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Month: February 2017

Will We Accept Music Written by Robots?

Technology
Jason Tate

Eugune Wei, writing on his blog, about the “Magic iPod”:

How such work is received by a human audience is about more than its intrinsic qualities, however. In an objective competition like a game of Go, or when considering a mashup which is simply the synthesis of existing creative works, I suspect humans will be comfortable with acknowledging the achievements of an algorithm.

With original creative works, however, like music, novels, movies, I suspect humans will recoil from even intrinsically appealing creation if it was written by a computer program. Call it some variant of the uncanny valley effect.

We have a romantic attachment to human creation, and it may take a generation of people passing on before we overcome that cultural aversion.

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How YouTube Serves as the Content Engine of the Internet’s Dark Side

YouTube
Jason Tate

Joseph Bernstein, writing for BuzzFeed:

But it’s on YouTube where he really goes to work. Since Nov. 4, four days before the election, Seaman has uploaded 136 videos, more than one a day. Of those, at least 42 are about Pizzagate. The videos, which tend to run about eight to fifteen minutes, typically consist of Seaman, a young, brown-haired man with glasses and a short beard, speaking directly into a camera in front of a white wall. He doesn’t equivocate: Recent videos are titled “Pizzagate Will Dominate 2017, Because It Is Real” and “#PizzaGate New Info 12/6/16: Link To Pagan God of Pedophilia/Rape.”

Seaman has more than 150,000 subscribers. His videos, usually preceded by preroll ads for major brands like Quaker Oats and Uber, have been watched almost 18 million times, which is roughly the number of people who tuned in to last year’s season finale of NCIS, the most popular show on television.

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New Feist Album in April?

Feist
Jason Tate

The Huffington Post is reporting that Feist will release a new album in April:

Feist has been largely off the radar since the 2011 release of her award-winning album “Metals” and since the album’s subsequent tour came to a close the end of the following year. (Fans can expect her long-awaited follow-up in April as well as her vocals on the upcoming Broken Social Scene record.)

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