M3GAN and ChatGPT– A Critique of Contemporary AI?
In an interview about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Matt Murray from the Wall Street Journal asks Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ‘do we need to learn math anymore? Why learn math?’[i] The New York Times article ‘Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach’, retells the story of a teacher catching a student using ChatGPT to cheat on a paper. They described the AI-generated essay as ‘the best paper in the class […] with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments’.[ii] ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot, which means it has been trained on extremely large datasets in order to generate answers to text-based prompts. Large parts of the internet are scraped to gather information to train ChatGPT to give effective and well-written answers, or put plainly, ‘these algorithms are shown a bunch of text in order to understand how text functions’.[iii] ChatGPT has both been penned as the most […]
Panel Review: ‘Pop Cultural Interventions’ BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
One of the final sessions for the British Association for American Studies 2021 digital conference was titled Pop Cultural Interventions, chaired by Dr. James Peacock (Keele University). Pop culture covers a wide range of subjects and media which was reflected in this conference session, including discussion of film, television, social media and video gaming. Thematically, the first two presentations looked at how audience reaction to mainstream media and news events becomes creation and production of culture. The second two presentations discussed cultural projections and imaginations on to nature, and how this is used to reinforce cultural belief and ideology. Overall, the intertwining of culture as something produced, consumed and reproduced again, rather than something static, held all the presentations together. The speakers questioned what narratives are being told, what biases they might contain and looked at the historical significance of such narratives. Beginning the presentations, Dr. Lyndsay Miller (University of […]
Panel Review: ‘Lights, Camera, Crash: Finance and Contemporary Genre Film’, BAAS Annual Conference 2021 (Online)
The conference for the 2021 British Association for American Studies was held entirely online this year in response to the global pandemic of Covid-19 and as a way to hold an almost carbon neutral conference in response to growing concerns around climate change. Indeed, the first session of the conference titled Lights, Camera, Crash: Finance and Contemporary Genre Film chaired by Dr. Cara Rodway (Deputy Head of the Eccles Centre at The British Library), thematically revolved around another global catastrophe: the financial crisis of 2008, when American stock market crashes created a wave of financial uncertainty for many across America and the world. The financial crash began with the accumulation of risky housing mortgages by investment insurance institutions, pension funds and insurance companies. Housing values plummeted dramatically as homeowners defaulted on their mortgages and investment banks were stuck with worthless investments and mounting debt. The entire financial stream froze, causing […]