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I love Creative Commons, ok? I’ve followed, used, the licenses since the start, I have the t-shirts. And like many, I can rattle of the stack of letters and explain them.
But in my internet roaming, especially for my other strong interest, photography, I come across things in practice, well, that are much less cut and dry. Like a few posts ago when I fell into some slimy and weird toy spaces of public domain (not strictly CC, but in the same neighbourhood).
And I also love cacti. They are unworldly, especially to an east coast born suburban kid (well I did taste the Southwest through Roadrunner cartoons), but so intriguing in design and beauty that defies the probably of life with almost no water.
Both seem simple from afar, yet different up close, and occasionally you might get stuck by a sharp spine.
Have I exhausted the un-necessary metaphor? I can’t resist, this was my photo I found my searching my flickr stream on “details”.
On with the show.
Old man internet warning- this started while reading my RSS feeds in my folder of Photography sites. I clicked to read the PetaPixel article Generative AI is a Minefield for Copyright Law. Of course it opens with the requisite surreal AI generated image, but frankly does not really give me anything new beyond what I’ve read before– especially from those great CC folks. Bottom line, no one can really say for sure where the clear rules and guidelines will land on generative imagery. It’s messy. Again.
But this is where it got me curious. Down at the credits bottom of the PetaPixel article it reads:
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. This article was originally published at The Conversation and is being republished under a Creative Commons license.
https://petapixel.com/2023/06/18/generative-ai-is-a-minefield-for-copyright-law/
It is “being republished under a Creative Commons license”. What license is “a”? And where is the link to the license? I am an observer of attribution practice, and this one falls way short of the Creative Commons Best Practices. Okay, that’s just being sloppy. I am no perfectionist.
But I am curious.
I follow the one link to the original article published at The Conversation (I have read many great articles there, good writing happens, I declare). What’s curious here is I can find no mention of a Creative Commons license on the article. There is a footer assertion "Copyright © 2010–2023, Academic Journalism Society" — so I did around for more.
Not that it would ever be clear to look for license details under a link for “Republishing Guidelines” there it is.
We believe in the free flow of information and so publish under a Creative Commons — Attribution/No derivatives license. This means you can republish our articles online or in print for free, provided you follow these guidelines:
https://theconversation.com/ca/republishing-guidelines
The belief in free flow of information is a nice sentiment. And there is is, they are asserting a CC BY-ND license across their publications. One license to rule them all.
Except.
The conditions.
Now this was somewhat new to me, but I heard the smart and esteemed Jonathan Poritz (certified facilitator of the Creative Commons Certificate) say in an online license quibble that adding extra conditions to a CC license… nullifies it (?) That seems to be clear on the response on the CC Wiki to the question “What if I want to add some conditions and I clarify what I mean by a specific term? Is there anything wrong with adding conditions on top of a CC license?” though the details written under License Modification fall into the Ask a Lawyer region.
Back to the conditions on The Conversation’s site- the first three seem to be the scope of the CC BY-ND license: “You can’t edit our material” (that’s ND), “You have to credit authors and their institutions” (that’s attribution), “You have to credit The Conversation and include a link back to either our home page or the article URL” (also mostly standard attribution).
The question to be is the next one:
You must use our page view counter when republishing online. The page view counter is a 1 pixel by 1 pixel invisible image that allows us and our authors to know when and where content is republished.
https://theconversation.com/ca/republishing-guidelines
Can they really make that a condition of reuse? To deploy a tracking pixel?
That smells a bit weird to me, along with there being no clear indication of the CC ND license directly on articles (hence why PetaPixel does not know what license to declare??).
Okay, this is truly quibbling, but thinking about these details is important, more than just a simple pat acceptance of the basic rules of licensing.
For a recently published post I sought an image of a well known brand of candy– it’s not surprising of course that there are not many available- funny in that my google image search filtered for CC licensed results, a high ranking one was my own flickr photo of the spanish language version I spotted in Mexico (and likely that might be a copyright infringement, shhhh).
The one I liked (and used) was pointed from Google to rawpixel. There’s a great image! But zoom in close, and there’s some fishy things happening.
I am very familiar with the iconic roadside Americana photos of John Margolies, readily available public domain content from the Library of Congress.
Rawpixel does declare the image source (not linked) and the CC0 license. All kosher. So far.
But try to download the image- you are required to create an account. Even free, why do I have to sign up for an account to access public domain content (hint, the upsell answer is in the lower right corner). So rawpixel is repackaging public domain content but putting a requirement to download.
I can right control click and download easily (I did) and that trick of hiding images in a .webp file format is no barrier (Preview on OSX now converts it easily to JPEG).
But there’s more. What is that Editorial Use Only link, right below the link to the CCO license?
Content labeled “Editorial Use Only” are for use in news and events-related articles, non-commercial blogs and websites, broadcasts and other non-profit media. This content cannot be used for commercial purposes including advertising, promotions and merchandising.
Editorial content should not be edited or altered substantially from the original image.
rawpixel.com
Now wait a minute- how can Rawpixel put extra conditions on CC0 content? I’d say this is enforceable as wet tissue.
Compare this to the source of this same image at the Library of Congress. No logins required, the images are directly there in usable JPEG format, and there are no extra conditions.
The question is- why does Google give preference in search results to fishy re-packagers of public domain content over the actual source?
We all know the an$wer.
You should. When we just grab stuff because some web site says its free, us, especially as educators, should be looking at the fine detail. The same is true for the inevitable world changing tsunamic technofad (look closely at the top results, outside of Wikipedia, is there a pattern?).
Again it’s something at a quick glance has a statistically valid appearance of resembling useful information. If you grab and go, because it’s done for you easily, do you understand/question what you got? Can you zoom in and get an understanding of how it works, where it gets its info from? Can you even view source?
Nice pretty cactus there.
Featured Image: My photo! CCO, natch!
“One of the things that helps define Latino identity is this sense of having a history but also not knowing the history.”
The post Héctor Tobar on “Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’” appeared first on Public Books.
I was trolling the olde blog settings for the WordPress Jetpack plugin and spotted something that confirmed I had aleady learned– the nuking of Twitter’s API meant the Social module could no longer tweet new posts.
Old news.
But what I did see was a new option to connect my WordPress blog to publish new posts to Mastodon. In like 10 second I connected to my instance and connected my account to this here blog.
Thus, this post is mostly a test of the connection (for which I spent more than too much time in Photoshop on the fetured image).
This might end up double tooting, since I have been using an IFTTT applet to share to mastodon whenever there is a new post in my RSS feed.
Ok, let’s see how this elephant flies with a new Jetpack!
Dead bird dead bird.
I’m no super billionaire businessman, but to cut off the world’s largest web publishing platform from adding content to your product is— dumb ass to the nth degree.
Toot, toot, someone sweep the dead bird off the road.
I have two mastodon post tooters in operation now… for comparison:
The difference is minor- the Jetpack on includes an excerpt of the post. I like in IFTTT I can customize it with extra text like before the title “Just CogDogBlogged” and adding an extra hashtag. I could include the excerpt in IFTTT but am not sure it matters. Also, IFTTT is a bit delayed, the JetPack one is instant. As if I am that important that I don’t want to keep my fan waiting.
I don’t think it means a hill of beans to anyone except me. I like IFTTT more, but I can use JetPack if the former ever poops out.
Featured Image: My own photoppery (OMG the crap DALL-E gave me for “An elephant wearing a jetpack hovers in the air over a dead bird laying on the road, cartoon style”) based on p1210759 flickr photo by generalising shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license and Dead bird flickr photo by indoloony shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has honored philosophers Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch with plaques at their former homes.
The Blue Plaques program “promotes recognition and awareness of people, places and events that have been of lasting significance in the life of Oxfordshire or more widely.”
You can see a list of other Blue Plaque honorees here.
The post Foot & Murdoch Honored With Plaques in Oxfordshire first appeared on Daily Nous.
Three philosophers have been named 2023 Guggenheim Fellows.
They are:
Stephen Darwall, Jennifer Morton, and Susanna Siegel
The fellowships are for 6-12 months, with monetary awards of varying amounts, and are given with no strings attached. There were 180 new fellows announced. You can view the entire list of them here.
A few philosophers have picked up grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently.
They are:
You can learn more about NSF grants here.
(Previous post about NSF grant winners is here.)
Oron Shagrir, professor of philosophy and cognitive and brain sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the winner of the 2023 Covey Award.
The Covey Award, presented by the International Association of Computing and Philosophy (IACAP), “recognizes senior scholars with a substantial record of innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived”.
The IACAP says: “The board recognised Professor Shagrir’s significant contribution to our field over several decades; in particular, his contribution to theories of computation.”
He will present the Covey Award Keynote Address at IACAP 2023 conference this July in Prague.
You can learn more about Professor Shagrir’s research here.
A list of previous winners of the Covey Award is here.
The Joseph Levenson Prize is awarded by the Association for Asian Studies to “the English-language books that make the greatest contribution to increasing understanding of the history, culture, society, politics, or economy of China.”
This year’s prize contest recognized books published in 2021, and honorable mention in the pre-1900 category was awarded to Tao Jiang, (a philosopher in the Department of Religion at Rutgers University, and director of the university’s Center for Chinese Studies) for his book, Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China (Oxford University Press).
It appears that Professor Jiang’s book is one of the few philosophy titles recognized in the history of the Levenson Prize since its inception in 1987.
Here’s a description of the book:
This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions.
This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one’s heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history.
The winning book this year is by historian Ruth Mostern (Pittsburgh): The Yellow River (Yale University Press), a 3000-year history of China’s Yellow River.
You can learn more about the prize, including its previous recipients, here.
The Journal of Applied Philosophy has awarded its 2022 Best Essay Prize to Scott Altman (USC).
Professor Altman won the prize for his article, “Selling Silence: The Morality of Sexual Harassment NDAs“. Here’s its abstract:
This article argues against enforcing sexual harassment nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). Although NDAs guard privacy, facilitate settlement, and compensate victims, they also help repeat perpetrators avoid detection and punishment, endangering future victims and undermining efforts to combat sexual harassment. Advocates argue that victims have no duty to prevent these harms, given the risks and trauma of reporting. I offer three responses. First, although most victims have no duty to speak, some victims might come to have such a duty. The state should not help them commit to violating a future duty. Second, some initially reticent victims may later want to disclose. The state should not enforce promises not to do supererogatory acts. Third, NDAs make victims complicit with the perpetrator’s future harassment and wrongful efforts to avoid social punishment. If perpetrators refuse to compensate victims adequately without NDAs, we should increase victim compensation rather than enforce NDAs. Accused harassers might claim they need NDAs to guard against wrongful or excessive social punishment. For guilty perpetrators, NDAs resemble felony expungement statutes. However, arguments for expungement do not apply to NDAs. Although falsely accused people have legitimate privacy interests, NDAs are an excessively broad way to protect this interest.
The prize of £1,000 is awarded to the author of the best paper published in the journal that year, as judged by journal’s editors.
A list of previous winners of the prize is here.
Claire Katz, professor of philosophy at Texas A & M University, is one of three finalists for the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching from Baylor University, which includes generous prizes for the finalists, winner, and their home departments.
As a finalist, Professor Katz will receive $15,000 and will be invited to present a series of lectures at Baylor University, and her home department at Texas A & M will receive $10,000 for pedagogical development. The winner of the award will receive an additional $250,000 prize and will teach in residence at Baylor University for a semester; the winner’s home department will receive an additional $25,000.
The award site’s description of Professor Katz describes what contributes to her being a good candidate for the award:
Claire Katz is professor of philosophy of education and serves as interim department head of the Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture at Texas A&M. Before joining A&M in 2006, she was associate professor of philosophy and Jewish studies at Penn State University. She teaches and conducts research in two primary areas: (1) the intersection of philosophy, gender, education and religion and (2) K-12 philosophy.
In 2015, Katz launched the preK-12 philosophy program, which are educator workshops for K-12 and university teachers/administrators that have reached more than 100 teachers and administrators in Texas; training for university students in facilitating philosophical discussions with pre-college students; and developing and running a week-long philosophy summer camp (Aggie School of Athens) for middle and high school students from communities across Texas and the U.S.
She is the recipient of several awards, including the 2019 Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award (University Level) for Teaching, the 2019 American Philosophical Association Prize for Excellence in Teaching Philosophy and the 2020 Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence, and was named a Piper Professor in Texas in 2021.
Professor Katz wrote a guest post for Daily Nous about the philosophy summer camp she runs, which you can check out here, and put together two edited collections about it, Growing Up with Philosophy Camp: How Thinking Develops Friendship, Community, and a Sense of Self, and Philosophy Camps for Youths: Everything You Wanted To Know about Starting, Organizing, and Running a Philosophy Camp.
The Cherry Award is named for, and was established with a bequest from, Baylor alumus Robert Foster Cherry, who graduated from the university in 1929. It is awarded biennially. You can learn more about it here.
(via Daniel Conway)
Despite the apparent demise of blogs the flat line of the RSS-ograph blips with a pulse from David Kernohan “on chatbots.” FOTA is alive!
Unsure if my comment gets through the gate (a first one generated a critical WordPress error, sorry, David), but I have to at least assert my assertion, as if it blips anywhere in the raging discordant discourse, “Intelligence might be based on pattern recognition as Stephen [Downes] asserts, but it should not be mistaken for intelligence.”
So when David passes a linked reference to the Colossus as the dawn of pattern guessing to decrypt war time messages, my pattern recognition goes to where no GPT can fabricate:
This photo was taken on my own visit to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, that being a memorable day when Dave and his partner Viv drove me all the way from Bristol where I visited them to Milton Keynes where I spent a week at the Open University.
Maybe a machine could mine the facts from my blog posts and photos, but it would never make connections, the feelings, to the experience of being there that are not digitized or accessible to wholesale scraping. Never.
Or is this my own flailing effort to raise a pitifully tiny flag of I am Human in front of the advancing, inevitable horde of machines? For an image I could have plopped a prompt into a DALL-EMidJourneyStable Diffusion but why, when I can deploy one of my own making?
I could try my best to weave more words around my emerging thought patterns, yes ones that I generate from my own sum of vast experiences. And truly, I could say that I myself, with this nerve network plugged into a 3 pound skull enclosed non-battery powered device, merely have been training 50+ years on written, visual, auditory media,much of which I did not ask explicitly to use, from which I generate through some mystical process, my “own” words? my “own” imagery?
Who better to turn to than Kirby Ferguson to wisely delve into Artificial Creativity?
Stop, watch the whole thing. I mean the whole damn series. I can only yank quotes
Of all Humanity’s technological advances, artificial intelligence is the most morally ambiguous from inception. it has the potential to create either a Utopia or a dystopia. Which reality will we get? Just like everybody else I do not know what’s coming but it seems likely that in coming decades these visions of our imminent demise will seem campy and naive because our imaginings of the future always become campy and naive.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
He takes AI to “court” on three counts, and makes a point that many don’t want to accept, that harvesting all of the “stuff” readily available is maybe not the point of ethics to hang the purveyors. If you buy into his theme that everything is a remix, that means everything is available, as he has done in his video.
But do not take this as suggesting there is a free ticket to just grab content for the classic “because you can” reason. Follow Kirby Ferguson’s statement about all the media he has remixed into his video:
On some videos about AI the big reveal is that this video was actually made by AI. But this video and this series is the opposite. Nothing has been AI except where I cited AI art. This is entirely human made, the words are all mine but they’re merged from the thoughts of countless people. Everything you’ve seen and heard is from real filmmakers and musicians and game developers and other artists. All these thoughts and all this media were remixed by me into something new and yes I did it all without permission.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
The big difference is that this filmmaker provides credits / attribution to he sources. It is very clear what was used. There is no mask of source content or how it was used hidden behind a facade of a commercial purveyor whose very name has washed open with techno-clorox.
Also, lost in the court section is a very valid question-
Training AIs on individual artists work does seem wrong everyone should be able to opt out of all training sets and maybe AIS should simply not train on images from active art communities. Also some company should make an image generator trained on public domain and licensed images which would avoid this Hornet’s Nest entirely. Somebody please do this.
Everything is a Remix Part 4
Why is there no ethical entity out there creating training from public domain or openly licensed materials? Or why does quote/unquote “OPEN” ai DOT com, which already trains its machines on Wikipedia amongst everything else, just create a version limited to truly open content? About the only thing I found was an image generator on hugging face that looks like it does this, but I am not clever enough to make it do anything.
There is a free idea for anyone to pick up.
Finally, Kirby Ferguson ends with a compelling (to me) assertion of the essence of creativity.
AIs will not be dominating creativity because AIs do not innovate. They synthesize what we already know. AI is derivative by design and inventive by chance. Computers can now create but they are not creative. To be creative you need to have some awareness, some understanding of what you’ve done. AIs know nothing whatsoever about the images and words they generate.
Most crucially, AIs have no comprehension of the essence of art, living, AIs don’t know what it’s like to be a child, to grow up, to fall in love, to fall in lust, to be angry, to fight, to forgive, to be a parent, to age, to lose your parents, to get sick, to face death. This is what human expression is about. Art and creativity are bound to living, to feeling. Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it’s not because of what the AI did it’s because of what a person did.
Art is by humans for humans.
:
Everything is a Remix is a testament to the brilliance and beauty of human creativity. In particular it’s a testament to collective creativity. Human genius is not individual it is shared.
Everything is a Remix Part 4 (emphasis added by me)
Please watch this video! All of them!
But it’s not as clean as just going John Henry and making an untenable slice of human versus machine. Artificial Intelligence “stuff” is a tool, but it’s not “just a tool.” I am reaching back to something I often rely on from Gardner Campbell’s explanation of Marshall McLuhan
“There is no such thing as “just a tool.” McLuhan wisely notes that tools are not inert things to be used by human beings, but extensions of human capabilities that redefine both the tool and the user. A “tooler” results, or perhaps a “tuser” (pronounced “TOO-zer”). I believe those two words are neologisms but I’ll leave the googling as an exercise for the tuser.
The way I used to explain this is my new media classes was to ask students to imagine a hammer lying on the ground and a person standing above the hammer. The person picks up the hammer. What results? The usual answers are something like “a person with a hammer in his or her hand.” I don’t hold much with the elicit-a-wrong-answer-then-spring-the-right-one-on-them school of “Socratic” instruction, but in this case it was irresistible and I tried to make a game of it so folks would feel excited, not tricked. “No!” I would cry. “The result is a HammerHand!”….
http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/doug-engelbart-transcontextualist/
So no “just a tool,” since a HammerHand is something quite different from a hammer or a hand, or a hammer in a hand. Gardner has given me more directly, in email:
I got to that in part because of McLuhan’s famous dictum “the medium is the message.” Most folks appear to think he meant that the medium shapes the message. If you read the piece in which the phrase appears, however, you can see that’s not what he meant. Instead, McLuhan thought of every medium as a message about what we are and desire as human beings. He said the electric light was a message. Every medium should tell us something meta about itself, and something vital about humanity. A medium is not just a channel for transmitting stuff. A medium is also itself a message, a transmission. Can we understand the medium’s message about itself, and thus about us? That’s why the book is called Understanding Media. What is the message these media convey about themselves? and about mediated experience generally?
So with that, I built on Alan Kay (and I think others as well), who said “we shape our tools, and after that our tools shape us,” bringing in the idea of man-computer symbiosis, putting it all within the context of Engelbart’s integrated domain, and then re-reading McLuhan to find a way to express what I took to be something essential about his ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience, and I came out with hammerhand.
Gardner Campbell, personal communication
Much of the educator reaction to ChatGPT (which to me is narrow as there is much more we should be wrapping our heads around), so focused on the fear/worry/change factors rather than ” ideas of human transformation in the development of mediated experience.”
Going back to where I started, with David Kernohan’s On Chatbots post, he gives just a short bit at the end to maybe the larger idea of his two, under the heading “A Matter of Semantics”:
I want to close my argument by thinking about the other major strand of artificial intelligence – an associative model that starts (in the modern era) with Vannevar Bush and ends with, well, Google search. The idea of a self-generating set of semantic links – enabling a machine to understand how concepts interrelate – is probably closer to the popular idea of artificial intelligence than toys like ChatGPT.
http://followersoftheapocalyp.se/on-chatbots/
meaning (I think) that the interconnected web of ideas imagined by Bush that influenced Engelbart and actually was instantiated by Tim Berners Lee, is the connectivist idea that the web itself, changing with every new bit linked on to it, offers more potential for making something akin to intelligent than chatbots that are merely regurgitation parts of it in a way that just parody intelligence, not embody it.
So this happened today. It is of no significant to any discussion threading out in the ghosted public square of twitter or the de-aggregated butvibrantcorners of Mastodon, certainly not dead to ne where I will never vention spew pots of (f*** it I cannot call it “Meta” its always Facebook),or the iteration of the America Online is to the real Internet as Linkedin is to ______________… Oh I might have lost my thought completely, as it humanly happens.
Can I get help?
This is what people have their undergarments wadded about? Seriously? I push back
Okay, I am left to my own story making.
Today I sat down to catch up on a few DS106 Daily Creates, it being the very essence of acts of human creativity assisted by tools (using a “TDC HAND”). This was one challenge from a few days ago which in true TDCness, gives a nudge, and opens a door to respond in almost any way.
Lots of ways to run with this, so I just start with the random names generator that suggests possible names from different countries. Cool! I love random stuff and never saw this one. There’s 12 countries listed, each with 10 names. I just decide to be quick and use the first names in the middle row:
Before getting to where / how they meet, I decided I need pictures. Before everyone got wrapped up in Generative text posing as intelligence, there was the phase of all the generative adversarial network (GAN) tools making realistic photos of people and thing that do not exist. If you want a real diversion, see This X Does Not Exist. But I went for the one I remember for generating people, thispersondoesnotexist.com but that now seems gone and only goes to some AI outfit.
But I did find a similarly-URL-ed version at https://this-person-does-not-exist.com/ that was interesting,as there are a few more options to choose from (gender,age range, a few ethnicity options, so I generated 4 non-existent people for Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor. I imported into Photoshop using one of the Panorama collages which spread them out like photos on a table.
Then I tried to think if where to place these non-existent people. I first reached for a new browser window thinking of some sort of technical image, like a computer circuit board. This is when unexpected-ness happened.
You see I use the Library of Congress Free to Use Browser extension that puts a random public domain image in my screen each time I open a new browser tab. I was fully intending to open an image search, but there, but random chance here was my answer, a road sign for Hanks Coffee Shop, even better, because it was from Bensen Arizona, a place I have been before.
So now it all came together, these people who do not exist, met up for coffee at Hanks in Benson. A bit more Photoshop editing to make a cloud background, superimpose the names of the four, and I was done.
@ds106dc #tdc4081 #ds106 Ionut, Lázár, Angel, and Elenor materialized at https://t.co/DKTTg3iMq5
— Alan Levine (@cogdog) March 19, 2023
Through magic randomness of LOC Random image in a new browser tab, met at Hanks Coffee Shop, in Benson, AZ, which *does* exist, see https://t.co/MDHKBoI7h3 pic.twitter.com/WLDN6ucC5M
“So what?” is certainly a reasonable response. Couldn’t I save time and just type into an image prompt box, “Photos of 4 people displayed under an old time coffee shop sign”? And maybe iterate a few times until it’s “good enough”? Yes, but is making art about the process or the product? Maybe sometimes it is just getting the thing done, turn it in, as they say.
But what is the connection to it? Would an AI remember driving through Benson, AZ on a memorable road trip to camp in the Chiricahua mountains? Would it remember a completely un-related connection from these photos in the Flickr Commons and that there was a call a while ago for examples of galleries of themed images from the commons? And would it then decide, for no productive reason, to search for other Arizona road sign images in the flickr commons, create a gallery, and then share it back?
I’d say, plausibly, eff no. I want to be doing stuff described as “Art is the voice of a person and whenever AI art is anything more than aesthetically pleasing it’s not because of what the AI did it’s because of what a person did.”
I’m not saying at all don’t do AI. And I absolutely intrigued by what it might offer, we have hardly even scratched the surface. But it does not always mean we have to just line up as robot servants to the AI Industrial Complex.
If we lose our ability, interest, to be non stochastically human in our tasks, then we end up being “derivative by design and inventive by chance.”
Never. But I am hoping maybe to see before not too long, another just thinking blip from FOTA.
Featured image: Humanly created and selected, mine
The British Journal for the History of Philosophy has announced the winners of three of its prizes.
The journal awarded the 2022 Rogers Prize—its annual prize for the best article it publishes—to Michael Kremer (University of Chicago) for his paper “Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle: a philosophical friendship”. Here’s the abstract of his article:
This article considers the personal and philosophical relationship between two philosophers, Margaret MacDonald and Gilbert Ryle. I show that a letter from MacDonald to Ryle found at Linacre College, Oxford, was part of an extensive correspondence, and that the two were intimate friends and philosophical interlocutors, and I explore the relationship between their respective philosophies. MacDonald, who studied with Wittgenstein before coming to Oxford in 1937, deployed and developed Wittgensteinian themes in her own subsequent work. I show that this work was an important source of ideas in Ryle’s philosophy. I examine two episodes: (1) a 1937 symposium in which MacDonald gave the lead paper, and Ryle was a respondent—I argue that Ryle derived his famous distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that from her paper; and (2) Ryle’s rejection in Dilemmas (1953/4) of the central importance of the idea of a ‘category mistake’—I argue that this may have been in response to MacDonald’s critical review of The Concept of Mind. Along the way I consider the development of MacDonald’s metaphilosophical views, and I shed new light on MacDonald’s remarkable biography.
This article and the topic of underappreciated philosophical friendships were discussed previously at Daily Nous here.
clockwise from top left: Michael Kremer, Lea Cantor, Michael Morgan, and Claudia Dumitru
The winner of the Rogers Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2012 in honor of John Rogers, the founding editor of the journal.
The journal awarded its Beaney Prize—its annual prize for the best contribution to widening the canon it publishes—to Lea Cantor (University of Oxford) for her paper “Thales – the ‘first philosopher’? A troubled chapter in the historiography of philosophy”. Here’s the abstract of her article:
It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy.
The winner of the Beaney Prize receives £1,000. The prize was established in 2021 in honour of Mike Beaney, Editor of the journal from 2011 to 2021.
Lastly, the journal awarded its Best Graduate Essay Prize for 2022 to Claudia Dumitru (
The Graduate Essay Prize is £1000, and is awarded annually to the writer of an essay that makes a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. The competition is open to all graduate students, anywhere in the world, studying any subject.
Simon Keller, professor of philosophy and head of the School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, has been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (formerly known as the Royal Society of New Zealand).
The mission of the Royal Society is to “honour, recognise and encourage outstanding achievement in the sciences, technologies and humanities”.
The society announced its most recent class of fellows yesterday, describing their work. Of Professor Keller, they write:
Simon Keller is a philosopher who specialises in ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of mental health and disorder. He has written extensively about the moral and political dimensions of relationships, examining family relationships, friendships, erotic love, and patriotism. His work on mental health looks at the assumptions that lie behind our ways of dividing mental conditions into the healthy and the unhealthy, and the links between mental health and the living of a good human life. In other work, Keller explores such topics as well-being (“welfare”), political freedom, equality, the significance of death, and the way we form beliefs about science. Unifying his work is a concern with how small, often unnoticed details of human life are amplified so as to become powerful political and social forces. He is the author of The Limits of Loyalty (winner of the American Philosophical Association Book Prize) and Partiality, and a co-author of The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate. He is Professor of Philosophy at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, having worked previously at Boston University and University of Melbourne. He has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Rice University, and LMU Munich.
Keller is the only philosopher among the 34 new fellows. You can learn more about his work here.
(via Michael Smith)
An interdisciplinary team led by philosopher Havi Carel (Bristol) has won a £2.6 million grant for its project, “Epistemic Injustice in Health Care” (EPIC).
The “Discovery Grant“, from the charitable science foundation Wellcome, will fund the project for six years, beginning this September.
In addition to Professor Carel, the core team is:
They will be bringing on six* postdoctoral researchers and a range of other researchers and collaborators from Swansea, City and Aston Universities, and the Universities of Bologna and Ferrara.
(l to r) Lisa Bortolotti, Matthew Broome, Havi Carel, Ian James Kidd, Sheelagh McGuinness
According to the team, the project
will offer a systematic investigation of epistemic injustice across a diverse range of case studies—including somatic and psychiatric illnesses, and neurodiverse persons, as well as children and those in later-life care. EPIC aims to identify the interpersonal, institutional, and cultural dimensions of epistemic injustices. The project will include a range of events, postdoctoral positions, and publications and aims to identify practical measures for the benefit of patients and healthcare practitioners alike.
Inquiries about the project should be sent to Professor Carel.
(* Note: the original post stated there would be eight postdocs. That was an error.)
Writing Latinos is a new podcast featuring interviews with Latino authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad.
The post Natalia Molina on “A Place at the Nayarit” appeared first on Public Books.
The Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) has awarded a €8.9 million “Cluster of Excellence” grant to the “Knowledge in Crisis” project headed by philosopher Tim Crane (Central European University).
The project involves researchers at CEU as well as the Universities of Vienna, Graz and Salzburg. The universities themselves have also committed money to the project, bringing its total funding to roughly €15 million. The project looks at how recent social and technological deveopments affect knowledge:
Today we face a crisis of knowledge. Our claims to knowledge are being threatened by rapid and spectacular developments in technology, and by attacks on the very ideas of knowledge and truth themselves. The flood of information on the internet challenges our ability to tell truth from falsehood, and there is a widespread rejection of the standards of scientific evidence and expertise. The crisis raises deep philosophical questions about knowledge, truth, science, ethics, and politics, and ultimately about our relationship to reality itself. These questions will be addressed in entirely new ways by this Cluster of Excellence, which will work to understand the crisis of knowledge in all its manifestations, and to find ways to combat it and reshape our relationship to knowledge.
Professor Crane writes that the aim of the project is to “to investigate various challenges to scientific and other knowledge by connecting many otherwise unconnected areas of philosophy: metaphysics, ethics, political and social philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. The idea is to bring together areas of philosophy which are often isolated from one another, with the aim of getting a deeper understanding of the current crises of knowledge.”
He notes that the funds will be used for, among other things, 18 new academic appointments (postdocs and professors) and for funding PhD students.
The board of directors for the Knowledge in Crisis Project (l to r): Katalin Farkas, Marian David, Paulina Sliwa, Max Kölbel, Tim Crane, Hans Bernhard Schmid, and Charlotte Werndl.
In addition to Professor Crane, the project’s board of directors includes:
You can learn more about the Cluster of Excellence awards here.
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science has named Zina B. Ward (Florida State) the winner of its 2022 Popper Prize.
The Popper Prize, named for Karl Popper, is awarded to the best articles appearing in the journal which concern themselves with topics in the philosophy of science to which Popper made a significant contribution, as determined by the Editors-in-Chief and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science Committee.
Professor Ward won the prize for her “Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains“. Here’s what the judges had to say about it:
In ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’, Zina B. Ward tackles a methodological issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience: how to register data from multiple subjects in a common spatial framework despite significant variation in human brain structure, that is, how to map activity in different subjects’ neural structures onto a single template or into a common representational space. In a typical fMRI-based investigation, experimenters run a series of subjects through a scanner and, if the experiment is fruitful, draw conclusions, from the data collected, about the functional contributions of certain areas of the brain—that, for instance, the ACC regulates emotional responses to pain. Such work presupposes normalization of the images from various subjects, so as to allow experimenters to claim that, across subjects, the same area of the brain exhibited elevated activity during scanning. The requirements of normalization might seem to pose a mere technical problem; perhaps with hard work and ingenuity, neuroscientists can identify the single, correct method for pairing brain areas or regions across subjects. Ward argues against this kind of monism. For principled reasons to do with the extent and nature of variation in neural structure—for example, variation in the location of sulci relative to cytoarchitectonic boundaries—Ward argues that the choice of spatial framework and method of registration must vary, depending on the purpose of a given study. No single method will simultaneously effect all of the correct pairings of relevance to cognitive neuroscience. From a practical standpoint, such methodological pluralism may seem daunting, and it might also seem excessively theory-laden. In response to such concerns, Ward offers and defends a series of constructive proposals concerning how to implement registration pluralism.
For its impressive theoretical and practical contributions to an issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience, the BJPS Co-Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee judge ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’ to be worthy of the 2022 BJPS Popper Prize.
The prize includes £500.
Three others received honorable mention. They are:
You can learn more about the Popper Prize and see a list of past winners here.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Saint Louis University received a five-year $2,830,00 grant from the National Cancer Institute for programs to increase HPV vaccination and HPV screening to lower incidents of cervical cancer among girls and women in Nigeria. Currently, in Nigeria, only 10 percent of eligible women have been screened and 14 percent of girls are vaccinated for HPV. The project is under the direction of Juliet Iwelunmor, a professor of global health and behavioral science and health education in the university’s College for Public Health and Social Justice. Dr. Iwelenmor holds a Ph.D. in bio-behavioral health from Pennsylvania State University.
Spelman College, the historically Black liberal arts educational institution for women in Atlanta, received a $10 million gift from Rosemary K. and John W. Brown to support STEM educational programs at the college. The Browns’ gift will support the architectural, construction, and equipment costs for the college’s new Center for Innovation & the Arts, scheduled to open in the fall of 2024. John Brown is chairman emeritus of Stryker Corporation, a multinational medical technologies corporation based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Rosemary K. Brown is a long-time educator.
The School of Medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky received a $1.2 million grant from the Humana Foundation that will support cardiac disease screening and nutrition-based interventions to address cardiac health disparities among older Black adults in Louisville.
Historically Black Bowie State University in Maryland received a $1,589,014 Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program Grant from the U.S. Department of Education for programs to recruit and prepare Black male educators in early childhood/special education, elementary, or secondary education who can provide effective, culturally relevant/responsive instruction.
The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically Black educational institution in Los Angeles, received a $150,000 grant Grifols, a biopharmaceutical solutions company. The funds will support a scholarship in nursing and the university’s Saturday Science Academy program. The Saturday Science Academy exposes pre-K through 12th-grade students to fun and engaging science material in an effort to motivate them to move into the healthcare field after graduating high school.
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