Tag: 05.08.19

Turns Out AI Machines Can Hallucinate (Or Are They Seeing Things We Can’t?)

Adversarial examples are like optical (or audio) illusions for AI. By altering a handful of pixels, a computer scientist can fool a machine learning classifier into thinking, say, a picture of a rifle is actually one of a helicopter. But to you or me, the image still would look like a gun—it almost seems like the algorithm is hallucinating. – Wired

‘Dude’, ‘Grotesque’, And Other Words That Came From High-Culture History

Dude seems to have developed from a pejorative epithet for a man about as far as possible from Jeff Bridges’s character as one could get. Grotesque came from a hole in the ground in Rome. Picturesque originally referred to actual pictures — specifically, a particular style of painting. Silhouette started as Louis XV’s treasury secretary, became a snippy insult, and only then came to refer to framed side-views of a person, cut from black paper. – BBC

The “Camp” Aesthetic: From Susan Sontag To The Met Gala

Sontag wrote her groundbreaking essay in 1963. In 58 paragraphs, she conducted an intuitive yet rigorous examination of a phenomenon that she defined as “a badge of identity among small urban cliques”. And this “private code” constituted a new mode of perception that collapsed traditional ideas of high and low culture, of elitism and mass appeal. Here was a new hierarchy of taste, no longer defined by the old gatekeepers. Camp was a “way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon”, she wrote, “in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylisation”.

The Kid Who Exclaimed “Wow!”

It happened spontaneously at a concert in Boston’s Symphony Hall last Sunday. After a beat, as Ronan’s awe-filled “Wow!” echoed throughout the hall, the audience burst into laughter and cheers. So charmed were the Handel and Haydn Society by the child’s exclamation that they asked the public to help find him, hoping to reward the sweet sentiment with a trip to meet the artistic director. – WGBH

Boston Ballet Is About To Play A Rock Festival

“This Memorial Day weekend, Boston’s hometown ballet company is joining a lineup of major music stars for Boston Calling, a festival dubbed by some an ‘East Coast Coachella.’ It’s the first time in Boston Calling’s 10-year run that dance will be featured — and possibly the first time ballet has ever been given major stage time at such a high profile music festival.” – Dance Magazine

When The Old Soviet Union “Thawed” And Became Fascinated With Western Culture

Just as the CIA sponsored leftist magazines and abstract expressionism to assert American cultural supremacy (and to make censorship seem like something that only happened in communist countries), the Thaw mobilized the availability of Western art to combat the image of the Soviet Union as a repressive regime. Cultural exchange programs and film industry trade agreements were part and parcel of this. – The New Republic

Developers Who Worked On Violent Video Games Tell What It Did To Their Brains

Says one, who worked on Mortal Kombat 11 all through last year and came out of it with a PTSD diagnosis, “I’d have these extremely graphic dreams, very violent. I kind of just stopped wanting to go to sleep, so I’d just keep myself awake for days at a time, to avoid sleeping. … The scary part was always the point at which new people on the project got used to it.” – Kotaku