Tag: AI

Looking back at Battlestar Galactica

I stumbled across the 2004 Battlestar Galactica on Amazon Prime and started watching it again. I remember enjoying the original series long, long ago (trailers for both shows below):

When the new one came out, I realized what was missing from the original series: the collective trauma of the surprise attack on the civilian culture. After the initial episodes, while humanity was still on the run, that trauma seemed missing. It was, in my memory, a light hearted show. But post-9/11, the 2004 writers understood cultural trauma from the smaller scale terrorist attacks and could extrapolate out the effects of a genocidal one. Thus understood a society willing to dehumanize the enemy and use torture (and how ineffectual torture actually is). The show had a dark, more psychologically-introspective tone.

In some ways, it reminded me of watching the Laurence Olivier Henry V and the Kenneth Branagh Henry V (which I did back to back once – my roommate was a film major and it was an assignment). The first was made towards the end of WWII and intended as a morale booster. The heroism of war is quite romanticized. The latter has a much more modern, grittier version of war (I’d say post-Vietnam, but it’s a British production). 

All this struck me anew as I rewatch the 2004 series. And rewatching a show about humans creating AI that then destroys them now has a new frisson in the age of LLMs and the pursuit of actual AI.

Another thing that struck me was, quite frankly, the bathrooms. The bathrooms on the battleship are all gender-neutral.

It struck me when I first watched and even more on this rewatching because the US is so weird about bathrooms and gender. Even restaurants with two single-stall rooms will feel the need often to label them as male and female – even though only one person will be in the locked room at a time. 

I will say at my school, the best bathroom is gender neutral. Each of the stalls is completely closed off with an actual door and then in the main part of the room a long sink runs down the opposite wall. It’s newish and definitely recognized as the best bathroom on campus – my Latin students used it as a Percy Jackson scavenger hunt goal (mentioning where Clarisse tried to dunk Percy and that it was the best version on campus).

But yet bathrooms keep being the center of political battles. I remember the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment included the horrors that it might lead to gender-neutral bathrooms! And transgender rights battles also come back to that. What is our collective hang up about bathrooms?

AI Writing and Creativity

Another nice little reach, this one by Samanth Subramanian over at The New Republic on human creativity and AI writing. Subramanian is, in part, responding to Literary Theory for Robots by Dennis Yi Tenen and the notion that humans comb large scale sources for inspiration in the same way Large Language Model AIs do, so “we shouldn’t agonize too much over the source of intelligence.” But, as Subramanian says,

The art of the novel doesn’t lie in the combine-harvesting of details and plotlines. It lies in how a writer selectively filters some of them through her own consciousness—her deliberations, the sum of her life, the din of her thoughts—to devise something altogether different and more profound. This, and only this, makes any piece of writing meaningful to those who read it.

As someone who teaches about traditional tales and sees the same stories told again and again (Iliad -> Hamlet -> Lion King just as a quick example), this is the heart of the creativity. It’s less what story you are telling than how you tell it. Whether it is Propp boiling down the elements of Russian Folktales, or Joseph Campbell tracing the Hero’s Journey, or as cited in the article, Georges Polti publishing The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, some aspects of stories are, if not universal, than very wide-spread. Unoriginal if you will. Writers stand on the shoulders of their predecessors and draw from their cultures, but, in Subramanian’s words, produce something “different and more profound” – not just for the readers, but for themselves.

Nevertheless, the debate continues as to whether human writing (creativity) is really that different from AI  – or, if so, will remain different. Will it become just like every other automatized industry?

“Because mind and language are special to us, we like to pretend they are exempt from labor history,” Tenen notes.

There is much more in the article. A definite recommended reading.