On Doom Scrolling, Ai and Edward Weston
Lately my mind has been what one might call say, all over the place. Taoism would call it the monkey mind. My mind constantly hopping from one thing to another, not really able to focus on anything in particular. Heck, I’ve even tried to work on some very old images . . . to horrible results. It’s not just while photographing when one has to enter into the right frame of mind. Without that ability to focus intently, or to lose thought altogether and ride the intuition, it’s hard to develop images into something successful, or to print. So I’m left frustrated and turn to other things.
Other things for me involves learning or keeping up with the world . . . hopefully in a thoughtful manner. Well, if you’re aware of politics, US politics in particular, you know that too has its own problems. Some call it, appropriately, Doom Scrolling. I try not to do it, but it’s hard to avoid. My usual out is to ditch Apple News (where the doom and scrolling is easy and stories prevalent - unless I can find a good, thoughtful, long article from The Atlantic or something on an interesting science topic) and see what’s on the New York Times. Yeah, we quit our Washington Post subscription the day Bezos nixed the WP Editorial supporting Harris the last election, and the flight of journalists and opinion writers we respected from the Post, and then the axing of so much of its staff not once, but now twice, has demonstrated we made the right choice. Within a couple of days we had signed up with the NYT, but to be honest, it’s not the old Post. Granted, it’s good, honest journalism, but it’s different. Maybe all journalism is different these days (I still like Reuters and the BBC though). But face it, any real journalism these days is akin to doom scrolling and sometimes I just don’t want to deal with it.
So Ann and I will try to focus on some topic or other that usually winds up in a not-so-positive place, but at least seems to be informative in a way that the latest round of Epstein files releases isn’t (more of what we thought it would show). Lately, it’s been a lot about Ai (or AI, or however else you want to spell it), where it’s at, where it’s likely to be soon, what the social and economic impacts might be and whether or not, in the end Ai is going to say humans are a problem. I guess we’re back to doom scrolling. Well, not quite. Plenty of folks comment about positive aspects of the Ai revolution and . . . that is a genuine possibility. But only if folks talk about it and push for it. This post is one of those, a let’s look at the bright side of things.
Lately, I’ve started to think (based upon some articles I’ve read, discussions I’ve had with Ann, and some YouTube videos we’ve watched (that Ann has found and thankfully suggested I watch)) about how Ai can enhance my life. In simple ways. The most obvious of which is in Google searches. No longer does forming a Google search require the right combination of words (in the right order) to pull up the web pages that contain the information you want. As I learned from one article, the new Ai searches depend upon more description and the more description the better in a search (which used to confuse the Goggle web search engine). I’ve been remembering that more and more these past weeks.
Another thing I’ve been doing to get out of the doom scrolling mentality is to grab one of my books (usually a photography book) from our bookshelves. Which leads me to Sunday’s sit down (with a fresh cup of coffee) with a book “Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition.” It’s an excellent book that combines his photographs with excerpts from his Daybooks (also excellent). It was the first of my books on Edward, bought from the Weston Gallery in Carmel.
As I was reading one of his Daybooks passages, I paused at one passage and thought about it. Yes, I know quite a bit about him and his development as a photographer, but wondered if I really understood what he meant when he said, in 1926, “once my aim was interpretation; now it is presentation.” I thought I did, but . . . really? Did I?
Then I thought about Ai. Face it, in theory an Ai has pretty much read everything about everything that is available to read about Edward Weston that’s available on the internet. Might it help my understanding of the statement? So I crafted an Ai search, “What did Edward Weston mean by ‘once my aim was interpretation; now it is presentation?’” And it gave me the following result:
And yes, I followed the links (which are greatly appreciated), because I know well enough that an Ai can, and will . . . hallucinate (that is the proper term for it, but you can probably replace that with words like “make shit up,” “lie” or “tell you what it thinks you want to hear”).
In the end, everything seemed consistent between the Ai response and the referenced sources (and yes, I’ve seen an Ai response that was the opposite of what the cited source actually said), as well as with my own understanding of Weston’s development and what I thought he was talking about.
It may not seem like much, but afterwards I felt a bit better. Both about my understanding of Weston and his work, and about Ai. Perhaps there is some hope that Ai can and will be used for the greater good. And, at least I’ve come to realize that it opens up for me, personally, a world of learning opportunities and excitement I haven’t really felt since my immersion into undergraduate studies in my late-teens/early twenties, and the New Carrollton public library as a child. I doubt I’m ever going to stop turning to books (I really should do more of that than to the iPad . . .), but Ai searches may help me find more of what I’m really looking for from the Internet.
That’s not such a bad thing.