"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
pure and utter bollox, surely he was not a native English speaker.
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
It's an ugly looking thing in the wrong place. Sticking up out of lovely Fitzrovia
Pull it down, and London's skyline would begin to make more sense (not hard)
In the great order of things, this should be considered a little time after the view from Westminster Bridge towards the City once again looks something familiar to Wordsworth.
BTW, re Gerard MH, earlier (can't find it now); it is arguable that 'day' is not used as a verb there; you import the later 'find' or the earlier 'get' to make sense of it.
Jeez. It sounds like the wing simply.... fell apart
????
Is it wise of us to have a nuclear deterrent that is dependent upon another country? Is it in the US's interest for us to have a functioning system or would it be better that we didn't so we'd then be more reliant on Uncle Sam?
Personally, I have always felt we should have gone the French route, and developed our own truly indy deterrent. Expensive, but ultimately worth it
Instead we have ended up with a deterrent wholly dependent on the goodwill of an ally, who might be minded to tell us to fuck off, and now it seems it possibly doesn't work?
We should be urgently looking into the development of an entirely UK deterrent. Perhaps we could unite with Australia, as part of AUKUS, I dunno. They must fancy having a deterrent with China looming...
I see the shiny new parliamentary precedent is that previous precedents should be dumped to make things easier for the 'main' parties. Hoyle is Michael Martin level fckn useless.
"An earlier post (see 1.43pm) said the Labour motion was likely to pass. I have removed that line from it now because, looking closely at what Sir Lindsay Hoyle said (see 1.54pm), it is clear that the government motion will only be put to a vote if the Labour one has been voted down. That means the government has a clear incentive to vote against Labour’s wording.
Also, if the government can knock out the Labour amendment, that would lead to a vote on the original SNP motion – which will trigger a Labour revolt (because some MPs would support it). That is a second reason why the Tory whips have a reason for voting against the Labour wording – even though in practice it is hard to detect much difference between the government’s position and Labour’s."
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
It’s a national humiliation.
I am writing a strongly worded letter to the Foreign Secretary.
I see our politicians have decided a good old blame game is more important than actually paying sub postmasters.
More lawyers needed.
I will tell you now what will happen.
1. The Inquiry will produce a humongous damning report which will blame pretty much everyone in the Post Office, Fujitsu, the internal and external lawyers and in the relevant Ministries for multiple failings over years. 2. Some people will be referred to the police for possible criminal offences. 3. The police will take years to investigate and likely do nothing. 4. The regulators may go "tut tut" at some of the lawyers. 5. Lots of people will be shuffled sideways, retired or move to other jobs. No-one will lose bonuses or suffer anything remotely serious. 6. None of the recommendations in the report will be taken seriously. But quite a lot of new procedures will be written. 7. Some poor Labour Minister will have to read out an apology in the Commons. 8. The subpostmasters will not get anything like full or fair compensation for their losses. 9. Everything will anyway be delayed because of the election: stasis beforehand and horror at the reality after it. 10. The idiotic "believe the computer" law will not be changed thus ensuring future miscarriages of justice.
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
It's an ugly looking thing in the wrong place. Sticking up out of lovely Fitzrovia
Pull it down, and London's skyline would begin to make more sense (not hard)
The idea at the time was to pull down Fitzrovia and surround the Tower with sympathetic monoliths so it was no longer considered to be 'in the wrong place'. There's a mini version on the M40 at Stokenchurch, now bereft of dishes, still meeting travellers to our antique land.
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
It's an ugly looking thing in the wrong place. Sticking up out of lovely Fitzrovia
Pull it down, and London's skyline would begin to make more sense (not hard)
In the great order of things, this should be considered a little time after the view from Westminster Bridge towards the City once again looks something familiar to Wordsworth.
BTW, re Gerard MH, earlier (can't find it now); it is arguable that 'day' is not used as a verb there; you import the later 'find' or the earlier 'get' to make sense of it.
Yes, I agree that sense is arguable. OK I have now faffed about on PB for too long (fascinating as it is)
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
It's an ugly looking thing in the wrong place. Sticking up out of lovely Fitzrovia
Pull it down, and London's skyline would begin to make more sense (not hard)
In the great order of things, this should be considered a little time after the view from Westminster Bridge towards the City once again looks something familiar to Wordsworth.
BTW, re Gerard MH, earlier (can't find it now); it is arguable that 'day' is not used as a verb there; you import the later 'find' or the earlier 'get' to make sense of it.
Just been reading this - what London up to Richmond were like in 1829. Hadn't quite realised how different London was then to view. You could actually see the distant hills ...
Detectives investigating the SNP’s finances have requested to re-interview staff working at the party’s headquarters.
Workers, including those who were not in place when the inquiry began, have been sent letters asking them to speak to officers. A source said that this move was being directed by the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service.
How can it take more than 2 years to see the obvious , the money is gone , someone withdrew it from the bank accounts. Only a few (2) had the cheque book.
I see our politicians have decided a good old blame game is more important than actually paying sub postmasters.
More lawyers needed.
I will tell you now what will happen.
1. The Inquiry will produce a humongous damning report which will blame pretty much everyone in the Post Office, Fujitsu, the internal and external lawyers and in the relevant Ministries for multiple failings over years. 2. Some people will be referred to the police for possible criminal offences. 3. The police will take years to investigate and likely do nothing. 4. The regulators may go "tut tut" at some of the lawyers. 5. Lots of people will be shuffled sideways, retired or move to other jobs. No-one will lose bonuses or suffer anything remotely serious. 6. None of the recommendations in the report will be taken seriously. But quite a lot of new procedures will be written. 7. Some poor Labour Minister will have to read out an apology in the Commons. 8. The subpostmasters will not get anything like full or fair compensation for their losses. 9. Everything will anyway be delayed because of the election: stasis beforehand and horror at the reality after it. 10. The idiotic "believe the computer" law will not be changed thus ensuring future miscarriages of justice.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
It’s a national humiliation.
I am writing a strongly worded letter to the Foreign Secretary.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
The comment by MJW about Martin Amis downthread is a good one to use as an example.
Consider the literary career of Martin Amis. His first few novels were patchy, but when he hit his prime (Money, London Fields), he wrote like nobody else ever had. You could pick any paragraph out of his work and show it to someone and they'd go "yep, that's Amis." Then consider his next umpteen novels - from The Information and Yellow Dog through to Lionel Asbo. All variations on a theme. Lionel Asbo is a thin imitation of Clint Smoker who is a thin imitation of Keith Talent. All variations on a theme that AI could churn out, because it's been trained on the formula.
Now consider some hot shot young writer, who picks up a copy of London Fields for the first time. But instead of creating a Clint Smoker or a Lionel Asbo after reading it, he goes on to create something definitively new and stylistically original. Something someone could take any paragraph out of and go "yep, that's Hotshot Young Writer, for sure". This is what AI is incapable of. At the moment, when you read AI written stuff, all you go is "yep, that's someone trying to write like Martin Amis" (which is also what reading later Martin Amis feels like).
This is what I meant by "going from zero to one" to borrow Peter Thiel's terminology. Human intelligence isn't developed in a vaccum, every writer is inspired and influenced by the thousands of books they've read, every artist is inspired by the art they've seen. The difference between Picasso or Amis and, say, ChatGPT, is they are capable of creating something that looks and feels genuinely new. Something that is more than the sum of its parts. Whereas those of us of limited talent - or AI models - are reduced to rehashing, copying, making more of the same.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
Here is Gerard Manley Hopkins, in one of his terrible sonnets, using a noun as a verb. "Day"
I cast for comfort I can no more get By groping round my comfortless, than blind Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
pure and utter bollox, surely he was not a native English speaker.
Much as Picasso was influenced by primitive African art Hopkins was influenced by primitive Welsh poetry that relies for its effect on a curious concatenation of colliding consonants (this sentence being an example).
I am very glad that, 70 years ago, I had to read the poetry of Robert Burns, rather than that of Gerald Manley Hopkins for English literature, O-level. And Burns was complicated enough for teenagers from Southeast Essex!
Jeez. It sounds like the wing simply.... fell apart
????
Is it wise of us to have a nuclear deterrent that is dependent upon another country? Is it in the US's interest for us to have a functioning system or would it be better that we didn't so we'd then be more reliant on Uncle Sam?
It has been so ever since we had SLBMs. That's a very long time indeed.
There is certainly a case for having a chat with France, S Korea, Japan etc about a future system. But it would be quite some time before any such thing was in service.
I see our politicians have decided a good old blame game is more important than actually paying sub postmasters.
More lawyers needed.
I will tell you now what will happen.
1. The Inquiry will produce a humongous damning report which will blame pretty much everyone in the Post Office, Fujitsu, the internal and external lawyers and in the relevant Ministries for multiple failings over years. 2. Some people will be referred to the police for possible criminal offences. 3. The police will take years to investigate and likely do nothing. 4. The regulators may go "tut tut" at some of the lawyers. 5. Lots of people will be shuffled sideways, retired or move to other jobs. No-one will lose bonuses or suffer anything remotely serious. 6. None of the recommendations in the report will be taken seriously. But quite a lot of new procedures will be written. 7. Some poor Labour Minister will have to read out an apology in the Commons. 8. The subpostmasters will not get anything like full or fair compensation for their losses. 9. Everything will anyway be delayed because of the election: stasis beforehand and horror at the reality after it. 10. The idiotic "believe the computer" law will not be changed thus ensuring future miscarriages of justice.
Re 10, I do not know what will happen to the computer law, and actually there is a real difficulty in framing a law which is both workable in the everyday world and also is immune from technical errors - simply because so much evidence ultimately derives from technologies no-one in the court understands.
But, crucially, the post office case puts juries on notice that whatever a judge says to the jury, they alone are the arbiters of fact, and no technology is infallible.
They remain entitled, in the face of a not guilty plea, to say "We believed the defendant, we don't have to say what was wrong with the technical evidence, but we think the defendant was telling the truth. So we find them Not Guilty."
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
This is not fruitful. It is my job to understand creativity, it is not yours
I have pulled rank, to end the debate. Sorry
Just about every artist I have come across couldn't care less about "understanding creativity". They just produce art.
Your error is to think that you are more than this and somehow understand the intellectual and historical underpinnings of the creative process. You are not and you don't.
I wouldn't worry about it, though.
Your art is perfectly good as is and if you try to do a Damien Hirst as a jumped up little shit believing your meta-cognition is also great then you will, alas and like him, be judged accordingly.
Detectives investigating the SNP’s finances have requested to re-interview staff working at the party’s headquarters.
Workers, including those who were not in place when the inquiry began, have been sent letters asking them to speak to officers. A source said that this move was being directed by the Crown Office, Scotland’s prosecution service.
How can it take more than 2 years to see the obvious , the money is gone , someone withdrew it from the bank accounts. Only a few (2) had the cheque book.
This was from a few weeks ago. In short the investigation’s scope has become wider.
Detectives investigating the SNP’s finances are examining claims that signatures on financial documents have been forged.
In the latest revelation from Operation Branchform, officers are understood to have paperwork in the name of a person who denies having any knowledge of the matter.
A source told the Sunday Mail newspaper: “There has been signatures on documents which the person named has made clear they did not write. It is one of a number of many strands to the investigation which remain under scrutiny. The documents are in relation to financial transactions which are being probed over the potential for fraud.”
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
YOU, CASINO, ARE QUESTIONING THE VALUE OF OUR NUCLEAR DETERRENT??
On one hand, if true, that's rather poor, isn't it?
On the other; Starmer's actually showing some teeth. For once.
I can’t see that at all in the Sky News liveblog. Maybe I’m blind? Either way, it’s obvious the SNP and government were playing silly procedural games and they’ve now got a silly prize. I personally think Labour are in a positional mess and should back the SNP motion but it was clearly raised in bad faith.
I see our politicians have decided a good old blame game is more important than actually paying sub postmasters.
More lawyers needed.
I will tell you now what will happen.
1. The Inquiry will produce a humongous damning report which will blame pretty much everyone in the Post Office, Fujitsu, the internal and external lawyers and in the relevant Ministries for multiple failings over years. 2. Some people will be referred to the police for possible criminal offences. 3. The police will take years to investigate and likely do nothing. 4. The regulators may go "tut tut" at some of the lawyers. 5. Lots of people will be shuffled sideways, retired or move to other jobs. No-one will lose bonuses or suffer anything remotely serious. 6. None of the recommendations in the report will be taken seriously. But quite a lot of new procedures will be written. 7. Some poor Labour Minister will have to read out an apology in the Commons. 8. The subpostmasters will not get anything like full or fair compensation for their losses. 9. Everything will anyway be delayed because of the election: stasis beforehand and horror at the reality after it. 10. The idiotic "believe the computer" law will not be changed thus ensuring future miscarriages of justice.
Can I suggest that the really important statement in Henry Staughton's notes was the reference to sub postmasters failing to make a living from their sub post offices. It would seem that the whole structure is unfit for purpose and root reform is necessary.
Repercussions from @CommonsSpeaker decision to call Labour Gaza amendment: Conservative MP William Wragg has just tabled an Early Day Motion saying: This member has no confidence in Mr Speaker
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
I see - so now only experts can have views? Can you shut up about science then old boy? Let the scientists opine?
On one hand, if true, that's rather poor, isn't it?
On the other; Starmer's actually showing some teeth. For once.
The Speaker could just tell Starmer to **** off, which of course is in his gift.
The whole vote is a cynical ploy from Bond villain, Stephen Flynn to embarrass Starmer-Labour. Maybe Hoyle is getting somewhat tired of the SNP's old nonsense.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
We have come to the point in the political cycle that everything the government does is failing and the only solution now is for a new start with an early GE
Not a good look for Hoyle, allowing himself to be strongarmed by Starmer. In a tricky situation he should have stuck with precedent.
Mind you Starmer's seen the way the Tories walk all over Hoyle and thought "I'll have some of that".
Quite. Pearl clutching over procedural tomfoolery from any party is a bit much. The commons is entirely built on procedural tomfoolery. There’s also the possibility that someone annoyed Hoyle with the procedural warfare over the last couple of days and he decided to play referee.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
Fighting In Built Up Areas? As in the 'German' village the army built on Salisbury near my parents? That FIBUA?
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Agree. But in terms of quality, it deserves Grade I listing. In its day it was an astonishment to be admired. If only other high buildings in London were as interesting.
Oh, yes, certainly. I wish they'd kept some of the microwave dishes - even just the few that were still attached when the listing came in. They were kept around as late as 2012-ish before they finally got permission to remove them.
They're a wonderful monument to that moment of absurd 1960s optimism. BT Tower, the APT rotting away near the train line through Crewe, the Samson and Goliath cranes in Belfast, Concorde at Heathrow.
Perhaps we should cast some dinghies in resin on Kingsdown beach, so that kids in the future can have something similar of the 2020s to look back on in wonder.
On one hand, if true, that's rather poor, isn't it?
On the other; Starmer's actually showing some teeth. For once.
I can’t see that at all in the Sky News liveblog. Maybe I’m blind? Either way, it’s obvious the SNP and government were playing silly procedural games and they’ve now got a silly prize. I personally think Labour are in a positional mess and should back the SNP motion but it was clearly raised in bad faith.
The SNP motion can't be supported by anyone seeking to be a serious government, because of its accusations against Israel (collective punishment), which, boringly, are a matter for legal argument in years to come. IMHO this dismal and distressing matter is one for centrists of Tory and Labour to make common cause, have a common line and play no games at all.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
Fighting In Built Up Areas? As in the 'German' village the army built on Salisbury near my parents? That FIBUA?
The comedy here is that there is nothing in standing orders preventing the Speaker from doing this. Various people may not like this - and rightly so. But it isn't blatantly out of order as some of the Bercow shenanigans were.
Note the power shift. Labour already control the levers of power...
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
Fighting In Built Up Areas? As in the 'German' village the army built on Salisbury near my parents? That FIBUA?
You'd have to ask Leon what he was thinking when he said "soldiering in urban environments" but yes, broadly, that FIBUA.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
Fighting In Built Up Areas? As in the 'German' village the army built on Salisbury near my parents? That FIBUA?
You'd have to ask Leon what he was thinking when he said "soldiering in urban environments" but yes, broadly, that FIBUA.
Leon's phrase does sound a bit like Friday night in Aldershot or Belize, mind.
On one hand, if true, that's rather poor, isn't it?
On the other; Starmer's actually showing some teeth. For once.
I can’t see that at all in the Sky News liveblog. Maybe I’m blind? Either way, it’s obvious the SNP and government were playing silly procedural games and they’ve now got a silly prize. I personally think Labour are in a positional mess and should back the SNP motion but it was clearly raised in bad faith.
The SNP motion can't be supported by anyone seeking to be a serious government, because of its accusations against Israel (collective punishment), which, boringly, are a matter for legal argument in years to come. IMHO this dismal and distressing matter is one for centrists of Tory and Labour to make common cause, have a common line and play no games at all.
I would be fine with that but it ain’t going to happen sadly.
The comedy here is that there is nothing in standing orders preventing the Speaker from doing this. Various people may not like this - and rightly so. But it isn't blatantly out of order as some of the Bercow shenanigans were.
Note the power shift. Labour already control the levers of power...
Another asset sold overseas. MCR Hotels is American.
Not much of an asset, these days. The microwave network it was built for was switched off decades ago. The tower itself was used for mobile network control, but that was moved to Vodafone's Newbury site in the mid 2010s. There's a broadcast switching hub in the base, or was until recently - but that could be done anywhere, there's no need for it to be in the middle of London.
Otherwise, it's just a very expensive corporate hospitality site. It's Grade II listed, so can't easily be altered to be suitable for anything BT might actually need.
Flogging it to be used as a hotel is probably the best thing that can be done with it.
Why not a British hotel? Aiui in the short term BT will be leasing space there anyway.
On one hand, if true, that's rather poor, isn't it?
On the other; Starmer's actually showing some teeth. For once.
The Speaker could just tell Starmer to **** off, which of course is in his gift.
The whole vote is a cynical ploy from Bond villain, Stephen Flynn to embarrass Starmer-Labour. Maybe Hoyle is getting somewhat tired of the SNP's old nonsense.
The SNP have often publically stated their aim, rather than sitting out the London Parliament as the IRA Irish Nationalists do, they prefer to turn up and cause as much mischief and chaos as possible, certainly not do anything the least bit constructive.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
We have come to the point in the political cycle that everything the government does is failing and the only solution now is for a new start with an early GE
It shouldn't take the intervention of a minister to ensure that the Trident missiles work. What are all the admirals for if not this?!?
Can I suggest that the really important statement in Henry Staughton's notes was the reference to sub postmasters failing to make a living from their sub post offices. It would seem that the whole structure is unfit for purpose and root reform is necessary.
I regularly took packages to the PO in my village for posting and was astounded when the SPM said one day that he makes no money at all from my packages because I buy the labels from Royal Mail's web site. Only if I paid the postage in the PO do they get a (tiny) cut, but as the packages are going abroad and the customs paperwork is fierce that isn't really a viable option.
The PO closed down a couple of years ago. The next nearest PO, in a neighbouring town, closed last year. It really does look like the current arrangements are simply an unviable business.
Bearing in mind the influence the goings on in the Commons today is going to have on Netanyahu is less than zero, I'd argue today is ALL about procedural shenanigans, trying to embarass each other and urging people to come together for OUR PARTY'S motion.
"Lammy says MPs are used to division, because their trade relies upon it. But he says, on this, MPs should rise above it. He urges the Commons to come together for the sake of peace."
"Andrew Mitchell, the development minister, is speaking now on behalf of the government. He says David Lammy urged MPs to come together, and he says the best way for this to happen would be for the the Commons to support the government."
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
We have come to the point in the political cycle that everything the government does is failing and the only solution now is for a new start with an early GE
It shouldn't take the intervention of a minister to ensure that the Trident missiles work. What are all the admirals for if not this?!?
I suspect the missiles do work and we’ve run into an unfortunate coincidence. However, that means we need another test post haste to confirm if it’s a coincidence or if there is genuinely something wrong with our equipment or processes. You shouldn’t be able to cock up an ICBM launch
The sooner this parliament faces a GE the better for the country
Well yes. Putting the country first.
If you are saying this on 21st of February Big G, imagine mood of the electorate and business groups as we enter September without one. There really is no swingback for the Conservatives, only great risks of entering choppy waters of that background narrative second half of this year.
It's over for the Tories. Absolutely over. We didn't do what we said we'd do and did the things we said we wouldn't. The longer Sunak delays the election date the angrier the electorate are going to get.
Tim Montgomerie not backing a Conservative leader?
Now, there's a surprise.
While that's true about Tim, the thing about this quote is that he's not agitating for another leader, or criticising one, he's talking about the whole party, and all the decisions taken.
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
Fighting In Built Up Areas? As in the 'German' village the army built on Salisbury near my parents? That FIBUA?
You'd have to ask Leon what he was thinking when he said "soldiering in urban environments" but yes, broadly, that FIBUA.
Leon's phrase does sound a bit like Friday night in Aldershot or Belize, mind.
Friday night in Aldershot is fairly tame these days
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
It's not often I agree with you, CR, and I'm staunchly non-nuke, but I totally agree this is a massive disaster both politically and militarily, and couldn't have come at a worse time in the world.
The SNP tabled the amendment in a way that would mean Labour couldn’t back it . The Tories have the numbers to vote down any motion but chose to join the political game playing by tabling an amendment designed to force a drama in Labour .
Neither the SNP or the Tories bargained on the normally precedent obsessed Hoyle allowing the Labour amendment but got what they deserved for their political games !
Nowhere does he mention compensation for the subpostmasters. Not sure why he thinks this helps him.
Also the context in which the word "hobble" appears is completely different to the way he presented it. Here it just means there's no scope for grand ideas.
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
It's not often I agree with you, CR, and I'm staunchly non-nuke, but I totally agree this is a massive disaster both politically and militarily, and couldn't have come at a worse time in the world.
If you want to increase defence spending, the timing is perfect.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
"This is the trail, the churn, the vail. Aye, it is the wreath, the call, the very bend in the river, where light, and dawn, and the slight, gather in lea, for in this serpentine, this spring, we see not end, but inklings of the ever"
That's tremendous. A proper Biblical cadence, definite hints of Tyndale and the KJV
Why and how did it cough that up, at 2am?
Is it tremendous? It reads more like a random collection of words that don't really mean anything. Vail is a verb, why is it using it as a noun? I think this meaningless verbiage is exactly what you'd expect a LLM to produce as "poetry". It doesn't contain any actual thoughts, and sounds extremely pretentious. And what's the relevance of 2am? I would imagine the server farms this thing runs on are spread all over the world, and it's not like computers go to sleep at night.
As someone who - in his second job, when not dildo knapping - writes the odd thing for a living, I can assure you that this passage is impressive. The rhythm and cadence is beautiful and using a verb as a noun is the sort of thing poets do all the time, we call it creativity, exploring the bounds of the language
The lines contain internal rhyme - trail, vail - light, slight - there is staggered alliteration - serpentine, spring - end, ever - and the last phrase "inklings of the ever" reads like fine Victorian poetry. Tennyson, perhaps?
It is sonorous and resonant, it is mysterious yet opaquely profound. It is ALSO gibberish invented by a computer at 2am
If a 12 year old child came to me, having written this, I would think - "My God this is a massively talented kid, who will go places, this child has a natural sense of verbal rhythm, they know how to make words resound"
Each to their own, it sounds like meaningless, portentious twaddle to me.
The trouble with AI is that it produces very little that is good. But it produces a great deal that is "good enough". Good enough to fool people at first glance, good enough to pass as human to the untrained eye, good enough to be a value proposition, costing several orders less in both time and resources to create than human created writing/art/video.
It is the McDonalds-ification of everything. Cheap, disposable, just about passes as food if you don't stare at it too closely, and ubiquitous worldwide. Most people know, deep down, that it isn't as good as the real thing, but it's cheap, it's there, and it fills a gap.
The thing that worries me the most is the crowding out effect. In a year or two, mass produced AI content will be so ubiquitous that it will be hard to find real content. To the point where, to continue the analogy, we will all be forced to consume mass produced hamburgers whether we like them or not. Because the real thing will be so hard to find.
This is too pessimistic about the quality of AI
Sora shows real beauty and "talent", if it didn't, it wouldn't be freaking out everyone in TV, Hollywood, advertising, etc
It is freaking them out, BECAUSE it is good
We could still be headed for a hideous AI dystopia, but I am not sure AI is always gonne be at the level of McDonalds
See my reply to LostPassword. AI creates stuff that's 90% as good as human created stuff and maybe one day that gets to 99% as good. But it has so far completely failed to create anything that doesn't follow existing formulae. That's good enough for most people, almost all of the time. The risk now is that it crowds out the actual good stuff.
Hollywood should be bothered, because 99% of what they create is as bland and formulaic as anything that's written by an AI. Ads are formulae too - the 1% or so that aren't formulaic tend to be the ones we remember.
Entirely disagree
When I asked Stable Diffusion (before they nerfed it) to create horrifying images, it made images so horrifying that when I put them on here, PBers had heart attacks, and begged me to stop, and I have been banned from posting AI images ever since
The images weren't gory or sexual, just.... terrifying. Possibly more frightening than anything I have seen produced by a human?
My stalker on the Spectator stole these images and claimed them as his own. I can't be bothered to sue him. Anyway here they are
I suggest that last image is right up there, this is not mediocre, that is properly OMFG
Except people have been creating scary images for years in photoshop, and any uncensored AI worth a damn will have been trained on them. People have been posting gore and creepypasta on certain forums since the year dot. So what you're seeing is variations on a theme.
What I'm talking about could be defined more as the ability of the auteur to create something that breaks out of formulae. Something so *different* to anything that has come before, it clearly bears the author's signature throughout, something you say "My god, I wish I had thought of that!" or "Nobody has ever made anything like that before". I'm yet to see an AI creation - writing, image, or video - that doesn't look recycled in some way or other. Which is of course what it is, because it's trained on data it recycles to give the illusion of newness.
But that is all human imagination is: it takes influences and examples, and mashes them together, and creates something new, by compounding them
No art is created ex nihilo. It will come from influences absorbed by the artist in his/her childhood, youth, and studies, and then - if the artist is gifted enough - the artist will create something "original", blending all this
Seeing as we are discussing Gerard Manley Hopkins, widely regarded as one of the most innovative poets of all time, with his unique sprung rhythm, his theory of inscape, and so on, let's use him as an example. He was certainly "original", so original he wasn't really appreciated until long after his death, sadly
But was he absolutely original? Did his poetry come out of nowhere? Of course not, he combined influences
One of them was cynghanedd, an ancient Welsh verse form
"The Welsh Influence in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins"
"For me, discussion of Anglo-Saxon verse and kenning leads logically to a discussion of sprung rhythm, the invention of Gerard Manley Hopkins, noted poet and Jesuit priest. Why? Well, because Hopkins himself was inspired by Anglo-Saxon verse. "
"Hopkins was deeply impressed with the work of Christina Rossetti and she became one of his greatest contemporary influences, with the pair eventually meeting in 1864."
No artist is truly original, unless they actually start a new art form (eg the movies)
AI will, at a guess, be entirely similar, it will combine influences and thereby make great art. It will be fascinating to see if AI can create NEW artforms. We simply don't know about that, these are the very early days of AI art
That's one view. And it's certainly true that no art is created in total isolation - as a human brain, you're "trained" on all the things you've seen before. But there's a difference between rehashing those things in slightly different ways and coming up with a completely new style. Take Picasso, for example. He was "trained on" everything from Van Gogh to Cezanne, but to look at his work, one sees something genuinely new. Not an amalgam of previous styles. This appears to be something AI is incapable of at the moment.
To borrow from the tech industry, it's what Peter Thiel describes as the "Zero to one" moment - the creation of something truly unique rather than a clever reformulation of an existing business model. AI does the clever reformulation well. Really well. I've yet to see an example of it going from zero to one.
But that also is bollocks
What was Picasso's most famously innovative painting, the one that kicked off Cubism?
But those weird famous angular female faces did not come out of nowhere. Picasso was directly inspired by African masks owned and exhibited in Paris. He denied the influence, but no one believed him
"Picasso long acknowledged the importance of Spanish art and Iberian sculpture as influences on the painting. The work is believed by critics to be influenced by African tribal masks and the art of Oceania, although Picasso denied the connection; many art historians remain skeptical about his denials. Picasso spent an October 1906 evening closely studying a Teke figure from Congo then owned by Matisse. It was later that night that Picasso's first studies for what would become Les Demoiselles d’Avignon were created. Several experts maintain that, at the very least, Picasso visited the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro (known later as the Musée de l'Homme) in the spring of 1907 where he saw and sought inspiration from African and other arts shortly before completing Les Demoiselles. He had come to this museum originally to study plaster casts of medieval sculptures, then also considered examples of "primitive" art."
He looked at the Congolese mask then started the painting THAT night. Yeah, sure Pablo, no connection at all. lol
Oh dear. Of course he was influenced by different art but, as was mentioned, and following Cezanne, and possibly Courbet, he decided to make a painting a painting rather than trying to mimic reality. And that was new. And it's something that AI, as a tool of artists, rather than being able to create, or innovate art, is unable to do. And will be unable to do.
I mean I would be happy to discuss AI and art all year but isn't there an election due in Jan we need to dissect.
A face from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles
A Gabonese mask of the type Picasso was looking at when he painted that
Or is it the other way round?
I mean, you know. lol
Yes absolutely he borrowed and was inspired by and next you'll drop the Shunga prints bombshell on us.
He was fascinated by African art, in particular the masks, and that contributed to his approach to plasticity.
But it was that approach to plasticity that was unique to him and not something that AI could originate.
For a writer and artist you surprise me at your doltishness on this. Perhaps to allow you to understand this you could look at Picasso's relationship to African art in the same way as you might look at Joyce's relationship to Homer.
I'm a professional artist, you are not; I get this, and you don't
It is that simple
If we have a big debate about soldiering in urban environments, I will yield to your experience
It is precisely because you are an artist that I am surprised by your lack of insight on this.
Were you one of those who walked into the Tate, looked at the bricks, or an early Matisse for that matter, and thought: "Pah, a three year old could have done that". Sounds like you were.
Edit: FIBUA is the term you are after.
Fighting In Built Up Areas? As in the 'German' village the army built on Salisbury near my parents? That FIBUA?
You'd have to ask Leon what he was thinking when he said "soldiering in urban environments" but yes, broadly, that FIBUA.
Leon's phrase does sound a bit like Friday night in Aldershot or Belize, mind.
Friday night in Aldershot is fairly tame these days
There;s nothing in Aldershot full stop these days.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
The convention was that only government amendments should be selected for opposition motions?
Yeah, that looks outdated for me. Fine for a two party world, but not when we have significant numbers of MPs from third and fourth parties.
Beth Rigby's reporting that the deciding factor was that MPs feared for their safety if a way wasn't found to defuse the issue:
On the matter on pressure on Speaker. Am told that many MPs made a personal pleas to Sir Lindsay about amendments. MPs' have growing concerns for personal safety after incidents of confrontations & protests over the Israel-Hamas war. https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1760306065634124018
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
It's not often I agree with you, CR, and I'm staunchly non-nuke, but I totally agree this is a massive disaster both politically and militarily, and couldn't have come at a worse time in the world.
If you want to increase defence spending, the timing is perfect.
It would be a solid House of Cards episode where Ben Wallace conspires with the Admiralty to embarrass his successor and force an increase in defence spending.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Yes but in the next parliament they almost certainly will.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Jon Craig is actually in the HOC and certainly something happened as can be seen by the comments others are making
Hence as I said earlier if a third Trident test fails and Trump wins again and withdraws from NATO we will have to follow the French and look to create our own independent non Trident nuclear missiles or we will be reliant on the French President, not the US President to stop Putin invading
It's a catastrophe. I'm not sure the Government realise this, and it cannot simply be shrugged off.
It's even led me to question the value of our nuclear deterrent, and I'm as staunch as hell.
It's a complete disaster. A successful launch now needs to be military priority number one. Preferably more than one.
It's not often I agree with you, CR, and I'm staunchly non-nuke, but I totally agree this is a massive disaster both politically and militarily, and couldn't have come at a worse time in the world.
If you want to increase defence spending, the timing is perfect.
The BBC says that each Trident missile costs £17m, or 1,700 Sunak chessboards, so it shouldn't be beyond the current MoD budget to repeat the test.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Yes but in the next parliament they almost certainly will.
So what - he's 67 now, time to retire. Its probably not a bad thing for a new parliament to have a new speaker (that by convention would be an ex-conservative).
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Yes but in the next parliament they almost certainly will.
So what - he's 67 now, time to retire. Its probably not a bad thing for a new parliament to have a new speaker (that by convention would be an ex-conservative).
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Jon Craig is actually in the HOC and certainly something happened as can be seen by the comments others are making
I finally found the quote you referred to on Twitter under Craig’s handle. It begins “Tory MPs claim…”. Context is for kings and this is bollocks.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Yes but in the next parliament they almost certainly will.
Hoyle is toast, SNP and Tories are finishing him off today.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Yes but in the next parliament they almost certainly will.
So what - he's 67 now, time to retire. Its probably not a bad thing for a new parliament to have a new speaker (that by convention would be an ex-conservative).
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
They would have the votes if the Tories feel like changing the Speaker as well. I don't know whether any or many of them do feel like that.
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Yes but in the next parliament they almost certainly will.
So what - he's 67 now, time to retire. Its probably not a bad thing for a new parliament to have a new speaker (that by convention would be an ex-conservative).
He doesn't give a rat fuck which amendment is selected for debate or which one is backed. Doesn't matter one little bit.
While not endorsing your rather colourful analysis you are absolutely right in that this is a side show and wholly irrelevant as far as Netanyahu and Hamas are concerned
I don’t believe this and Labour don’t have the votes for it this side of the GE .
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
It is what Jon Craig of Sky reported
In this parliament Labour can do zip to remove Hoyle , they don’t have the votes . Craig is being his customary drama queen believing any old nonsense he’s told .
Yes but in the next parliament they almost certainly will.
So what - he's 67 now, time to retire. Its probably not a bad thing for a new parliament to have a new speaker (that by convention would be an ex-conservative).
IIUC this is 1 of 3 SNP opposition days. Labour have 17. Hoyle is effectively surrendering the day to Labour because it'd be awkward for them if the SNP had as much control if normal procedures were followed. Goldsmith notes this in his acerbic letter.
This to my mind is the worst day of Hoyle's speakership.
Comments
This is the one to watch as this develops
https://news.sky.com/story/politics-live-defence-secretary-to-make-commons-statement-after-failed-nuclear-deterrent-launch-12593360
BTW, re Gerard MH, earlier (can't find it now); it is arguable that 'day' is not used as a verb there; you import the later 'find' or the earlier 'get' to make sense of it.
Instead we have ended up with a deterrent wholly dependent on the goodwill of an ally, who might be minded to tell us to fuck off, and now it seems it possibly doesn't work?
We should be urgently looking into the development of an entirely UK deterrent. Perhaps we could unite with Australia, as part of AUKUS, I dunno. They must fancy having a deterrent with China looming...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/feb/21/kemi-badenoch-post-office-scandal-rishi-sunak-keir-starmer-pmqs-uk-politics-live
"An earlier post (see 1.43pm) said the Labour motion was likely to pass. I have removed that line from it now because, looking closely at what Sir Lindsay Hoyle said (see 1.54pm), it is clear that the government motion will only be put to a vote if the Labour one has been voted down. That means the government has a clear incentive to vote against Labour’s wording.
Also, if the government can knock out the Labour amendment, that would lead to a vote on the original SNP motion – which will trigger a Labour revolt (because some MPs would support it). That is a second reason why the Tory whips have a reason for voting against the Labour wording – even though in practice it is hard to detect much difference between the government’s position and Labour’s."
I am writing a strongly worded letter to the Foreign Secretary.
1. The Inquiry will produce a humongous damning report which will blame pretty much everyone in the Post Office, Fujitsu, the internal and external lawyers and in the relevant Ministries for multiple failings over years.
2. Some people will be referred to the police for possible criminal offences.
3. The police will take years to investigate and likely do nothing.
4. The regulators may go "tut tut" at some of the lawyers.
5. Lots of people will be shuffled sideways, retired or move to other jobs. No-one will lose bonuses or suffer anything remotely serious.
6. None of the recommendations in the report will be taken seriously. But quite a lot of new procedures will be written.
7. Some poor Labour Minister will have to read out an apology in the Commons.
8. The subpostmasters will not get anything like full or fair compensation for their losses.
9. Everything will anyway be delayed because of the election: stasis beforehand and horror at the reality after it.
10. The idiotic "believe the computer" law will not be changed thus ensuring future miscarriages of justice.
I must pack. Tomorrow I hie to Bangers!
Sawadee and Awkun
https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Panorama_of_the_Thames/SNiNEAAAQBAJ?hl=en
On the other; Starmer's actually showing some teeth. For once.
Lesaigleshurlants: Hahaha
Consider the literary career of Martin Amis. His first few novels were patchy, but when he hit his prime (Money, London Fields), he wrote like nobody else ever had. You could pick any paragraph out of his work and show it to someone and they'd go "yep, that's Amis." Then consider his next umpteen novels - from The Information and Yellow Dog through to Lionel Asbo. All variations on a theme. Lionel Asbo is a thin imitation of Clint Smoker who is a thin imitation of Keith Talent. All variations on a theme that AI could churn out, because it's been trained on the formula.
Now consider some hot shot young writer, who picks up a copy of London Fields for the first time. But instead of creating a Clint Smoker or a Lionel Asbo after reading it, he goes on to create something definitively new and stylistically original. Something someone could take any paragraph out of and go "yep, that's Hotshot Young Writer, for sure". This is what AI is incapable of. At the moment, when you read AI written stuff, all you go is "yep, that's someone trying to write like Martin Amis" (which is also what reading later Martin Amis feels like).
This is what I meant by "going from zero to one" to borrow Peter Thiel's terminology. Human intelligence isn't developed in a vaccum, every writer is inspired and influenced by the thousands of books they've read, every artist is inspired by the art they've seen. The difference between Picasso or Amis and, say, ChatGPT, is they are capable of creating something that looks and feels genuinely new. Something that is more than the sum of its parts. Whereas those of us of limited talent - or AI models - are reduced to rehashing, copying, making more of the same.
And Burns was complicated enough for teenagers from Southeast Essex!
That's a very long time indeed.
There is certainly a case for having a chat with France, S Korea, Japan etc about a future system. But it would be quite some time before any such thing was in service.
But, crucially, the post office case puts juries on notice that whatever a judge says to the jury, they alone are the arbiters of fact, and no technology is infallible.
They remain entitled, in the face of a not guilty plea, to say "We believed the defendant, we don't have to say what was wrong with the technical evidence, but we think the defendant was telling the truth. So we find them Not Guilty."
Your error is to think that you are more than this and somehow understand the intellectual and historical underpinnings of the creative process. You are not and you don't.
I wouldn't worry about it, though.
Your art is perfectly good as is and if you try to do a Damien Hirst as a jumped up little shit believing your meta-cognition is also great then you will, alas and like him, be judged accordingly.
Detectives investigating the SNP’s finances are examining claims that signatures on financial documents have been forged.
In the latest revelation from Operation Branchform, officers are understood to have paperwork in the name of a person who denies having any knowledge of the matter.
A source told the Sunday Mail newspaper: “There has been signatures on documents which the person named has made clear they did not write. It is one of a number of many strands to the investigation which remain under scrutiny. The documents are in relation to financial transactions which are being probed over the potential for fraud.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/snp-finances-police-signatures-forged-investigation-hpb8ljh88
O tempora, o mores.
Mind you Starmer's seen the way the Tories walk all over Hoyle and thought "I'll have some of that".
Repercussions from @CommonsSpeaker decision to call Labour Gaza amendment: Conservative MP William Wragg has just tabled an Early Day Motion saying: This member has no confidence in Mr Speaker
#doublestandards
The whole vote is a cynical ploy from Bond villain, Stephen Flynn to embarrass Starmer-Labour. Maybe Hoyle is getting somewhat tired of the SNP's old nonsense.
Another Tory MP tells me: this is the moment Lyndsay Hoyle goes from being Lyndsay Hoyle to being John Bercow
They're a wonderful monument to that moment of absurd 1960s optimism. BT Tower, the APT rotting away near the train line through Crewe, the Samson and Goliath cranes in Belfast, Concorde at Heathrow.
Perhaps we should cast some dinghies in resin on Kingsdown beach, so that kids in the future can have something similar of the 2020s to look back on in wonder.
Other examples include “Dan Dare”, the TARDIS console, and the Blue Streak missile.
I think it’s great news it will be invested in. A hotel is not a bad use for it at all.
Wish same could be said for the Old War Office which was shamefully flogged off to Indian industrialists and re-branded as “OWO” luxury apartments.
Note the power shift. Labour already control the levers of power...
72. Epithalamion
We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood,
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured, where a gluegold-brown
Marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between
Roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.
We are there, when we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.
By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.
This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast
Into such a sudden zest
Of summertime joys
That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best
There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;
Fairyland; silk-beech, scrolled ash, packed sycamore, wild wychelm, hornbeam fretty overstood
So on what grounds are they complaining here?
https://www.mylondon.news/news/nostalgia/bt-tower-revolving-restaurant-tragedy-18323974
The PO closed down a couple of years ago. The next nearest PO, in a neighbouring town, closed last year. It really does look like the current arrangements are simply an unviable business.
Proper dog and pony show.
But he says, on this, MPs should rise above it.
He urges the Commons to come together for the sake of peace."
"Andrew Mitchell, the development minister, is speaking now on behalf of the government. He says David Lammy urged MPs to come together, and he says the best way for this to happen would be for the the Commons to support the government."
https://x.com/skynewsadele/status/1760228075369857264?s=61&t=wWWeJB3W_ksMJK4LA1OvkA
Nowhere does he mention compensation for the subpostmasters. Not sure why he thinks this helps him.
For those who do not have X -
The so called precedent looked ridiculous anyway .
That bollocks?
The worst of all possible paths
Unless you are Bibi
If the ICJ was going to have an effect then it would have had an effect. It didn't.
Neither the SNP or the Tories bargained on the normally precedent obsessed Hoyle allowing the Labour amendment but got what they deserved for their political games !
Yeah, that looks outdated for me. Fine for a two party world, but not when we have significant numbers of MPs from third and fourth parties.
Beth Rigby's reporting that the deciding factor was that MPs feared for their safety if a way wasn't found to defuse the issue:
On the matter on pressure on Speaker. Am told that many MPs made a personal pleas to Sir Lindsay about amendments. MPs' have growing concerns for personal safety after incidents of confrontations & protests over the Israel-Hamas war.
https://twitter.com/BethRigby/status/1760306065634124018
The whole point of the Speaker is to stand up to the government (or in this case the likely future government).
https://x.com/TyrelWallace/status/1760219532566597717?s=20
The answer was something like "Yes, we respect the ICJ but we think it was a mistake for this case to be brought to it". Easy peasy.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/02/democrats-trump-biden-polls-november-presidential-election.html
This to my mind is the worst day of Hoyle's speakership.
In the next parliament it means their amendments can be taken to hijack SNP or Lib Dem opposition motions.