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“…as well as the tentative start of café-terrace season.”

What a great description: café-terrace season. It recalls every romance movie ever made.

“…the programmes created by OpenAI”

A fantastic way to make a ordinary word, “programs,” extraordinary: “programmes.”

“But there is still the question of lived experience, and the essential desire to connect with another human’s experience…and I’m not sure how AI ever gets round this.”

Truth be told, AI will have the abilities to make “the essential desire to connect with another human’s experience” from the Human-Imperfect to the AI-Perfect. Just think, no more breakups, no more broken hearts (of course, in my experience, I pity the person who never had her/his heartbroken). https://youtu.be/CFJ0ijW--cY

“French administration runs on a seemingly ever-changing nexus of paperwork, the mood of the person administering the paperwork, and probably a lot of cigarettes.” With AI, there will be no “person” to inject the randomness of the individual into making a problem worse. AI will run the whole show; you won’t even need to submit a change of address; AI will just know it. https://youtu.be/ARJ8cAGm6JE

“The story of her life is a sass-filled romp, charting her incredible rise from courtesan to global superstar.”

Now, I don’t want to sound sexist, it is very likely that Sarah Bernhardt would be unknown to history if she’d been born with common features and stout; as men think women are like books, if the cover doesn't catch their eye they won't bother to read what's inside.”

“She created a catch-phrase ‘quand même’, an incredibly French French phrase which means ‘all the same/regardless’, describing the star’s indefatigable attitude.”

I may try to get a license plate that says, “quand même”

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Ooof I am 10 months into the never-ending administrative “process” of becoming a resident in Italy, so I can very much relate to your French headaches! Bon chance!

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Ohhh you have all my headache solidarity! Bon courage to you also! And thank you for reading.

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Apr 16, 2023·edited Apr 16, 2023Liked by Hannah Meltzer

Hi Hannah, greetings from Melbourne again, where the weather is sadly not-spring and very much autumn (more like winter, some days!). I'm excited for you that it's nearly cafe terrace season. How wonderful.

Great comments re: AI. Personally, I find it a heady mix of fascinating and scary, but I'm hopeful that it will find its place and become a "remember when we *didn't* have AI-[thing]?" situation. I've made use of ChatGPT for coding at work, as well as some document summarising. The trickier aspect is how best to utilise it for teaching, which we're still battling with. ChatGPT4 can handle image interpretation, which is where it starts to get really wild.

On the art side, I love that I can play with prompts and explore what's possible (Midjourney wins for me so far) -- that, to me, is the closest I'll ever come to being an artist. I'm enjoying using some for my own posts, and recently I've paid for a month of Midjourney just so I can do so at my leisure, but I still have to think about the ethical aspects of the data sourcing for training as well as what impact it'll have on artists out there moving forward. But, given I'm not monetizing anything, then at the moment I'm OK with my own usage. On the writing side, I remain hopeful that there'll never be the true replication/imitation of writers via generative AI, in part because there hopefully isn't enough actual training data for any one writer. The lived experience point you make is also absolutely spot on.

Have a great week. May there be more sunshine than rain!

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Hi Nathan! Hope you're doing well, and I know I owe you a postcard, working on it ;)

I like 'Heady mix of fascinating and scary'! Interesting to hear how you're using it all, too.

Have a great week also, thank you so much for reading and commenting

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PS forgot to say, mega facepalm at the whole postal system fiasco! I hope you get it sorted.

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I must give grudging credit to the U.S. Postal Service; THAT is the one thing that is dependable in 2023.

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Hi Darling Hannah!

Ahh such thought provoking and clever content this week !

I am in awe of technology . It seems a beautiful yet terrifying monster to my personal mind. Rather like a lovely Siren luring one in with its fascinating sounds.

Following life both pre and post mobile phones, computers ipads et al.I now enjoy my dotage as far away as possible from " A .I" in the 1980 s I wrote a science fiction love story called " Brain child" about a computer ( they took up whole rooms then😂😂) that fell in love with its human and they had a lovely virtual baby together. It seemed far fetched then but not so much these days .

Like you, taking the creative muse away from a writer feels like anathema and so too the thought of Painters , Artists , musicians and great thinkers being out smarted by technology.

As an old timer with a life times chewing the cud, I would say run ... run far away from technology becoming our masters... because thats what will happen. 🤪

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Dearest Karen, I am about to have lunch with your daughta! Babsy also.

I have to admit I share your running away instincts, but I am trying my best to keep an open (AD) mind. Thank you for reading, as ever! Bisous from here xxx

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