Can AIs do interesting cultural analysis?

A few years ago, this question would have been just a joke. Now it’s almost something that one might actually wonder.

Today’s experiment:

“Fiona Apple, Billie Eilish, Sinead O’Connor; are these artists really transgressive, or do they only illustrate how naturally the system can co-opt a superficial transgressiveness to its own ends? Are there more transgressive artists, not in term of throwing around chicken blood or excrement, but in the sense of expressing thoughts that genuinely challenge or disrupt the system? Are these three as transgressive as a single individual can be? And what does that tell us about the relationship of culture to power? (Please answer as a seasoned cultural analyst, well versed in Marxist and Post-Marxist theories of labour relationals, as well as oppression and resistance.)”

“Labour relationals” is my typo. And one can of course question the question itself; it is a good question, or a bad one? Both as a challenge to generative AIs, and as a significant question about culture and transgression. Why those three particular artists, for instance? (That one is easy: because WFUV played “Shameika (said I had potential)” on my drive home, and the other two just sort of popped into my head.) And doesn’t the reference to the specific things that the AI should answer as someone “well versed in” bias the kinds of answers were likely to get? (It absolutely does; I did that on purpose.)

Here is (tonight’s version of) ChatGPT 4 on the issue:

“Your question delves deep into the intersection of cultural analysis, Marxist and Post-Marxist theory, and the role of artists in challenging or reinforcing societal structures. Fiona Apple, Billie Eilish, and Sinead O’Connor are indeed significant figures to consider in this context.

1. Transgressiveness of Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor: These artists, through their music and public personas, have certainly challenged various norms and expectations. For instance, Fiona Apple’s raw emotional honesty in her lyrics, Billie Eilish’s subversion of pop star image norms, and Sinead O’Connor’s famous protest against the Catholic Church on ‘Saturday Night Live’ are acts that can be seen as transgressive. They push against the boundaries of what is typically accepted or expected in their respective contexts. However, the extent to which they truly disrupt the system can be debated.
2. Co-optation by the System: In Marxist and Post-Marxist theories, there is often an understanding that capitalist systems have a powerful ability to co-opt forms of resistance, turning them into commodified elements that can be sold and consumed. This process can dilute the transgressive potential of an artist’s work. While Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor might initially challenge certain norms, the question remains whether their work becomes absorbed and neutralized by the very system they are challenging. This phenomenon is often discussed in relation to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s concept of the “culture industry,” where the capitalist system mass-produces cultural goods that ultimately reinforce dominant ideologies.
3. More Transgressive Artists: There certainly are artists whose work might be considered more fundamentally transgressive in that they might resist co-optation more staunchly or express thoughts that more directly challenge dominant power structures. This could include artists who operate outside the mainstream music industry, or those whose work directly confronts systemic issues like racism, sexism, or capitalism in more overt and unapologetic ways. However, transgressiveness is not just about the content but also about the context and the ways in which the work interacts with or resists prevailing power structures.
4. Limits of Individual Transgressiveness: The comparison of individual transgressiveness raises the question of whether any single artist, regardless of their intentions, can truly challenge a system as pervasive and resilient as capitalism. This ties into the idea of “repressive tolerance” as discussed by Herbert Marcuse, where the system tolerates a certain degree of dissent as a means of preserving itself.
5. Culture and Power: The relationship between culture and power is complex. Culture can both challenge and reinforce power structures. In Marxist theory, cultural expressions are often seen as reflective of the material conditions and power relations of society. However, culture can also be a site of resistance and a means of envisioning and enacting alternative realities. The extent to which artists like Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor contribute to this process depends on how their work interacts with and is shaped by the broader socio-economic context.

“In conclusion, while Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor can be seen as transgressive to varying degrees, their impact needs to be understood within the broader context of how cultural products and expressions are produced, consumed, and potentially co-opted within a capitalist system. The true measure of their transgressiveness might lie not just in the content of their work, but in how it exists in relation to the power structures it seeks to challenge or disrupt.”

And here is (tonight’s version of) Bard (the public one, nothing secret I can access inside of Google or anything):

“As your seasoned cultural analyst, I must offer a nuanced response to your query regarding Fiona Apple, Billie Eilish, and Sinead O’Connor’s “transgressiveness.” It’s a complex question, demanding we navigate the thorny relationship between artistic expression, the cultural apparatus, and the ever-shifting boundaries of transgression.

“Firstly, defining “transgressive” is crucial. Does it imply mere shock value, like chicken blood and onstage antics? Or something deeper, a genuine challenge to power structures and dominant ideologies? From a Marxist perspective, true transgression disrupts the capitalist system and its control over production, consumption, and even our consciousness.

“Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor all exhibit elements of both approaches.

• Apple: From her early, raw explorations of female sexuality in “Tidal” to her unapologetic critiques of societal expectations in “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” Apple consistently confronts taboos and pushes boundaries. Yet, her success within the music industry suggests a degree of co-optation. Perhaps her “transgressiveness” serves the system by providing a palatable form of rebellion for mainstream audiences.
• Eilish: Her goth-tinged aesthetic and introspective lyrics about mental health undoubtedly challenged some norms. However, her meteoric rise and vast appeal might suggest a system eager to embrace a sanitized version of rebellion, one that doesn’t truly threaten the status quo.
• O’Connor: Her act of tearing a picture of the Pope during a live performance on SNL remains a potent symbol of defiance against religious authority. But her career trajectory was irrevocably altered, demonstrating the system’s capacity to punish those who transgress too far.

“Therefore, labeling these artists solely as “transgressive” is overly simplistic. Each navigates a complex dance with the system, sometimes challenging it, sometimes being absorbed by it.

“But are they the most transgressive possible? Absolutely not. Consider:

• Underground artists: Those operating outside the mainstream, defying categorization and commercial viability, often express far more radical ideas and engage in more disruptive art forms. Noise music, performance art, and certain subgenres of metal or rap come to mind.
• Activists and dissidents: Their resistance takes tangible forms, challenging power structures through direct action, social critique, and even bodily sacrifice. Think Emma Goldman, Edward Snowden, or Ai Weiwei.

“The extent of individual “transgressiveness” depends on context and perspective. What seems radical in one cultural climate might be commonplace in another. Moreover, individual acts of defiance only gain true power when they connect to broader social movements and systemic critiques.

“This brings us to the relationship between culture and power. Culture is not a neutral space; it reflects and reinforces power structures while simultaneously offering sites of contestation and resistance. Artists like Apple, Eilish, and O’Connor operate within this complex dynamic. Their “transgressiveness” might be co-opted or diluted at times, but it also holds the potential to spark dialogue, challenge norms, and inspire others to question the status quo.

“Ultimately, the true measure of their impact lies not just in their individual acts of defiance, but in their ability to contribute to a larger conversation about power, oppression, and the possibilities for genuine social change. They remind us that even within the confines of the system, transgression can be a powerful tool for disrupting complacency and paving the way for a more just world.”

Neither of these is terrible! Both use lists (ChatGPT’s numbered, Bard’s two just bulleted), and some useful bolding. Both make some nice external references; ChatGPT is more about academic ones (“culture industry”, Marcuse) and Bard more about cultural figures (Emma Goldman, Edward Snowden (!), Ai Weiwei). Points to Bard for specifically referencing two Apple album titles; both of them mention O’Connor’s famous SNL gesture (it’s famous after all). I like “Each navigates a complex dance with the system, sometimes challenging it, sometimes being absorbed by it” and “culture can also be a site of resistance and a means of envisioning and enacting alternative realities” rather a lot. (Would a strict English teacher say that navigating a dance is a mixed metaphor?)

Either one would probably get a good grade in secondary school, and even, I would venture, in a non-Major undergraduate course (modulo being too short, not having explicit references or bibliographies, and other stuff I didn’t ask for). Either one would have absolutely floored me in, say, 2016 (see this skeptical piece), or even a few years after.

Does either one offer fresh or non-obvious insights? I kind of don’t think so. They are, entirely unsurprisingly, what a pretty decent writer might write in response to the question, given some time to poke around on the web for background if they weren’t already familiar with the subject. They are both very middle-of-the-road in significant senses, neither coming down hard on either side of the question of whether a popular and “successful” artist can truly challenge the system. It depends! It’s nuanced! There are arguments on both sides! It’s debatable!

And that’s very true! But a bit squishy feeling.

It might be interesting to ask them explicitly to take a side; change the prompt to request a strong case that these artists really are disruptive and transgressive (at least potentially), and otherwisely a strong case that they aren’t and cannot be.

Maybe another day. :)

1960s Psychodrama of Eldritch Suspense

So Midjourney has Yet Another New Version of their main engine, called “5.1”, and it’s very much like v5, except that it has more of a “house style” like 4.0 did, which can be turned off via “–style raw”. (There’s also “–stylize”, and one might think that ”–style raw” and say “–stylize 0” would do the same thing, but apparently not. It’s all magic.)

I have, as ever, been playing with it extensively (given that “relax mode” GPU time is free at my membership level, any time when the engine is not working for me is wasted, eh what?), and am now up somewhere over forty thousand images, most recently involving things like echidnas (apparently not “echidnae”; “is Sonic an Echidna?“) and many stills from non-existent movies. I will present here a number from a 1960s Psychodrama of Eldritch Suspense, because woot! (See also The Cult Hit of 1977.)

Brad and Laura are concerned

Dr. Martin and Miss Carter are also concerned.

Miss Carter appreciates Dr. Martin’s collection of exotic curios.

Patrons in the village pub are concerned. And not only about the ugly picture.

Mrs. Martin is perhaps too impressed by the obsidian statue.

“Joannie, what –” “Please, Go, Through, The, Door, Doctor, Martin”

“Praise, The, Tentacles” “Yes, The, Wonderful, Tentacles”

“Come, Back, Soon”

(I like how exactly one of the eight images I made came out in color.)

Passive Gaming

In retrospect this should have been obvious, but I didn’t notice for awhile…

There’s a sort of continuum in gaming between completely open-world games (with Second Life for instance so far out on that end that it’s hardly a game anymore, and I gather things like the Fallout games also at that end somewhere), and “admire the pretty atmosphere and story while going through the set steps” things (like I dunno Myst and other puzzle games) down toward the other end.

But that’s not the extreme of that end of the continuum. When you’re so worn down by the Meaninglessness of Existence, and Humanity’s Inhumanity to Humanity, and stubbing your toe and all, that all you want to do is lie there and Experience Someone Else’s Stuff without moving your viewpoint around or fighting trivial monsters or solving any puzzles or even clicking Next, it turns out that there’s a whole genre of what I’ll call completely passive games out there, just waiting for you to collapse and fix your eyes on them and not move.

(Wow, that was a long sentence.)

Just now I spent a pleasant (or at least restful) 45 minutes to an hour playing one of these, an Android game called “Leverage: The Nigerian Job”. It’s a typical modern-day “steal from the thieves” game with a nice sort of twist in the middle.

I was about to say that there are five playable characters, but in a game this passive that doesn’t really mean anything! There are five characters whose viewpoints you play from at one time or another during the game, anyway. The viewpoint can cut very suddenly from one to another, but I didn’t find that especially confusing; it works well.

The story is very linear, and of course since it’s completely passive it plays exactly the same every time (or at least I assume it does; I guess there could be a random element so that it might go differently in different instances of playing it? Not sure.). The graphics are good, if mundane, and in fact, since they know exactly where your viewpoint will be at all times, I think most of the scenes are done live-action, filming real actors doing what the characters do, and then splicing that together to make the game-play.

Assuming there’s no random element (and none of the material about the game that I saw suggests there is), it probably doesn’t have much replay value. They make up for this (at least partially) by packaging the game as a series of “eipsodes”; after “The Nigerian Job” there is a sequel called “Leverage: The Homecoming Job”, and I gather a bunch more after that, with the same characters and in the same basic world, but with different quests or missions.

Also, although I said that it’s an Android game, that’s really not true; because of the completely passive nature of the game, it lends itself really well to server-side rendering. Like what OnLive does for less passive games, but the technical challenges are much simpler; they can basically just record one run through the game, and then stream that down to your client when you want to play. So it’s easy to make these games platform-independent; I played “The Nigerian Job” on my Android phone through a game-streaming app called “NetFlix“, that I gather specializes in these completely passive games, and has versions of its app for various platforms.

And there are alot of them! Some of them seem to be completely passive versions of popular normal games; I see some Star Wars and Star Trek spinoffs, for instance, presumably based on the normal video games in those same worlds. A clever idea!

It felt very frustrating at first, playing this, not being able to even move the viewpoint, much less control the actions of the protagonist (you can’t even customize appearance or clothing; that would make the server-side rendering much harder of course). But I will admit with some shame that the totally passive interaction mode got comfortable very quickly, just sort of sitting there not moving, eyes on the screen, mind sort of half-asleep.

So it was very relaxing and all. I do worry what might happen if this sort of completely passive activity takes off, though; might hundreds or thousands of kids grown up without the mental exercise of interactive games, just sort of sitting on the couch eating Cheetos and “watching”?

That could be bad…

{coffee,zen}@google

New adventures every day!

Here are a couple more observations that I think I can share without revealing any family secrets.
 

Coffee

You’d think that a place full of coders would be basically powered by coffee.

That’s certainly what I was expecting.

I was picturing, like, huge wall-length banks of those shiny cylindrical coffee machines that are everywhere, constantly being emptied by jazzed young programmers, and filled by a steady stream of staff persons with new grounds.

But it’s not like that at all.

There are fancy digital coffee-making machines in the snack areas (“microkitchens”, whee!), which produce what I imagine is quite good coffee (I’m no judge), but do it slowly. And there aren’t very many of them.

There are a couple or three of the shiny cylindrical coffee machines in the main food-places, but they tend to be awkwardly placed, and there are many things that it’s easier to get to.

There are also espresso machines (cappuccino machines, whatever they’re called) in the microkitchens for general use, along with signs about the time and place where the “how to” classes are offered, and the intranet URL of the relevant informational page(s). Naturally.

All of which encourages slow and thoughtful and high-quality consumption of only finite amounts of coffee.

Which I find fascinating.

As I pointed out the other day, I’m drinking a lot less coffee than I did before the venue change. Maybe the work keeps one awake all by itself. :)
 

Zen

I poked around the intranet a bit my first couple of weeks, figuring that these young hip (haha, “hip”) persons might include some number into meditation (“meditation”) or sitting or even zazen, and while I found some interesting groups dedicated to thinking about the impact of digital technologies on our practices of attention, and about being sure to pause now and then and be in the moment, and like that, they seemed to be mostly based out in Mountain View.

I did one “Mindfulness at your Desk” thing at Noon Eastern, 9am Pacific, where someone out on the Left Coast led a small group of us in meditation over videoconferencing, and that was fine, but a little odd.

I was figuring I could bring in a zafu of my own, and maybe just remember to sit in a quiet place somewhere now and then, when while exploring one of the higher floors of the building I came across a sign saying that sits take place twice daily (!) in the little sort of exercise room / dance studio. And in exploring it I found a cabinet with a bunch of nice high-quality zafus and blankets to go under them.

And the next time one of the twice-daily things came up, I was there, and this smiling person came and talked quietly and asked who would like some guided meditation, and talked softly to them while the rest of us just sat (on the nice zafus and blankets, which it turns out are for general use), and then he rang a lovely Zen bell, and we all sat more, until he rang it again and we slowly got up and went out.

ZOMG, eh?

So I may have a little practice, and maybe even a vague sort of sangha (not that there’s any particular reason to think all or any of the people are Buddhist as such), right there at work.

Who woulda thought?

P.S. This is a very good recipe for Butternut Squash Soup!

Avid fans of mediocre fiction

There are all sorts of fascinating things going on.

One fascinating thing is the breathtakingly rapid evolution of media of all sorts; and one fascinating part of that thing is these here “e-books” which are available “on-line”, more or less directly from the authors.

The web-site Amazon Dot Com, to pick a very notable example, has a whole ecosystem, one might say polysyllabicly, built around these essentially self-published and to a great extent disintermediated artifacts, where one can buy (or acquire, for the significant numbers that are nominally free) copies of these books (and the associated licenses to read the copies, which are enforced by one’s own computers and reading software, in an odd and facially improbable bit of co-optation), and rate them with small integers, and leave comments on them, and rate and comment on other people’s comments, and see what other books people who have purchased this one have also purchased, and so on for quite some time.

(Here is a link to this stuff, or at least a link that, at the moment, when followed by me, leads to something like the “Books” subtree of the largish “Kindle” tree, which also includes the Amazon-branded reading devices (you can also read these e-books on various other devices), and non-book things (magazines, who knows what-all) that can also be read on them.)

Not all of the e-books are all disintermediated and self-published; some number of them are also acquired and edited and published by publishing houses large and small and new and old, brought out at the same time as, or before or after, old-fashioned non-e versions of the same book, actually printed on paper in ink. These I am not talking about so much here today; there are interesting things to say about them, but to the extent that they are selected and polished and marketed in roughly the same way books were a decade or three ago, they are not, comme on dit, in my fovea at this time.

(Haha, the WordPress spell checker does not know the word “fovea”. I suggests that perhaps I mean “forgave”. Also, it scolds me for writing “WordPress” with a small “p”, even though the publishing software, obnoxiously in my opinion, automatically capitalizes that “p” for me automatically at publishing time, heh.)

So anyway, he said loquaciously, about those e-books that are all disintermediated and self-published and all.

Many of them are really badly-writen.

(This may not come as a huge surprise.)

Some of them are in fact very good. For instance I discovered by following some winding path through the Internets the Wool books by Hugh Howey (looks like the first one is available free, which is nice; I recommend it). They are books that might not have made it out of the slush pile at a publishing house (or they might have; who can tell), but eventually bubbled to my, and lots of other people’s, attention via the ecosystem of self-publishing, and are now apparently doing rather well. There are rough edges here and there (I recall something about what the protagonists’ wife was said to be doing at the start of the first book that by the end of the third it was unlikely anyone would have been allowed to do, and seemed to be from some earlier and now-abandoned version of the plotline, for instance), but no worse than in many normally-published books I’ve read.

But many of them, even most of them I would dare say, requiring for their publication only that (1) the author thinks it is good (or at least would like to publish it), and (2) the author pushes some buttons on their computer (significantly fewer buttons than it took to write it, in most cases), and therefore having successfully vaulted only a pair of very low bars, are not very good at all.

And yet some of these not-very-good-at-all books have, or appear to have, avid fans in the ecosystem, who rate them at the top of the set of possible integers, post glowing reviews comparing them favorably to all other books previously written in the genre, give “unhelpful” ratings to negative reviews posted by others, and so on.

It makes one wonder.

For instance, is the difference between Post-human, by David Simpson, rated four-and-a-half stars out of five, and Wool by Hugh Howey (linked above), also rated four-and-a-half stars out of five, just that I personally thought the latter was pretty good (my review gave it five of five stars) and the former pretty bad (my rather scathing review gave it just two)?

Once the magnetic field was in place, he was free to bolt upward, unhindered by friction, air pressure, temperature, or anything else. In seconds, he was above the stratosphere, using his mind’s eye to plot an automatic course for Venus.

I think Howey’s book is better than Simpson’s in ways that don’t come down to just my personal opinions. Simpson’s contains technology howlers about glowing green magnetic fields that allow humans to fly through space at interplanetary speeds without benefit of spaceship; Howey’s has just some rather powerful psychoactive drugs that unreliably suppress memory and alter behavior. Simpson’s has an evil antagonist with god-like powers who keeps the protagonist alive to allow him to do something he (the antagonist) would clearly have had no trouble doing all by himself. Howey’s bad guys are subtler and more realistic, and in that way more terrifyingly evil.

Simpson’s protagonist is the most intelligent person in the solar system (scientifically measured!), and everything goes right for him, pretty much all the time. Howey’s various protagonists are more ordinary people, more conflicted and confused, and when they have any triumphs at all they are partial and sometimes worrying ones.

(And nearly every time one of Simpson’s comic-book superheroes turns on the stupid all-powerful magnetic field, Simpson has to say that he “ignited” it. Drives me up the walls, I tell ya.)

I don’t want to pick on Simpson’s book in particular, really; I’m sure there are other four-and-a-half-star ebooks that are worse. But the case of Post-Human is notable for at least a couple of reasons (and here we will segue gracefully into the lazy weblogger’s device of unordered lists):

• For awhile, Simpson was offering a free book to anyone who gave him a five-star review on Amazon (he has since apparently stopped, and I hope it was because it’s against the rules).
• But there are still four and five star reviews being written, and many of the negative reviews also have an unusual number of “unhelpful” ratings, so that last point can’t explain the whole effect.

What now? Just a bunch of thoughts:

• Maybe the many glowing reviews and downratings of negative ones for the Simpson book are just fake; results of bribery, or posted by Simpson himself, or by some entity hired by him (I would not be surprised if there were companies that will create shadow-puppets who will boost the Amazon rep of a book for money). It would be interesting to look at the other reviews posted by people who have given very glowing reviews of very average works.
• Maybe only some of them are fake and/or a result of the above-mentioned bribery, and the rest are from people who wanted to get on the bandwagon, in some to-be-determined sense.
• Maybe some of the people who accepted the Simpson bribe are experiencing that interesting psychological effect whose name I forget and have decided that (since they can’t be bribed that easily!) they really did love the book, and go around downrating negative comments just to prove it.
• Maybe I am wrong, and the Howey book is not objectively any better than the Simpson one, and it’s just that the problems with the latter happen to bother me personally more than those with the former.
• Maybe I am not wrong, and by my objective criteria the Simpson book really is worse, but there are a significant number of people who don’t care about those objective criteria to speak of at all, but enjoyed the book greatly for some other reasons that I don’t really understand. That is sort of an interesting thought.
• I have a vague impression that there is sort of a whole subculture of people on the Internets who write and read and praise and advertise not-very-good books, either (see above) they have never really read a good book, or they actually prefer books that are objectively (in whatever sense) bad, or for some other reason. I recently came across a weblog reviewing some mediocre self-published Amazon ebook as “an Amazon Bestseller!”, where that phrase was apparently copied from the book’s own page on the author’s website; I was nasty and posted a polite comment pointing out that the only sense in which it was an Amazon Bestseller was that it has an Amazon Bestseller rank, which every book on Amazon appears to have, and that in this case the rank was somewhere over one million. So “best” only in the most technical of senses. Presumably, though, there is some in-crowd feeling to be had in posting a positive review of a Best Seller?

Looking at many of the glowing reviews of the Simpson book (and for that matter other books I find poorly-written), my impression is that many of the reviewers are somewhat less than literate themselves, and/or less than civil, that in particular people who leave negative comments on negative reviews and otherwise defend the books in the commentary part of the ecosystem, tend to sound like trolls (broadly construed). What sorts of things do these people have in common? What are their motivations?

And, sort of conversely, will we eventually have a system in which I can mark those people as having opinions generally Irrelevant To My Own (or even Contrary To My Own), so that the system could take this into account in its own recommendations? “This book has a 4.5 star rating, or 2.25 stars if we count only people whose opinions you are likely to care about.” Is anyone doing that yet?

And that is about the end of my thoughts on the subject for the time being. Reading over it I see that I come across as something of an elitist jerk, but when it comes to books I am rather content being an elitist jerk. :)

Good reading!