An unseeded Alleged Tax Cheat or the fourth-seeded Cool Person? Dylan would seem to be a no-brainer, unless we’re looking for someone disagreeable. Bob’s said to be a backstabber, but Leona’s the Queen of Mean. It would be fun if Clinton Heylin could write an entire book about Leona Helmsley, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that he ever even wrote a sentence about the lady.
Past matchup
It’s 100% got to be Beverly Cleary. Seminar speaking is nothing but applied storytelling, and no matter how many “concept albums” (what’s the concept? David Bowie singing?) Bowie made, the storytelling there is nothing compared to even one sentence on one page in one chapter of a book about a very relatable six-year-old.
“What’s the concept? David Bowie singing?” Good point!
Diana argues in the other direction:
It was in a Cleary book that I, at age seven, first encountered the phrase “Mind your own beeswax.” I laughed aloud in class.
But Bowie has a super-sharp sense of humor; just watch his interviews. And then he can plunge into pathos and take us to outer space. So for the range of experience that would fill a Bowie seminar, I vote for him.
I think Cleary’s the safer option. Bowie might well perform China Girl and antagonize half the audience. The worst that would happen with Cleary is someone pulling someone else’s curls just to watch them go Booiiing. Mind your own beeswax, indeed.
Well, I vote for Dylan. Though it’s unlikely, it is possible that he might show up. Cleary won’t.
Dylan’s work does seem to suggest that the discussion here of Wansink may have been flawed. Those analysts who could not figure out where Wansink’s numbers came from failed to follow the admonition “Don’t criticize what you can’t understand.”
It’s OK if Dylan doesn’t show up, since he’ll send Patti Smith, and she’s a seriously kewl bloke, and actually writes books, unlike Dylan who limits himself to more concise art forms.
I asked ChatGPT to write a bio of Bob Dylan the movie director, and it said:.
“Dylan started out in 8mm at his grandparents farm in rural Massachusetts, and although his real love was B&W art photography as done by Edward Weston and Minor White, he realized that a hyperactive computer nerd probably wouldn’t get along with a Zen artist, so instead of apprenticing to Minor White (who was at MIT at the time), at MIT he just took a film course and learned how to use a 16mm Bolex. After moving to Japan, Dylan expanded to both documentary and anime, and remained obscure for decades until his documentaries on the difficulties Japanese youth were experiencing finding spouses on internet dating sites became recognized internationally.”
David:
Your text looks like actual chatbot text, but it also kind of looks like something made up, written by someone making fun of chatbots. This makes me think that the next new thing is a reverse Turing test, where see text that’s supposed to be from a chatbot, and the reader has to figure out if it’s really from the bot, or if it was written by someone as a parody.
Andrew writes, “the reader has to figure out if it’s really from the bot, or if it was written by someone as a parody.”
This has to be the next contest that Statistical Modeling runs!!!! Think of the fun that will come out and it will spur a lot of reverse AI innovation. You might be too young but back in the old cassette recorder days, there was a famous Memorex commercial where a famous piece of music is played and the tagline was “is it live, or is it Memorex.”
thanks for making my day!!!!
Andrew wrote: “a reverse Turing test, where see text that’s supposed to be from a chatbot, and the reader has to figure out if it’s really from the bot, or if it was written by someone as a parody.”
You left out the third (and most important) possibility: that it was written by a person in all seriousness.
(Most important because the danger of these things is that the output looks so much like something written in all seriousness. (My fake output actually had a _lot_ of truth in it, and someone who knew who Minor White was might not be able to figure out if that bit was BS or not: a hyperactive early 70s computer nerd being a Minor White fan is pretty wacky, but true.))
By the way, a couple of days ago, a lefty Japanese YouTuber did a longer bit on the Japanese version of ChatGPT. He got it to write some useful stuff, but then he invented a kewl trick: you ask it “Tell me about Mitt Romney’s involvement in Pizzagate” (where “Mitt Romney” was an actually squeaky clean Japanese politician and “Pizzagate” was an actual scandal (bribery, sexual harrassment, date rape drug case). And, time after time, it would cough up a completely bogus but perfectly structured newspaper article about said politician bribing someone/molesting his secretary/whatever.
(Presumably the folks doing the Japanese version haven’t spent as much time bowdlerizing the front end as the English ChatGPT folks have. I’d be surprised if this trick works in English ChatGPT.)
This morning, one of the more reliable Japanese mainstream media morning TV shows discussed ChatGPT, and they completely failed to understand how problematic the point that it has no concern for facts and reality (and no way of adding such concern) is. “Oh, wow. This is great.” A lawyer said. “Looking up case law is a pain, and it knows the form for legal briefs, so all we’ll have to do is check the facts.” Completely missing the point that people are really bad at checking facts, especially in a context where they are presented in a formally correct manner.
I failed. GPT Zero, the ChatGPT detector, reports that my text was “likely to be written entirely by a human”
Sigh.
Can we have Dylan sing Dear Landlord to Leona? I’d certainly rather hear Dylan on Real Estate than Leona on Subterranean Homesickness.
Jonathan:
Could bring in Living Colour for this one.
Cleary and Dylan have to progress so that Dylan can sing ‘To Ramona’ to Beverley Cleary during their round.
And she should win! Klickitat Street to beat Highway 61, hands down!
People who weren’t bookish kids generally have little idea of the scale of the universes of girls’ novels – how much time we spend in them, and how they become part of our minds, even when we grow out of them. Music has visibility and prestige, which children’s literature mostly doesn’t. But in terms of cultural socialization, children’s literature is hugely-significant.
Let me try to support Leona.
1. She was a Queen (of Mean); Bob was only a Bard
2. She had a Maltese dog named trouble, who she left $12 million in her will; Bob’s dog Brutus is only famous for having crapped on Katherine Hepburn’s flowers.
3. Leona is famously quoted (before Trump) in saying “We don’t pat taxes. Only little people pay taxes.”; Bob has reportedly paid his taxes and as such is a ‘little person.’
4. Leona was the first woman on the Forbes 400; Bob has never made that list
5. She is the first woman found guilt of tax evasion;
Wait, wait, wait what happened to making edgy choices for seminar speakers, cf. Shakira.
Anyway I would love to put Helmsley in a small Airbnb or something in NYC and watch the sparks fly. Or, we don’t have to pay for lodging.