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In one of his funnier essays, included in the collection The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis launched a leisurely assault on the novelist Thomas Harris for his abortive latest installment of the Hannibal Lecter series, Hannibal. The author had lost it, developing a laughable romantic infatuation with his cannibal creation. He’d “gone gay” for Lecter, […]

Artificial intelligence is poised to suck the soul out of art — and make artists’ already precarious existence even worse.

An AI-generated “larger format” of Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. (Lee Brimelow / Twitter)

In the 2013 film Tim’s Vermeer, libertarian actor Penn Gillette documents his friend Tim Jenison’s efforts to reproduce the techniques of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer. To this end, Jenison, a software company executive and visual engineer, develops a series of elaborate methods that make use of mirrors and light to replicate Vermeer trademarks like field depth and chromatic aberration.

The film itself is reasonably entertaining, and Jenison’s recreation of Vermeer’s 1660s work The Music Lesson is certainly not unimpressive as an effort in engineering. Both Jenison and Gillette, however, ultimately mistake the creation for something it is not. In the narrow conception of art offered by Tim’s Vermeer, it is simply a technology like anything else — a method, or a series of methods, that aspire to represent reality with as much fidelity as possible. There is no social or cultural process involved, no inspiration beyond an act of mechanical production, and no higher purpose to Vermeer’s own project beyond photorealism.

In his commentary, Gillette gushes about the “photographic” and “cinematic” qualities of Vermeer’s work without ever grappling with its much more interesting and abstract dimensions. “My friend Tim painted a Vermeer! He painted a Vermeer!” Gillette exclaims of something that is no more or less than an extremely elaborate experiment in painting-by-numbers — a derivative simulacrum of something beautiful whose existence misconstrues the very idea of beauty.

Both in thesis and execution, Tim’s Vermeer was the perfect forerunner to the effervescent news cycle that continues to surround generative AI. From paintings to AI-generated podcast conversations to script writing and beyond, a concerted effort is currently underway to supplant human-driven creativity with computerized automation — while dispensing with the entire notion of art as we know it.

Like any technology-driven industrial process, the introduction of AI may well end up having profound social and material implications. Beneath the transhumanist utopianism of Silicon Valley is invariably found the same imperative that has driven capitalism since the nineteenth century — namely, a relentless drive toward ever-more efficient production at ever-lower cost — and there is little reason to believe AI will be any different.

In the cultural realm, the results will be exceptionally crude: ersatz paintings crafted by computer (sold, perhaps, in a marketplace of artificially generated scarcity like cryptocurrency or NFTs); formulaic music recorded by CGI pop stars who do not actually exist; writer’s rooms replaced by generative algorithms that reduce the nuances of dialogue and plot construction to a Fordist production process with few or even no actual writers involved.

there is something almost charmingly stupid about this particular application of this technology imo. a six year old’s concept of what creation entails. walking into a museum and seeing starry night and going “i bet i could make that bigger” https://t.co/XeTkhdEIjK

— sorrel (@sorrelquest) May 30, 2023

Such developments are a threat to artists and cultural workers. As artist Molly Crabapple recently observed, existing apps like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney can already generate detailed images based on nothing more than text prompts for next to no money. “They are faster and cheaper,” she writes,

than any human can be and while their images still have problems — a certain soullessness, perhaps, an excess of fingers, tumors that sprout from ears — they are already good enough to have been used for the book covers and editorial illustration gigs that are many illustrators’ bread and butter.

What these fabrications are not, however, is anything that can ever be called art.

Like Jenison and Gillette, the most effusive boosters of AI culture fundamentally mistake reproduction for creation and incorrectly see realism and artistic expression as synonymous. In this conception, creativity is ultimately a mechanistic endeavor, art of every kind — paintings, films, music, poetry — being nothing more than the aggregation of granular data points; quite literally, the sum of its component parts.

In their techno-utopian enthusiasm, they also elide the extent to which the brave new world they seek to create is already here. Accelerated by corporate monopolism, mass entertainment has increasingly become a wasteland of derivative and algorithmically generated “content,” very little of it meaningfully new. Aided by technology, corporate conglomerates have already honed a zombified mode of cultural production in which existing intellectual property (IP) is endlessly recycled and churned out in the form of sequels, prequels, reboots, and schlock pastiche. Insofar as AI represents a revolution, it will therefore mainly be one that refines this process further, which is not really much of a revolution at all.

It’s tortuous and complicated to make qualitative judgements about what constitutes good or bad art. But it can safely be said that making a creative process more “efficient” is not the same thing as making it better.

Art, music, and virtually the whole of human life and thought beyond the basic business of sleeping and eating, exudes an essence or Geist that is not reducible to mechanistic processes. Whatever we decide to call this — intelligence, humanism, creativity, the soul — it by definition yields something that cannot be quantified or taxonomized at the point of origin. Once it’s been created, a painting or a piece of music can be subsequently broken down into its component elements — which can, in turn, be rearranged or reconfigured to produce something else. Barring the introduction of some new creative element, however, the result will only ever be an ersatz reproduction.

In a world where machines are allowed to replace artists, the entirety of culture will simply be an ever-narrower and more derivative version of what already exists.

“This act of vandalism is more than an ugly attack on an internationally renowned scholar. It is an attack on academic freedom, on the historical record, and on Holocaust remembrance.”

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

Renowned Polish-Canadian historian Jan Grabowski, whose research into Poland’s complicity during the Holocaust has infuriated Polish leaders, was the victim of assault on Tuesday in Warsaw, Yad Vashem said in a press release the following day.

During a lecture by Grabowski, a member of the Polish parliament smashed a microphone on the speaker’s podium and tried to rip out the sound system in order to prevent him from lecturing at the German Historical Institute.

The press release did not mention the lawmaker by name, but a social media post identified him as Grzegorz Braun.

The topic of the lecture. Grabowski said, was “Poland’s (growing) problem with the history of the Holocaust. The lecture, hosted by the German Historical Institute and the Department of History at the University of Warsaw shall be given in Polish.”

You are warmly invited to my lecture about Poland’s (growing) problem with the history of the Holocaust. The lecture, hosted by the German Historical Institute and the Department of History at the University of Warsaw shall be given in Polish.https://t.co/jNs0Eu32jX

— jan grabowski (@jgrabows) May 25, 2023

Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan issued a statement, saying that the “incident represents a new low in attempts to stifle discussion about the complicity of Poles in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust.

“This act of vandalism is more than an ugly attack on an internationally renowned scholar. It is an attack on academic freedom, on the historical record, and on Holocaust remembrance,” Dayan said.

In 2018, Poland passed a law banning the phrase “Polish death camp,” in an apparent effort to absolve itself of complicity with the Nazis. The notorious Auschwitz death camp, for example, was located in Poland and administered by locals. Even after the end of World War 2, antisemitism was rampant in the country.

Best known among Polish anti-Semitic crimes in the immediate postwar years was the 1946 pogrom in the town of Kielce, during which 42 Jews were murdered.

Holocaust experts say that while Poland is “technically correct” when they say the concentration camps  were German, the legislation is being exploited in an attempt to clear Poles of the murder of so many Jews.

Grabowski, a leading historian, has refused to whitewash the facts.

In February 2021, a Polish court ruled against Profs. Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, both leading scholars, saying they must apologize for their research that “violated the honor” of Edward Malinowski, a Polish civilian alleged to have assisted in the capture and killing of Jews hiding in a forest near Malinowo in northeastern Poland. Jewish leaders slammed the ruling.

‘Some people exchanged punches’

Grabowski was apparently not the only victim of violence.

Although not mentioned in the Yad Vashem Press release, Aleksander Milchtach Slaw, a senior jounalist at Radio Shalom in Copenhagen, described the outrageous attack in a Facebook post tagging Grabowski, which included photos of the incident.

“Just a few words to let you know that my lecture at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw has been interrupted by Polish radical right-wing MP Grzegorz Braun. Ten minutes into the lecture, Braun stood up, wrestled the microphone away from me, repeatedly crushed it against the podium, and later destroyed the loudspeakers. Several of his supporters shielded him. Police showed up after some time, but they were powerless to remove him because Braun quoted his MP immunity,” Slaw wrote.

“It was mayhem and chaos. Some people exchanged punches. I have never seen anything like it in my long academic career. I was scheduled to talk about the rising wave of fascism in Poland. Now, I don’t have to – a few pictures will do the job. I must say, I am still shaken. It is not every day that you stare fascism straight in the eye. In Poland, we have transitioned to another stage: violence,” Slaw concluded.

The post ‘Mayhem and chaos’: Polish lawmaker violently attacks speakers on country’s role in the Holocaust appeared first on World Israel News.

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“Judea and Samaria is Israel’s biblical heartland,” says Rep. Mindy McAlindon.

By David Isaac, JNS

A resolution passed by a unanimous vote in the Arkansas House of Representatives, which includes a strong statement in support of Jewish ties to Judea and Samaria, has garnered growing appreciation among Israel supporters.

The resolution passed on April 6 calls on Arkansas to enter into strategic partnerships with Israel and build upon a Memorandum of Understanding then-state Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed with the Israel Innovation Authority in 2022.

Heartland to Heartland

“The State of Arkansas, which lies in America’s heartland, has a special kinship with Judea and Samaria, Israel’s biblical heartland,” the resolution reads.

“Cities across Arkansas bear the names of biblical cities throughout Judea and Samaria, such as Bethel, Hebron, Shiloh, Salem, and numerous others,” the resolution continues.

Other U.S. states have also issued resolutions recognizing Israel’s connection to Judea and Samaria, including Florida in 2012, South Carolina in 2018 and Texas in 2023. They speak of historical and biblical Jewish ties but also offer a modern legal background to justify Jewish rights in those areas, referring either to the League of Nations or the United Nations, or both.

Arkansas’s resolution goes a step further. By skipping over references to modern international law, it takes for granted the natural right of Jews to Judea and Samaria, their ancestral heartland.

“The decision of the House of Representatives in Arkansas is unique because, unlike most decisions of [state] houses in the United States regarding relations with Israel, this decision for the first time speaks of the special relationship with the Land of Israel … including Judea and Samaria,” the Samaria Regional Council said in a statement.

Yossi Dagan, Samaria Council chairman, told JNS, “For us, of course, this is something that is quite natural. The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is already inscribed in the most famous book in the world, by which I mean the Bible. So we appreciate the Arkansas state House representative who sponsored this.

“We thank the entire state of Arkansas. We hope the whole world will recognize and understand that a nation cannot be an occupier in its own homeland,” Dagan said.

A unique step in the heart of the Bible Belt

Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, told JNS, “ZOA strongly praised this fabulous, almost sacred, Arkansas resolution recognizing that Jews are the indigenous people of Judea and Samaria as clearly stated in the holy Bible; that this land was given to the Jews by God.”

Yoram Ettinger, a diplomat who served as Israel’s consul-general in Texas (1985-1988), and has worked closely with American evangelicals, told JNS the resolution stands out not only for highlighting the “mutually beneficial U.S.-Israel strategic and commercial cooperation and the shared-values between the U.S. and Israel,” but for emphasizing the biblical and historic significance of Judea and Samaria, “the cradle of Jewish history, religion and culture.”

The resolution’s sponsor, Rep. Mindy McAlindon of Arkansas’s District 10, told JNS that she hadn’t seen other resolutions that refer to Judea and Samaria in the same way, “but I think it’s really important that we do recognize that Judea and Samaria is Israel’s biblical heartland. We want to make sure that, as a state, we recognize that Judea and Samaria is Israel’s territory, and that it is not Palestine.

“We also need to recognize the special kinship that Arkansas has with Judea and Samaria,” she added.

McAlindon said “quite a few” constituents have reached out to her to express their excitement that the Arkansas legislature was not only supporting Israel, in general, but Judea and Samaria, in particular. “We tend to look at Israel as a whole and forget that there are crucial areas within Israel that we need to protect and defend. Even if we do so only in words, it is still important.”

McAlindon, who as a Christian feels “a strong affinity for Israel,” said she was motivated to propose the resolution after Hutchinson signed the MoU with Israel. “I just felt like I wanted to do a little bit more, something to continue to reinforce that relationship.”

She hopes to advance the relationship still further—”maybe even a Memorandum of Understanding specifically with Judea and Samaria.”

Noting that Arkansas is home to a Raytheon Technologies Corporation facility that builds the Iron Dome air-defense system, she said she wants to see more such special partnerships, whether in archaeology, history, religion, technology or agriculture. “We’re a very strong agricultural state. It is actually our No. 1 export. So there’s a lot that we can do together to strengthen both the State of Israel and the State of Arkansas.”

McAlindon hinted there was a chance other U.S. states will pass similar resolutions. As a member of a group including legislators from other states, she shared her resolution with them and several expressed interest and asked for copies. “So I hope other states will follow suit.”

She said state resolutions could impact federal policy.

“If you had enough states that pushed the idea that these are areas that we need to recognize, I think you could see some movement on a federal level.” However, she admitted states are “very much secondary” on foreign policy matters.

“At least, we’re very fortunate in Arkansas to have such strong federal congressmen and senators, like Senator Tom Cotton, who are very supportive of Israel,” McAlindon said.

The post Pro-Israel resolution from Arkansas breaks new ground appeared first on World Israel News.

On Sunday at about 8 pm, a tragedy in Columbia, South Carolina, echoed nationwide. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott announced that Rick Chow, the proprietor of a gas station and convenience store in the area, had been charged with murder in the death of 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton.

After learning the facts of the case, Lott clarified that the gravity of the situation was “very disturbing.” He stated there was no evidence that the victim had taken any merchandise, including the water bottles, from the store or pointed a firearm at the store owner.

It all started when the young man and Chow’s son had a verbal confrontation in the store. The 14-year-old, after a heated exchange of words, took off running. Chow and his son then chased the teen to the nearby Springtree Apartments.

A gun was discovered near the victim’s body. The sheriff made it clear that, even though the deceased had his own firearm, the suspect was not justified in shooting him- as he did not pose a deadly threat.

Richland County Coroner, Naida Rutherford, reported that the deceased’s cause of death was a gunshot wound to his lower back, which caused considerable damage to his heart and heavy bleeding.

Rutherford also revealed that, based on the evidence, there was no physical altercation before the shooting; the confrontation had only been verbal. Chow’s bond hearing is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, followed by a first court appearance set for the 23rd of June.

The public was offered a statement from Richland School District Two, which revealed that Cyrus Carmack-Belton was a student at Summit Parkway Middle School; their condolences went out to the family for their loss.

On the night of the announcement, the store belonging to the suspect was vandalized with graffiti, broken windows, and looted merchandise. Sheriff Lott reminded people that defying the law and incorrectly using a firearm could lead to devastating consequences. He reminded everyone that while defending yourself or another’s life requires using a firearm in some instances, shooting someone who is only running away and not threatening you with a gun is not a valid reason to shoot someone.

In the wake of the incident, this case serves as a precipitating reminder that everyone is responsible for their actions. It is a pressing call to protect our own lives and the lives of our fellow citizens, no matter the cost.

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