20hCritics persist. “I’m not going to call u kitty/kittyself or doll/dollself just bc u think its cool,” one TikToker wrote in a video caption. “Pronouns are a form of identity not an aesthetic.” But what’s the difference between an aesthetic and an identity anyway?
↩︎ The New York Times
21hBeing vaccinated does NOT mean you can use an incredibly powerful magic necklace to turn yourself into a football player so you can smuggle some footballs into football practice so football players can play football.
↩︎ AI Weirdness
3dWe’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated—that we are, in some sense, winning.
↩︎ The New York Times
The "Lost Tapes of the 27 Club" project uses Google's AI program Magenta to imagine later music from some of the famous musicians who died at 27—Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Amy Winehouse (heard above). From Rolling Stone:
O’Connor and his team used a similar process for lyrics, using a generic AI program called an artificial neural network. They were able to input the artist’s lyrics and start off with a few words and the program would guess the cadence and tone of the poetry to complete it. “It was a lot of trial and error,” O’Connor says, adding that the team examined “pages and pages” of lyrics for turns of phrase that syllabically fit the vocal melodies Magenta produced.
See also: Jason Kottke on the secret of synchronization.
