Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
We Thought AI Would Be Scary Smart. Instead It’s A Facilitator Of Banality
The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the...
Needed: Commonsense Tools To Protect Creative Work
A report released by Digital Citizens Alliance in August 2020 found that pirated streaming subscription services are used by an estimated 30 million individuals in the...
Is Intelligence Really Our Best Feature? Or Is It Holding Us Back?
Rather than being our crowning glory as a species, is it possible that human intelligence is in fact a liability, the source of our...
AI Is Getting Awfully Good At Designing Buildings. So What Happens To Architects?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly advancing to a point where it can generate the design of a building completely autonomously. With the potential to...
Archaeologists Discover 4,500-Year-Old Palace In Iraq
During a press conference at the Iraq embassy in London on Friday, Tablet Hill was described as the “cradle of civilization” and “one of the most...
Police Link Prominent Now-Deceased Horn Player To String Of Rapes
As a young hornist in the 1970s, he helped launch the first French-horn soloist competition in America, inspired by the performances of European players....
Before We Get All Artificial About It, Consider Intelligence…
Most experts acknowledge that we are a long way off from seeing what AI researchers have termed “artificial general intelligence”: the kind of intelligence...
In English: The Importance Of The Words From Elsewhere
Emily Dickinson thought that words start a new, discrete cycle of life the moment they are uttered. While American English can be perceived as a threat...
The Most Troubling Thing About ChatGPT Writing? The Endless Cliches!
ChatGPT, the popular bot released to the public by OpenAI late last year, is obsessed with clichés and uses them all the time. Perhaps...
Now Come Tools To Detect ChatGPT Writing. Do They Work?
We dug into several proposed methods and tools for recognising AI-generated text. None of them are foolproof, all of them are vulnerable to workarounds,...
What Might Dudamel’s Move To The NY Phil Mean For San Francisco Symphony?
Salonen’s ambitious plans for San Francisco, conversely, have gotten off to a rocky start because of COVID-19. There’s still plenty of time to get...
Netflix Doesn’t Seem To Understand The Difference Between Hard And Soft Products. It’s Finding...
The distinction between hard and soft products helps explain the controversy about changes Netflix is making to its streaming service—along with many other changes...
New Edition Of Roald Dahl Books Alters Text To Remove Words Like “Crazy’ and...
In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” for instance, the Oompa-Loompas are no longer “small men” but rather “small people,” according to The Telegraph, while...
Steven Pinker: AI And The Nature Of Creativity (And Thinking)
For 25 years I’ve begun my introductory psychology course by showing how our best artificial intelligence still can’t duplicate ordinary common sense. This year...
Sketch Identified As Study For Sistine Chapel
The red chalk drawing is thought to date from 1512, shortly before Michelangelo painted that final section of one of the world’s most famous...
How Davóne Tines Is Inventing His Career
“Sometimes my work is considered as activism,” he adds. “It is not. There are people who do that. My work is just trying to...
For Writers, Failure Has Increased Exponentially. Failure Now Defines The Writing Life
I’ve known writers who used to submit, literally, the manuscript of a work. It might loiter for six months in some publisher’s office before...
The #MeToo Hollywood Music Problem And How Women Are Trying To Fix It
Music is a sphere where young performers and composers tend to look to their teachers and bosses as mentors. This can give rise to...
How Abstract Art Is Related To Music
The deliberate attempt to emulate music culminated in the works of abstract artists like Kandinsky, where colours and shapes, devoid of representational contents, are...
How ChatGPT Is Like A Blurry JPEG
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same...
The Strategy Behind Selling Si Newhouse’s $150 Million Art Collection
“Si collected Johns in depth, but can we sell more than 10 Johns for $10 million apiece all at once? Absolutely not. So instead...
Morality: So What If Humans Go Extinct?
What does it matter if Homo sapiens no longer exists? The astonishing fact is that, despite acquiring the ability to annihilate ourselves back in the 1950s,...
An Algorithm For A Fandom Site? Makes No Sense
AO3 is one of the biggest fan fiction sites today. It’s an open source, multi-fandom archive for transformative fanworks that, as of January 2023,...
King Charles Taps Andrew Lloyd Webber For Coronation Music
Lord Lloyd-Webber said he wanted his new coronation anthem to reflect a "joyful occasion". A gospel choir will sing and there will be Greek...
Why Millennials Are In To New Age Music
As my generation grew up, new age seemed a bit like a lost world—a faerie realm we were promised but never got to go...
