Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind listener Mail. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick. And today is Monday, the day of each week that we read back messages from the Stuff to Blow Your Mind email address. If you would like to get in touch and maybe have your own message featured on a listener mail episode, you can reach us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. All types of messages are welcome. We especially like if you have something interesting to add to
a topic we have recently talked about. Let's see, rob should we kick things off with some responses to our series on authenticity?
Yeah? I was good.
All right, I'm going to start with this message from Louisa. Luisa says, hi, guys, I've enjoyed your Authenticity series so very much. The part that really got to me was that we somehow equate being authentic with being good slash virtuous. You're pointing out that this is not necessarily true. Reminded me of a Max Frish play called The fire Raisers. In German, it's called Biedermann und d Bronzetifter, and if you're trying to look this play up, I think sometimes
in English it's just called the Arsonists. Luisa goes on, if you're not familiar with it, it's basically about a group of men who set up in her Biedermann's attic. He asks them what they are planning to do with the gasoline they bring home, the incendiary devices they haul up the stairs, and other such things. They tell him outright that they are planning on setting the city on fire, and he either doesn't believe them or pretends he doesn't. It's a fascinating play, and I think it addresses some
of the complex issues you raised in the series. As always, thank you so much for the podcast. It always leaves me with so many interesting ideas. Best regards, Luisa. Thanks Luisa. I'm I was not familiar with this play beforehand, but
I went and read up about it, so yeah. The plot is, as Luisa describes, basically, like some guys, initially posing as salesmen, talk their way into this guy, this you know, regular guy's house and talk him into letting them stay in the attic, and then they increasingly are doing obviously suspicious stuff like you know, bringing in all of this this stuff that would clearly be designed to start fires with, and he ends up helping them and all this and and it's pretty clear what they're doing,
but for some reason he just won't accept that they are actually the arsonists who have been starting all the fires.
Hmm. Yeah, I'm not familiar with this work, but just looking around, it looks like there have been numerous TV movie adaptations of this over the years. I think a number of them were for like Swiss television. But yeah, it seems to be one of his works that has resonated really well and has thus been adapted.
I think it is often taken as a commentary on the rise of extremist political factions within democracies, with the idea that like people would make excuses as the Nazis are coming to power. It's like, oh, it's just talk, They're not really going to do any of that kind of thing, which I would argue is not a good mindset to have. You know, if a political faction is making scary threats, I would say take them seriously.
All right. This next one comes to us from Wayne. Wayne writes sentence says, Hi, Robert, Joe and JJ, your recent episodes on authenticity made me think of some issues that artificial intelligence has been bringing up in the last year or two. And just as a side note, we did I hear from a number of people sort of nudging us about the topic of artificial intelligence and AI generated art and imagery and so forth in response to these episodes. Anyway, Wayne continues here in particular, is AI
generated art really art? I feel like one quality of good art is that it connects the viewer with the mind and soul of the artist in an authentic way. They had to make the art or they wouldn't be true to themselves. With AI generated art, there is no mind and soul behind it, where at best the average version of the whole Internet. Whenever I see a really cool image such as and Wayne shares an image here and a Joe, You're going to jump in on it
in a second, he says. And then I found out it's been created by a program like mid Journey, it immediately feels empty to me.
Thanks Wayne, Yeah, thank you Wayne. So, folks, if you want to look up the image that Wayne shared with us, the one he attaches is oh, it's got a French name. It's called a Teatra de opera spaciale or like theater de opera spatial and it was created by mid Journey based on prompts by someone named Jason Michael Allen. And apparently this image was sort of in the news because the prompt engineer here Alan submitted it to a digital
art competition. From what I understand based on what I was reading, apparently being fully transparent, that the entry was
created by AI. So it wasn't like, you know, trying to pass it off as something he had done with his own hand, but saying, yeah, here's an AI image that I prompt I created with prompts, and the image won a prize, and so there was some controversy I guess over whether it should have won a prize, whether it really counts as art, you know, whether it should have been allowed to enter, whether AI generated art can should be allowed to compete with the art created by
human hands. But anyway, I would say yes, Wayne, at least to some extent, I agree with you whether or not we think AI generated creative objects like artworks and music and fiction can ever have qualitative parity with with works created by humans, whatever they're you know, the quality like the technical qualities are that we appreciate in these artworks, whether it can essentially pass as a human art work
or not. I think there is probably still going to be a preference in most contexts to interact with art created by humans simply for the reason that it was created by a human. So I in this particular case of the art work you mentioned, the Tatra de Opera spatial, I enjoy it like I like this digital AI image more than a lot of AI generated art that I come across. A lot of times that these AI generated images like that they even in a sort of direct
sensory capacity, a kind of lack character or personality. They often look too smooth and kind of samey. But I do like this image. However, despite the fact that I like it and just like a pure sensory way, I like the you know what the pixels are, Knowing that it was made by an AI causes an emotional change in me that does make me less interested in it.
And I would say one difference is that for a scene like this, so this is like an imaginative scene that looks like it could come from a kind of a science fiction world, there are characters in it, there is a setting that looks sort of unlike our world, and it raises questions in the imagination. So when I see an image of a scene like this, or really any imaginative painting, it suggests a broader imagined world, Like if the image was created by a person, I would
be tempted to wonder about the story behind it. You see this scene, but I wonder what else is happening in this imagined world, And that sort of depends on the creator having a broader imagination. Now to qualify you certainly could prompt the AI to generate more images from the same world, and it would, you know, confabulate as needed. But that is not as emotionally exciting to my mind the same It's not the same way it would be to imagine what else a human artist was imagining.
Yeah, because to your point, there is no story behind it.
There is just a yawning, grotesque emptiness. And that is That's ultimately what I keep finding myself confronting nowadays when I look at something or listen to something as is now currently in the news, to something created by AI, even if to varying degrees, yes there is a human I'm involved in the loop giving it words, deciding exactly how it's going to be calibrated, again with varying degrees of detail depending on the system, but still the results
almost always ring hollow in and of themselves, and if they don't ring hollow in and of themselves, it's that additional knowledge that this was created by a machine that just kind of like sucks the life of it in the same way, in a similar way anyway that the life might be sucked out of a piece of art if you found out something just particularly awful about the
human behind it. Now, even then, depending on the artwork and your exact relation with the you know, sort of the algorithm of separating the author and the artist, it might not change it too much, or it might change it in a way where it was still interesting, you know, at least you're like, well, this is a very disturbed person. I don't really enjoy this work anymore, but it is perhaps some interesting inside. There's no insight to be gained.
It's insight into an algorithm which is just completely devoid of humanity on the surface of things.
Yeah, well, I might not say there's no insight to be gained, but it's a different kind of insight, and it's not like a it's not an exciting, warm, human emotional insight. It's more an insight into systems and how machines work, and things about the you know, the corpus of the Internet and that sort.
Of yeah, yeah, things like oh well, this is what this is, sort of like the tortured and re tortured remnants of what happens when you get an aggregate of the Internet's vision of reality and things like that. I mean, there are a lot of interesting things going on and how these systems are working and malfunctioning. But god, it just at the end of the day, it kind of ticks me off more and more.
Do you want to talk about the music you were sharing with me?
I don't want to name the program or the website that is used. I mean, it's out there. There's like a Rolling Stone article about it. But yeah, we had one of our listeners sent some examples to me and said, hey, check this out. So of course, you know, I wanted to check it out so then I could have some
frame of reference to talk about it. And yeah, it was kind of horrifying because it did a much better job than I expected, and yet at the end of the day, like the things that came up with were solidly mediocre.
Yes, that was my feeling as well. I was both with incredibly impressed and really deflated so hearing these AI created songs with vocals that had supplied lyrics. On one hand, it was much better technically than it had any right to be, like it was frighteningly passable as music actually created by humans. On the other hand, I hated all of it, like it's the kind of music that if it was created by humans, I would not be interested
in listening to more. It had this this kind of horribly generic personality free equality to it.
Yeah, and I have all sorts of questions about how it is ultimately sourced, what sort of guardrails are on there currently, because I know with this particular system you can't put in or you're not supposed to put in, or it doesn't recognize or it's made not to recognize the names of individual artists, and so yeah, I'm not
sure how all that works out exactly. And also I just can't help but imagine some scenario like, Okay, if you have an AI just endlessly creating new songs in different genres, and then there is any level of like legal right to those songs that it just turns out constantly like what does that mean for just like the legal aspect of song creation moving forward, you know, which is you know, already a very crowded realm of tunes and melodies and riffs and so forth.
Oh are you saying, like the musical equivalent of if you just have a machine create the library of babble and then file for copyright on every book in it, so any book that a human rights afterwards already exists in the library and that we already did that.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like you have automated AI copyright trolls. Yeah, and maybe there ends up being a situation where oh, there has to be a human in the loop for
it to count. But then maybe there's just this one human there's a name on a document, and that humans in the loop, so that human has the copyright to all the I don't know, I'm fine here, I'm this is just technological anxiety, maybe to a large extent, And maybe folks who have more insight on the legalities of all of this can chime in and set us straight.
Oh yeah, I know, we have there are lawyers that listen, and so I'd be interested to hear your perspectives. But it seems to me that AI is currently stress testing or testing the boundaries of our concepts of authorship and intellectual property and all things like that.
Now, of course, if you listen to the great you know all of the more positive and optimistic views, like AI is supposed to be changing all of our lives for the better, and AI is going to be our assistant, our collaborators and help us overcome wicked problems in the world. But I don't know. It seems like most of what we see is it creating bad art these days? All right, that's the end of my butler and rant there.
Sorry, all right, I think we're going to shift over because we got a bunch of stuff in the mailbox about Weird House cinema, so we need to address some of that. First of all, this is just we don't need to read this whole message, but we did get a message from listener Jeff amending a previous comment about
the Netflix adaptation called Delicious in Dungeon. This is where like some adventurers in Dungeons and Dragons basically are going through a dungeon fighting monsters and then cooking them, and so it was like a combination fantasy adventure show and a cooking show. And Jeff had previously told us that
this show was appropriate for kids. Jeff says that was a true at the time he sent the original message, but since then some more episodes have been released and says, now, actually, maybe maybe this is not a fully family friendly program. Maybe parents check it out first.
Yeah, yeah, fair enough. We have encountered similar situations before with shows where like the rating seems a bit high, particularly with some anime type stuff where uh, you know, in isolation, one episode may seem very cute and charming and not you know, too serious, but then it'll go
off the rails in the next. So yeah, it's always good to I've become the sort of person who always goes and looks at the IMDb users submitted like parental guidelines, or sometimes I'll check out does the Dog Die to see, you know, some of the potential trigger points on given pieces of media and so forth.
Yeah, what was the movie we watched for a Weird House that had appearance guide warning about a character being implied to nude off screen?
Yeah? Oh yeah, implied nudity. Yeah, that one definitely sticks with me. Sometimes the youth Again users submitted parental tips for films and TV shows on IMDb. Sometimes it can be quite hilarious, but oftentimes it broad and more broadly speaking, it can be very helpful for helping to choose something for your own viewing, for family viewing, and also for
weird House sometimes. I mean that's one of the first things I check when we're thinking about watching something for Weird House, just to see what sort of stuff happens in the movie and it's.
Going to be a gross bummer.
Yeah, Yeah, I just sort of to see, Okay, is there anything here that just probably disqualifies it? And if so, then I'm just gonna move on to something else. Though again it's user submitted, so it's not all It doesn't know everything either. Yeah, all right, This next one comes to us from Pat. Pat writes in and says Rob Joe the Weird House Dune set was great, A lot of fun diving into the dune world and the world of David Lynch more Lynch movies, please one missed point.
Saint Aliah of the Knife is played by Alicia Witt, familiar to my fellow Hallmart cheesy Christmas movie fans, and a creepy character from Walking Dead.
Oh okay, I I don't really know Walking Dead. I do watch some cheesy Christmas movies seasonally with Rachel. That's kind of a fun thing we do sometimes. But I'm more familiar with like the bad Netflix Christmas movies. I don't think I know the Hallmark ones as much unless there's some overlap there.
Yeah, and I think I fell off of watching Walking Dead before her character was introduced. And as far as Christmas shows go, Yeah, I have to have a ghost or a monster in my Christmas movies. It's just how I am at this point. Sorry.
With some of the Christmas movies, you can kind of imagine a monstrous plot behind them, like it's unstated. But these are characters that are all like I don't know, like virtual personalities created inside inside, like a virtuosity kind of scenario, that are about to become sentient and it could happen any moment.
We'll see. I'll allow that a nice sci fi element is good, but yeah, otherwise it's like I'm watching a Christmas movie and it needs to be a fantastic element. It needs to be magic or monsters. It's not that big of an app It can be a Grinch, it can be a ghost of Christmas past, president or future. It can just be the existence of Santa Claus. That's why again I applaud the ted Lasso series for creating
a universe in which Santa Claus definitely exists. And I think that's something we have to remember anytime we watch an episode of ted Lasso. This Santa Claus definitely exists in this universe. Who don't know what will happen next.
Like he's physically at the North Pole.
Yeah, yeah, this is a This is a universe in which Santa Claus is real, is at the North Pole, does fly around every Christmas in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, And so you know that magic is real, that magic is possible. So who knows? Every time I go into a ted Lasso episode, I'm like, what's what's going to happen next? The gates of Hell could open and it will be in keeping with what we've established, though it
never does anyway, pack continue expected it. One point you made referred to over emphasizing the power of the spacing Guild disagree. A major theme of the novels is the political problem of the overlordship of the Guild in space travel. Every group of human culture in Herbert's universe struggles with this at the highest levels. When Paul Assum's control over the Guild by threatening Spice production, he becomes a stronger
emperor in all of Herbert's history. This leads me to one problem I have with the Newsdoom in that he plays down this aspect. The story falls apart if it is not taken that Aracus is the only planet with Spice, a galaxy wide empire powered by the Guild's ability to provide transportation. All of the film adaptations downplay the galactic addiction to Spice. Herbert's books make it very clear that all of the nobility are addicts. Science fiction fans know
that intersolar systemic travel is a silly idea. There is no extent theory that would allow this. The fun of science fiction is in what if, in this case, the Space and Guild's ability to fold space thissability is an offshoot of spice addiction.
Hmm, okay, Well, to defend what we said, I don't think we were making the case that David Lynch should not have emphasized the spacing Guild. I think we were talking about that there are like, because the novel is so huge and the world is so big, you kind of have to like pick what you're going to focus on in a movie adaptation, unless the movie adaptation is going to be like a you know, ten hour mini
series or something. But you know, if you're going to do something within movie length range, you've really got to You've got to just select things to zoom in on and leave some other things by the wayside. So the Lynch movie really picks the spacing Guild to focus on the expense of focusing on like the Benny Jesrett and other things, whereas the newer movies focus more on the
politics of the Benny Jesret. They're different choices, and I think the Benny Jesert focus works really well in the new movies.
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, he had to the team in general had to decide on what they were going to focus on, and they focused on the Beni Jesterrett and they did a really good job with them. Yeah. I love the space and Guild. I would have liked to have seen more from them, but you just have
to make these choices in adaptation. By the way, and I say this in part because I've gone back and started rereading Doom, but I believe it's actually the Holtzman effect that allows for the folding of space, and that spice enables the guild steersman or navigator to just choose the safest, safest path through space. But solid point on
the life extending properties of the spice. It is said in the books especially that like, if you can afford spice, you are probably on spice in part to prolong human life.
Yes, now, do I remember correctly that the whole thing about the guild navigators needing spice, as you say, it allows them to see the safest path through folded space. It's like it's essentially that the spice give grants some foreknowledge, like you can kind of see the future, right.
Yeah, Like the way I always think about it again, it comes back to we can't have computers. We need human minds that can do the things that computers would other otherwise do, in this case safely navigate a complex system. And the spice allows the guild steersman or navigator to sort of see just far enough in the future to avoid catastrophe, and so it's you know, it's not substantial for sight, but it is just enough to avoid the dangers. And so it's often pointed out that the Guild kind
of takes the safest path through anything. So it's a safe path. It doesn't mean it's the most direct path. It doesn't mean it's the fastest. It may be quite slow, but this is how they navigate things.
It's not complete knowledge of the future, but it's like a Spidey sense.
Maybe, yeah, right, Pack continues. You also mentioned that David Lynch weekly refers to the greater galactic culture of Herbert Stune universe by mentioning Ix the Benny Fleelax the Rishi's Lynch also downplays the lanstrad and Chom does Venue even mentioned Chrome Chom. One weakness of all the film adaptations is that they gloss over Herbert's politics. Disagree the novels are all about politics. The Fremen or free Men, represent a difference in culture with the rest of the Empire.
The empire is feudalistic, balanced with a corporate superstructure. When Paul creates a new empire, he sweeps away ancient life patterns. The feudalism of Herbert's galactic empire is made clear by many references to the butleran Jahad. One cannot create a machine which mimics the human mind. What replaces machines in such a society human labor and feudalism. While Herbert does not explicitly explain the roles of Ix and Rieschi's in this structure, he does invite the reader to think as
Lynch did solid point. Yeah, there's a great deal of political intrigue that the movies just generally don't get into, that generally can't get into. Like a lot of Dune fans, I really love the banquet scene in the book because of this, because you get to see a lot of just even the planetary factions interacting with each other. But I think this has only come to life on screen for this by mini series. Yeah.
One thing I like about the politics of Dune is that it represents a complex world in which, as in the real world, like, there is a balance of power and there are different factions competing for power, so as where you know, in like the Star Wars universe, you don't often get a lot of that. It's just sort of like the empire is on top. They are essentially all powerful except for the rebellion fighting against them. So they're like two forces basically, and they're in direct conflict.
You know, that gets filled out more in the extended universe stuff, but you know, the original picture is pretty like two has two poles of power, whereas in the Dune universe you get to see, for example, that like the Emperor is very powerful but has to manage a lot of factions that can all like come against him, and they all have power over him even though he is technically the boss.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, pac continues another myssed another area missed in the film the great schools of Herbert's universe, the Bennie jester At, the Bennie Leelax, the Mentats, the Silk School, and the Ganas. The magic present in this universe is explained by Herbert as intense development, training and education and specialization. A favorite idea I have concerns Paul's duel with Fade in the film. As in the book Fade Ratha attempts
treachery by poison. Paul is a Mentat and the Quisach Haatarak. He would have seen the attempt with presidents, he would have sneered as with his benijesurate training, he would be immune to poison. Herbert was not perfect now on this note, so to be clear, I had to go back and reread the final Knighte fight, and this sweat into me
like starting the book over again. But Paul and his mother do anticipate poison, and while like Paul's faction does briefly discuss his fighting Fade is something that is dangerous and unnecessary, he does in fact use his powers to babolize the slowing poison that Fade manages to nick him with. But he also he also somewhat underestimates Fade to a
certain extent. So, just to read a quick fragment from this part of the novel, quote, Paul remained silent, probing with his inner senses, examining the blood from the wound. Finding a trace of soporific from the Emperor's blade. He realigned his own metabolism to match this threat and change the molecules of the soporific, but he felt a thrill of doubt. They've been prepared with soporific on a blade. A soporific nothing to alert a poison snooper, but strong
enough to slow the muscles it touched. His enemies had their own plans within plans, their own stacked treacheries.
Oh okay, so it's not a killing poison. It's something that is supposed to be subtle enough to be not noticed by someone who does normally notice poisons. But it would slow Paul down in the fight.
Yeah, to sort of throw him off his game in a very tint situation with a number of factors political and otherwise. Yeah, so I'm not sure it was one hundred percent in the bag at this point for Paul. I think he gambles. He doesn't take the safest path, you know, as the Guild takes the safest path and navigating the stars. But that's one thing that makes him a trades you know, he is going to do the daring thing and the times reckless thing instead. Anyway, Pat closes out, as always many things.
Pat Okay, Well, I think we have to close it there for today, but we have a bunch more messages to get to, so we'll have to address them next week. So tune in again next Monday for more listener mail.
Yeah. Yeah, we're happy to continue to discuss these various topics, continue to geek out on done if necessary. So yeah, right in, we'd love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to Plow Your Mind's primarily a science podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Mondays are when we do our listener mail episode, So right in.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this side or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufft blow your Mind dot com.
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.