Any other Sydney Uni alumni at the festival today?
Author: Kris
ChatGPT Did Not Write This Talk
Yesterday I was invited to give the final talk of the year for the Tech Leader Chats meetup group, which is run by Multitudes from NZ. I had a righteous rant about generative AI and creativity, and I think I did a pretty good job with it! My references are below, and you can watch the talk online here:
I also wanted to share the list of references and news stories that I mentioned during the talk:
- “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” by Roald Dahl
- Google’s “Dear Sydney” commercial that ran during the Olympics
- Alexandra Petri’s response in The Washington Post to Google’s ad
- Forbes‘s article suggesting you use ChatGPT at the Thanksgiving table
- The Verge‘s review of Google’s Pixel 9 phone
- The Guardian’s story about LJ Hooker’s hallucination-filled home listings
- The Harvard Misinformation Review‘s article about GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar
- The Atlantic‘s exposé revealing that AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work
- The Verge‘s article about OpenAI engineers accidentally erasing critical evidence from a lawsuit
- Study in Nature about how AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect
- Bruce Sterling’s blog post about “Delvish”
- Wired‘s story about the prevalence of AI-generated text on LinkedIn
- International Business Times story about the environment crisis the AI industry is exacerbating
- Dr. Linda McIver’s keynote from PyconAU 2024
- Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
- Ted Chiang’s essay on why AI isn’t going to make art, from The New Yorker
- Slate article about this year’s NaNoWriMo AI controversy
- The Bookseller article about new startup Spines aiming to disrupt publishing
- Issue #218 from Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files
- The Economist article about the AI investment bubble
- Procreate’s AI statement
Dessert
My pumpkin pie ice cream turned out really well! Much more suitable on a hot day than trying to bake.
MTV Thanksgiving Special 1997
The Snook had a special Thanksgiving surprise for me: he downloaded the 1997 MTV Thanksgiving special, with poor Kurt Loder trying to interact with Beavis and Butthead. 😂 It’s terrible.
Happy Thanksgiving!
It’s way too hot to cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner in Sydney this week, so I decided to spin it into a classic American picnic: chicken salad rolls and potato salad. Yum. 🦃
Recipes:
Used book JACKPOT
I’ve put a fair number of old books in our local “Street Library” box over the past few months, but this is the first time I’ve fished one out! #sunny
Thanksgiving
It’s 35C/95F out; all of Sydney is under extreme heat warning; and all I want is a goddamn can of pumpkin so I can make pumpkin pie ice cream. But alas, none to be found, not even for ready money. I will be roasting butternut this evening once the sun goes down…
Oh, and I asked the butcher how much it would be for a turkey breast to sous vide, and he told me $97 AUD (that’s $62 USD), and I laughed in his face and then bought a couple chicken breasts instead. I think it was actually a turkey crown roast, but whatever. Chicken it is.
EDITED – ONE HOUR LATER:
Me: So we’re going to be roasting pumpkin tonight so I can get puree, because I couldn’t find any canned. 😒
Rodd: You know, we already have some frozen puree from the last time you did that?!
Whaaaaaaat. THANKS, PAST KRIS!
7-11 Onigiri 🍙 – continued!
Time to try the other two 7-11 onigiri flavours!
First up I went with the Teriyaki Chicken, which I think illustrates just how “ungenerous” the filling is in these. It also didn’t really taste of much. Definitely my least favourite of the three.
Lastly, we have the Sweet Chilli Cooked Salmon. I definitely wasn’t expecting much (Sweet chilli? Really, Australia?!), especially when I saw the little blob of filling. BUT I was very happily surprised. It’s great! Lots more flavour than either of the other two, and if I ever get them again, this will be my choice.
Peer Gynt Quilts
If you like classical music, patchwork quilting, or in-depth explanations of creative design process, you will absolutely love this blog series about 4 Peer Gynt-inspired quilts. The artist Deborah Pickett was inspired by this painting based on Ravel’s Boléro. Doesn’t that just make you want to make some art?
Dinner
Korean Chili-Braised Brisket with Kimchi Coleslaw! I accidentally bought an extra tub of gochujang so this was a great way of using it up. 😍
The recipe is here. It’s technically for an Instant Pot, but I did it in a traditional pressure cooker and therefore reduced the time a bit. (I think the traditional one gets a bit higher pressure.) You can also use a slow cooker, but that would have required starting the day before to get everything properly marinated.