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Good Friday Morning! And Happy Birthday to The Weather Channel, which launched this week on May 2, 1982. YouTube has footage of the first hour of broadcasting from The Weather Channel (skip to 29:30 to see the first broadcast). They described it as a “non-stop weather telethon.”
The Weather Channel used to run a service called “Weatherscan,” which offered the stuff you saw on the “Local On the 8’s” coverage. That specific service has largely disappeared. However, YouTube has a compilation of all the music they use for that part of the broadcast. It’s amazing what the internet archives.
This week, I’m going to review two pieces of criticism I read from opposite ends of the artificial intelligence spectrum—links to follow.
Quick Hits:
- Ross Dellenger at Yahoo Sports dropped an utter bombshell report late Thursday (h/t to Josh Pate of Late Kick for mentioning it live on air). The long and short of it is this: we’re about to see college sports shift to the salary cap model we see in the NFL, NBA, and other professional sports leagues. Currently, college sports are in the wild west of Name Image Likeness (NIL) deals. Dellenger leads his piece with an anecdote about how Baylor Head Coach Dave Aranda headed to the Arizona Cardinals to learn how salary cap planning works. What will be interesting to watch with this: will all college athletics survive? Football and the men’s basketball tournament are the only money-makers in college sports. Everything else loses money. In the salary cap era for universities, does everything make the cut? It seems unlikely. Women’s sports are the things facing the biggest chopping block, and that implicates Title IX, which the Biden administration is in the middle of trying to rewrite (which is setting up to be the next big clash between states and the federal government – look for this to hit the SCOTUS 2025 docket). What happens next? No one knows. But it’s coming fast — the 2024 season will be the last year college athletics exists in the current fashion. This change is expected to hit by 2025.
- August 19, 2024. Mark that date down now. That’s when the Democratic National Convention is going down in Chicago, Illinois. I’m on record at the Conservative Institute saying that Biden needs to roll the National Guard into that city now. The proliferation of anti-Israel protests across the country indicates I’m not overstating that point. Politico reports that the White House and Democrats are starting to worry about how that will even go down. Protests are spreading, and the White House is concerned they will look bad on Democrats. Politico is giving you the positive Democratic Party spin on things. The Free Press listens to the activists themselves, who want a repeat of the summer of 1968: mass riots, mass arrests, and disrupting all things (ironically, the thing that helped give Nixon a landslide). The White House is in a pickle. On the one hand, supporting Israel is a no-brainer politically. The vast majority of Americans support Israel and don’t like Hamas. The problem is that the White House is terrified they will lose Michigan, a swing state. And the anti-Israel radicals are dense there. Good luck squaring that circle.
- In 2016, it was common to see Democrats doing something cosmically stupid and then look over at Trump and realize, “He’s going to win, isn’t he?” I had one of those moments this week when I read the following headline on CBS News: “White House considers welcoming some Palestinians from war-torn Gaza as refugees.” My exact thought: “Donald Trump is going to win the popular vote.” A day or so later, I read the following statement from Biden: “Today, my Administration is approving $6.1 billion in student debt cancellation for 317,000 borrowers who attended the Art Institutes.” Now, I know he’s referring to a specific set of for-profit universities accused of fraud, which went defunct. But that’s not how that reads or sounds to the average person. And I became more convinced that Trump was going to win.
- Last week, I wrote that Biden needs to lead the popular vote by four points to win. Trump has expanded his lead to 1.5 points. Biden is 5.5 points behind where he needs to be to win. The media-driven narrative of a “Biden bounce back” in polls is gone.
Where you can find me this week
Please subscribe, rate, and review my podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or Google Play — the reviews help listeners, and readers like you find me in the algorithms. Make sure to sign up for the Conservative Institute’s daily newsletter.
Biden Must Act Now To Protect Jewish Lives In American Cities – Conservative Institute
Antisemitism And Israel Rip The Democratic Party Apart – Conservative Institute
How Artificial Intelligence Is Making People Devalue Art And Anything Created
Two social media posts on artificial intelligence caught my eye this week. One is public, and the other is in a private group I’m a part of involving AI writers. They sort of illustrate two large threads that are developing regarding AI in the world around us. We’re still in a stage where AI-created text, images, video, and sound are increasing, but people don’t fully realize it yet.
The first is Jon Acuff on Facebook. He posted a short anecdote:
I talked with a CEO 3 weeks ago.
In 2022, he had 10 copywriters on staff creating content.
In 2023, he fired 9 of them and kept the 1 who was the best at writing ChatGPT prompts.
Before I wrote books, I spent 15 years as a copywriter.
If I still was, I’d be paying attention.
He’s not lying about this point. I know he’s telling the truth because I could tell similar stories myself. I’ve both seen versions of this directly and read stories about news sites switching to this kind of writing. At this point, you have to assume most content-creating sites use AI to edit or create information on their sites for consumption.
Where Acuff is selling this short is books. In 2015, Georgia Tech worked on building an AI capable of creating “choose-your-own-adventure” stories, where the reader chooses from those decisions, and the program writes things out from there. That was before the massive leap with ChatGPT in 2023.
Authors are also harnessing AI to create and write stories much faster. If you want to watch step-by-step instructions on how to write a novel with AI, check out The Nerdy Novelist on YouTube. He has a full tutorial on using AI to go from idea generation to an entirely written book.
The point of all that is AI is proliferating rapidly everywhere. The flip side is that people are growing cynical, believing anything incredible they see is AI-generated. An AI-cynicism is developing, and I know even I’ve seen it with myself. It can’t be real if something is just too perfect a representation of something.
This brings up a point someone wrote about AI in a group I’m in. They wrote the following:
I am having more and more negative experiences due to the propagation of AI in society.
I am into art, design, music, architecture, photography and painting, among other things. The fallout from AI is that people have instantly become desensitized to impactful works of art and design by people.
Whereas an image or photograph, in the past, that would have been praised for it’s stunning design, colors and composition, people now look at it, then shrug and say, “Meh, AI” and move on.
As a creator this is especially disheartening to me, because I still put hundreds of hours into my works of art, photography and design. But now, anything visually appealing is automatically labeled as AI and dismissed.
This is true in many contexts. I belong to an engineering group. Someone posted an image of an architectural project for which the construction was challenging. So much so that it looked nearly impossible to have been built. People in the group suggested it was an AI-generated image. Even after explaining that it was a real structure and those were real people having lunch in front of it, they insisted it was a fake AI photograph.
The loss of awe and inspiration found in things created by the hands and minds of humans is, I think, the real and first casualty of AI, I wonder how long it will be before people approach written works with the same aloof and dismissive attitude.
There’s a fascinating development occurring where humans encounter AI work. The assumption is that because a human didn’t create it, it is inherently worth less than whatever was created by the machine. On one level, I get that; on another level, I don’t.
Here’s where it matters: in the pharmaceutical industry, AI programs are designing drugs no one has ever considered. Because it has an unlimited capacity to combine and use data, it can make connections we, as humans, might not have made in the past.
In human terms, we call it being multi-disciplinary. For AI programs trained on all the data we have on the internet and more, it’s just called having access to everything at once. David Epstein wrote a book titled, “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.” It’s a fascinating look at how generalists, who can see connections between unconnected fields, can make more significant breakthroughs better than specialists, who only know the silo in front of them.
In sports, a multi-sport athlete is often better than a specialist. That’s because they have a different skill set that was honed differently. Patrick Mahomes played baseball, which impacted his throwing style and gave him different hand-eye coordination.
Machines have all the information, and if something connects, it connects.
But we view this differently with something to create. Humans perceive art differently. They view it as less than if a machine does it.
AI text is not the only way this happens. Diamonds are a perfect example of people viewing the same thing differently based on how it was created. Up until the modern era, we found diamonds by digging for them. We can now grow them in a lab, and the prices of these lab diamonds are lower. Compared to where we source natural diamonds, they’re ethical.
The second irony of lab-grown diamonds is that they are molecularly no different from natural diamonds. We have methods of mimicking the diamond growth process. Because we can replicate that process, lab diamonds drop in price as supply floods the market. How much? Quite a bit.
As a rule of thumb, man-made diamonds on average sell for about 10% the cost of natural diamonds. A year ago, they cost about 20%-30% of the price, according to Diamond Hedge.
A natural 2-carat, round-cut diamond with a high-quality color and clarity rating costs about $13,000-14,000, whereas the equivalent lab-grown diamond sells for about $1,000, according to Sompura.
Soon, people will assume most engagement rings, especially the larger ones, are lab-grown. The same is true of any jewelry made with lab-grown gems (for fun, we can do the same with other precious gems, too).
It’s not a matter of whether lab diamonds are passable fakes or not. Lab diamonds are as real as the ones we dig up from the earth. The only difference is how the diamond was created.
The same is true of AI-created content. People are pushing it away, like they’d ignore a fake diamond. But in many cases, the things that AI is creating are no different from human-created content. As we get better at it, AI-created content will become preferred to the mistake-prone versions of human content.
The flip side of that is that everyone will presume humans have no skill to produce something of value. 2023 heralded the beginning of artificial intelligence’s widespread adoption. By the end of this decade, you will start believing most of the content you read, see, or hear was generated by artificial intelligence.
That’s already creating profound rifts in how people view art and what they see online. And we’re only a little over a year into this technological revolution.
Links of the week
There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech: Frat parties with offensive themes are swiftly punished. But publicly contemplate murdering Zionists? That’s a different story. – Abigail Shrier, The Free Press
The Czech illegals: Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe – The Insider
AP/NORC Poll: Only 14% of Americans Trust the Media – Hot Air
The Cookie-Cutter Campus Protests: Columbia’s Gaza encampment invaded Hamilton Hall this week via Instagram. – Daniel Henninger, WSJ
Normal Kids Get F*cked: Elite universities went to war against fraternities and fun while indulging Hamas-admiring collectives, and the students have noticed – Tablet Magazine
Schumer poised to join Johnson invite for Netanyahu address to Congress – The Hill
Israeli Terror Victims Sue Anti-Semitic Campus Groups for Aiding Hamas: Lawsuit seeks damages from groups driving campus protest movement – Washington Free Beacon
Dem Fundraising Platform ActBlue Takes a Cut of Donations to Michigan State University’s Anti-Israel Tent Encampment: ActBlue previously facilitated donations to bail fund for anti-Israel bridge blockers – Washington Free Beacon
VIDEO: Why Hundreds Of U.S. Banks Are At Risk Of Failing – CNBC
Sun unleashes near X-class solar flare: M9.5 eruption sparks radio blackouts across the Pacific – Space.com
X/Twitter Thread(s) of the week
48% of the people arrested at NY universities were “unaffiliated with the schools.”
Coleman Hughes nuking the idea these are “anti-war” protests.
The Rubbermaid trashcan shield protestors getting wrecked to funny music.
The leaked demands of protestors is every bit as eye-rolling as you can imagine.
Satire of the week
Trump Watching Movie On iPad During Trial Without Using Headphones – Onion
Buttigieg Distracts Americans With Speech While DOT Steals Nation’s Catalytic Converters – Onion
Congressional Democrats Demand $40 Billion For UCLA Protest Border Security – Babylon Bee
History Repeats Itself As Communists Run Out Of Food – Babylon Bee
TRAGEDY: AOC Announces She Was Killed During NYPD Raid At Columbia And Is Dead Again – Babylon Bee
Woman in Mood for Home Cooked Meal Made by Somebody Else – Reductress
Trump Defense Attorney Grills Former National Enquirer Publisher on Whether or Not Elvis Was Spotted Alive Eating Moon Pies at Tennessee Gas Station – The Hard Times
Former Child Star Arrested on Suspicion to Launch Rewatch Podcast – The Hard Drive
Thanks for reading!