bad impact on human culture.  

Roland Martin And Company On Pope Leo's Creole Heritage

THIS HAS ME SMILING like little else I've heard this year. 

 

Not A Blast But More A Retro Petard From The Past - I'm Noticing At Least a Blip in 00s era Neo-Atheism On The Internet

LOOK AT WHAT THIS MEMBER of the "Ethical Society" recently said in a comment on that fun Youtube channel I recently posted a piece from here. 

@ZenBearV13

5 months ago (edited)

“Religion is the first — and worst — explanation we came up with.” - Christopher Hitchens

As a member of the Ethical Society of St. Louis, I agree with the premise you advocate here. Religion is not an isolated system of beliefs but a part of our development as sapient beings that must be integrated into our understanding of our future. It doesn’t deserve special reverence, merely conscious consideration.

Considering the video starts with a question of whether the listener or someone they know suffers from a condition called "angry 17-year-old-atheism," which Christopher Hitchens based his entire journalistic career on spreading (I can't figure out any other reason he'd have had that long gig at The Nation, and I used to read him all the time when I subscribed) before he branched out to a Bush II era neo-con theme, maybe being the last of a long line of Trotskyites who took that baby step from one depraved ideology to a similar but far more lucrative depraved ideology,  I'd say this guy's answer to that question is "Yes." 

Christopher Hitchens?   Really?   That liar and journalist whore who went from being a Trotsyite to a supporter of the worst neo-cons and crypto-fascists?   One who, I will guarantee you, would be supporting if not actually Trump, then much of what the Trumpzis are doing if not on anything else than on the basis of his financial interest and getting his drunken mug on right-wing media.   The man who, among many other things, supported the Bush II regime and its entirely illegal and catastrophically bloody and permanently consequential invasion of Iraq, defending their motive of getting hold of Iraq's oil? 

That's who members of the "Ethical" Society hold up as a valid judge of ethics?   It's like holding up James Randi as a figure of science, as many a true believer in materialist-atheist-scientism apparently still does.  Only that's relatively less dangerous.   I was mildly interested in following up on the "Ethical Society" and its members during my long look at 00's era new atheism but I started losing interest in it as it went out of style and fewer of those stuck in angry 17-year-old style atheism mentioned it as their their attention drifted to newer shiny objects.  I have been tempted to do the same critique of the Fieldston School in NYC based on its product, the one I've slammed elite Catholic Education and the prep--> Ivy sysem on.  I may have mentioned the "ethics" of A.G. "Dash" Sulzberger, the man whose journalistic ethics at the New York Times apparently are identical to those of Jeff Bezos, as one of them in the past.   The Fieldston School strikes me as a kind of atheist religious prep which has about the same relationship to "ethics" that the elite Catholic preps have to the Gospel of Jesus, these days.   Based on its product.