Friday, March 31, 2023
Good morning and welcome to another edition of Wolmania. Our interminable indictment-watch is over. Let our interminable conviction-watch begin!
Item 1: a link
We're clearly going to be hearing about AI for the foreseeable future. Anyway, someone on Medium called Jenka wrote this story about AI that's more about how AI reflects the biases of its creators and training data. Specifically, it's about how American/European cultural mores regarding 1) posing for photographs, and 2) how and when we smile, leads to the generation of "historical" images that are really ahistorical - depicting various groups grinning for the camera in ways that they never would have (setting aside the obvious point that, for example, the Aztecs didn't have selfie technology).
The immediate point is interesting and, I think, should undercut our sense of how "real" the output of these systems actually is. But the deeper point, I think, is that there are surely other, less apparent, yet equally significant ways in which what looks "right" to our modern, Western eyes can be dangerously deceptive. I'm all for amusing ourselves asking Bing to write us sonnets about the Disney legal team's use of the rule against perpetuities or whatever - but we should be very careful before we start letting AI dictate our actions in any important area.
Item 2: a list
Animal* wools, ranked
- Angora rabbit
- Cheviot sheep
- Merino sheep
- Lincoln sheep
- Montadale sheep
- Alpaca
- Columbia sheep
- Cashmere goat
- Dorset sheep
- Friesian milk sheep
- Hampshire sheep
- Romney sheep
* it’s mostly sheep
Item 3: a media recommendation
The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby (Take 2)
Item 4: word of the week
Peduncle
Item 5: a photograph
See ya!
Thanks for reading. Hope your March is going out like a lamb. See you next financial quarter!
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