There is a concept in post-modern philosophy called "hauntology". This theory posits that late-capitalist societies loose their ability to imagine different social orders; and cannot imagine the future except as high-tech versions of the current social order. To fill the void of novelty, the culture industry must constantly recycle and repackage old culture.
Anyway, this isn't a new phenomena, just a technology enabling us to resurrect live people instead of just fictional characters.
I've thought about this a lot. I think its more the sheer oversaturation of "culture" than it is a true lack of imagination. People alive today consume exponentially greater amounts of "culture" (for the broadest term possible) than anyone ever before, and it's not even close.
When tech enables you to experience a movie or a video game or a performer 30 years after the death of everyone involved, in essentially the same fidelity as the day it debuted, "old culture" has a much harder time making way for "new culture." If Star Wars exists, why care about Rebel Moon or whatever that movie was called?
I think the public consciousness can only maintain cognizance and interest in so much, but at the same time creatives are constantly adding to the Culture Pile. But the more tech enables us to hold on to our past, it becomes more and more difficult to move on, and the majority of new stuff goes unwanted and unappreciated. And so the mass market dives into keeping the old alive with reboots, remakes, remasters, and now AI recreations, because that's what people respond to.
Not even. We just need it to trip over the pronunciation of something, preferably the same thing more than once, and then both the news and social media will latch onto it like a pit bull and with any luck they'll never live it down.
Michaels, 79, told Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday that he was initially “very skeptical” of the proposal from NBCUniversal executives — until he heard the AI-generated version of his speaking voice, which is capable of greeting viewers by name.
Greeting viewers by name? Not in my fucking house. AI should be a tool to rid humanity of undesirable work. Instead its replacing humanity in every field where humanity is the main event. Why the fuck would I ever want to listen to a fucking robot while I watch the Olympics, or anything for that matter?
Buy dumb TVs. Make your next phone a Pixel and install Graphene OS. Ditch Windows/MacOS for Linux. Use ProtonMail. Run a Pi-Hole on your network. Do anything you can to take control of your digital footprint in any way.
Don't let corporations freely suck your data dry and exploit your life for profit while force feeding you their elaborate fakery. Its impossible to insulate yourself from it all but any step towards digital privacy is the right step to take.
If we tried this in the UK with someone like, say, the late David Coleman, I'm not entirely sure anyone who remembers him would be able to distinguish - other than, as I said, the knowledge that he's been gone for quite some time now.
Coleman, was considered a go-to commentator for decades despite being gaffe-prone even at the best of times. He was occasionally oblivious and apparently lacking any self-awareness too. (He did kind of learn to laugh at himself though and was a good, well, sport, about it all.)
Sounds very AI to me. Come to think of it, he may even have been kept around precisely because of the entertainment value.
I assume that Al Michaels is not of this bizarre calibre and it wouldn't take long for people to notice.
Michaels uttered perhaps the most famous six words in the history of sports broadcasting at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics after the U.S. hockey team triumphed over the Soviet Union in a stunning upset: "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!"
It's tragic that the humanity of these types of things that are understood by humans will be lost in AI.
I took a music business class and I vaguely remember this subject. I'm pretty sure dude was actually in the hole from frivolous spending, and also partially due to the way the music rights worked out.
Here's a legitimate question...at what point, in your mind, does a child who's suffered years of sexual abuse deserve to lose every shred of empathy? In no way am I ever going to excuse what MJ might have done, but he himself was also a victim for so many years, and was set up to fail from the beginning by his family and the industry
A very large percentage of paedophiles are victims themselves. Children don't have any characteristics that arouse me, and to dwell on the thought males me feel very uncomfortable indeed.
If a person is attracted to a child in a sexual manner, then for want of a better way of putting it, there has to be something wrong with that. Arguably that person needs help rather than incarceration.
But then there are the victims of the paedophile. They deserve justice, and children deserve to be safe.
Maybe MJ was a private and quirky troubled artist who was guilty of poor optics. Maybe he was a serial serial offender, who was enabled BT paid off security, parents etc.
We will never know what MJ did or did not do with those children, but they were failed by multiple adults, regardless. If you let your kid play on a main road you are a terrible parent, whether they get hit by a car or not. Every person that did not intervene, allowed that child to continue playing is as responsible as the parent.
And there are mountains of child-abuse victims who never abuse children. MJ was treated worse than most children can even imagine but the advantages he took on other children is unacceptable.
I saw a documentary about him once where they showed him in a Las Vegas hotel. He decided he wanted to go shopping, so they took him to the fancy art store there. We're talking paintings that cost a couple million dollars each. He walked through the store and pointed at things he liked and his handlers bought everything for him. If that was an average day for him, then I'm not surprised he was heavily in debt. They had to close everything off just for him to go places, which I'm sure also costs a fortune. Fans would get a glimpse of him walking and break down into hysterics and tears. It was quite the spectacle.
For the people of the Venezuelan state of Mérida, the glaciated peaks of its Sierra Nevada have been a source of pride since time immemorial: The mountains are part of the regional identity and the origin of various legends in the area that relate them to mythical white eagles.
It is a great sadness and the only thing we can do is use their legacy to show children how beautiful our Sierra Nevada was,” Alejandra Melfo, an astrophysicist at the Universidad de los Andes in Mérida, said in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), they typically exist where average annual temperatures reach near-freezing levels and winter precipitation causes significant accumulations of snow.
With the increase in global temperatures due to climate change, the melting of large ice masses is a continuous phenomenon that, among other things, contributes to raising sea levels around the world.
“Although the end of the glacier was something that was going to happen due to the cycle we are experiencing, there is no doubt that global warming, a product of greenhouse gases, has of course accelerated the disappearance process,” Bezada said.
The Andes region — a mountain range running through parts of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela — has seen a temperature rise of at least 0.10 degrees Celsius over the past seven decades.
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