Recommended Reading: Mostly about Burning Man & AI

(some FTX/SBF for soap opera entertainment, plus the usual side journeys into neuroscience and creativity...)

Oct 03, 2023

In case you’re all wondering (…even if you’re not…):

1) No, I did NOT attend That Thing in the Desert this year. Here is an excellent explanation from a veteran Burner of why she has decided to stop going after 30 years. Mind you, I came to this conclusion 10 years ago.
2) Media coverage of the rain and mud was over-hyped and ridiculous. Veteran Burners (my friends) were well prepared and had significant and enlightening Burns. That being said, I also wanted to share Daniel Pinchbeck’s recent writing about Burning Man, “How Burning Man Failed” because his piece back in 2003 in ArtForum Magazine was what originally inspired me to GO in the first place…
3) Also though, this parody video is the BEST and definitely accurate and everyone should watch and always rewatch it (2018): How Was Burning Man?

In regards to other hype cycles (or long-term cycles?), for those of you looking to learn a little more about Large Language Models (LLMs) I found this explanation of their inner workings the most comprehensive: A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work (yes, it’s long).

Plus, combining my favorite literature plus technology topics, I highly recommend checking out this article by Vauhini Vara, Confessions of a Viral AI Writer. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, I pulled out these two striking paragraphs:

"As much as technologists might be driven by an intellectual and creative curiosity similar to that of writers—and I don’t doubt this of Sims and others—the difference between them and us is that their work is expensive. The existence of language-generating AI depends on huge amounts of computational power and special hardware that only the world’s wealthiest people and institutions can afford. Whatever the creative goals of technologists, their research depends on that funding.
The language of empowerment, in that context, starts to sound familiar. It’s not unlike Facebook’s mission to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” or Google’s vision of making the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.” If AI constitutes a dramatic technical leap—and I believe it does—then, judging from history, it will also constitute a dramatic leap in corporate capture of human existence. Big Tech has already transmuted some of the most ancient pillars of human relationships—friendship, community, influence—for its own profit. Now it’s coming after language itself.
...
WHAT ABOUT THE cost to literature when all that humans have put on the internet gets vacuumed up and repurposed in Big Tech’s image? To start, an AI-dominated literature would reflect the values, biases, and writing styles embedded in the most powerful AI models. Over time, it would all start to sound alike. Some research even suggests that if later AI models are trained using AI-produced text—which would be hard to avoid—the sameness of the material could trigger a scenario called model collapse, in which AI loses its grasp on how real human language functions and is no longer able to form coherent sentences. One wonders whether, at that point, humans will still have the ability themselves."

Books: The End by Attila Bartis - from one of my favorite publisher’s of international works in translation, translated from Hungarian by Judith Sollosy, please read this. “Unspooling like a roll of film, The End captures in frames of language the faces and places of András’ memory, which together form a fever-dream collage of an artist’s psyche. With electric precision and fluid dialogue, Attila Bartis weaves a sprawling family saga with 20th-century European history and offers an unflinchingly lucid yet boundlessly compassionate account of psychological devastation under authoritarianism.”

In the Name of Luminosity and Transparency by Odysseus Elytis - From Odysseus Elytis’ speech at the Nobel Banquet City Hall, Stockholm, December 10, 1979 - winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature

Watch: ‘His Name Was Bélizaire’: Rare Portrait of Enslaved Child Arrives at the Met “The Met recently acquired “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” a 19th-century Louisiana portrait with a secret: For over a 100 years, the image of an enslaved child was erased. This is his story.”

RECOMMENDED READING - Top of Mind - Burning Man

Why I’m breaking up with Burning Man - Adriana Roberts (Aug. 23, 2023)

Burning Man’s “mudpocalypse” was greatly exaggerated - Adriana Roberts (Sept. 5, 2023)

How Burning Man Failed - Daniel Pinchbeck (Aug. 29, 2023)

Heat of the moment: The art and culture of Burning Man - Daniel Pinchbeck (2003)

How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Elite Parents Enabled His Crypto Empire - Max Chafkin & Hannah Miller (Sept. 2023)

She Sacrificed Her Youth to Get the Tech Bros to Grow Up - Lexi Pandell (Aug. 2023)

THE ONES WE SENT AWAY - Jennifer Senior (Aug. 2023)

The False Gospel of Conversion Therapy: I went to sessions every week in high school. I came out as trans anyway. - Grace Byron (Aug. 2023)

Ahead of Time: On poetry and mourning - Kamran Javadizadeh

AI / ChatGPT

The creepiness of conversational AI has been put on full display - Louis Rosenberg (Feb. 2023)