Prufrock: Artificial Intelligence in the Newsroom, the Search for Red, and The Brutality of Russian Revolutionary Art

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The search for the perfect red: “For a long time, it was also the chapter on reds that began the exposition on pigments useful to painters. That was already the case in Pliny’s Natural History, which had more to say on red than on any other color. And the same is true for the collections of the medieval recipes intended for illuminators and in the treatises on painting printed in Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was not until the century of the Enlightenment that in certain works—most often written by art theoreticians and not painters themselves—the chapter on blues would precede the one on reds and offer a greater number of suggestions.”

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Philip Larkin and the jazz man: “Martin Chilton remembers his father’s friendship with the poet, and recalls a lost age of independent bookshops.”

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Why critics get it wrong (and what we can learn from them when they do): “No critic — even the most prodigiously talented — gets it right all the time. What matters, as we read through the long history of critical misjudgment, is the quality of thought that goes into the critical observation, however flawed.”

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Algis Valiunas on Karl Kraus’s The Last Days of Mankind: It “was intended to be the last word on the ‘war to end all wars’—a phrase and concept Kraus subjects to a thorough mauling. As Kraus states in his preface, ‘The performance of this drama, which would take some 10 evenings in terrestrial time, is intended for a theatre on Mars. Theatre-goers on planet earth would find it unendurable.’ For Martians, presumably, the spectacle would be a lesson in primitive zoology, describing the vilest creature the universe has brought forth; human beings could only be disgusted with the sight of themselves.”

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The brutality of Russian revolutionary art.

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Essay of the Day: In Wired, Joe Keohane writes about the use of artificial intelligence at the Washington Post:

“When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat in November, the Washington Post snapped into action, covering both the win and the wider electoral trend. ‘Republicans retained control of the House and lost only a handful of seats from their commanding majority,’ the article read, ‘a stunning reversal of fortune after many GOP leaders feared double-digit losses.’ The dispatch came with the clarity and verve for which Post reporters are known, with one key difference: It was generated by Heliograf, a bot that made its debut on the Post’s website last year and marked the most sophisticated use of artificial intelligence in journalism to date.

“When Jeff Bezos bought the Post back in 2013, AI-powered journalism was in its infancy. A handful of companies with automated content-generating systems, like Narrative Science and Automated Insights, were capable of producing the bare-bones, data-heavy news items familiar to sports fans and stock analysts. But strategists at the Post saw the potential for an AI system that could generate explanatory, insightful articles. What’s more, they wanted a system that could foster “a seamless interaction” between human and machine, says Jeremy Gilbert, who joined the Post as director of strategic initiatives in 2014. ‘What we were interested in doing is looking at whether we can evolve stories over time,’ he says.

“After a few months of development, Heliograf debuted last year. An early version autopublished stories on the Rio Olympics; a more advanced version, with a stronger editorial voice, was soon introduced to cover the election…”

Read the rest.

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Photo: Yosemite “firefall”

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Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Gentleman Crow”