Latest news with #IanBogost
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
There's a Nuclear Option to Fight Trump's War Against Colleges. You Aren't Going to Like It.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. It's now very apparent that the Trump administration's assault on American higher education is not going to stop. Seemingly every day brings news of a fresh threat—or actual move—to pull federal money from a college or university for blatantly political reasons. Although these attacks specifically target research grants—which are the main way the U.S. government subsidizes higher-education institutions—they will invariably affect every aspect of the work of higher education. Ian Bogost argued in the Atlantic this week that the Trump attacks will ruin every aspect of college life, extending beyond research labs and even the classroom to the 'entire undergraduate experience at residential four-year schools.' He paints a picture of stripped-down campuses, with no student services, no social infrastructure, and nothing of the bread and circuses that we've associated with American colleges and universities for over a century. So here's an idea: Why not get ahead of the curve on that? Specifically, let's start by canceling intercollegiate athletics. This would be an immediate cost-saving move that would mitigate the pain of the Trump cuts. Despite the glitz on display during events like the ongoing NCAA basketball tournament, college sports are a big money loser for nearly every school that participates in them. According to the NCAA's own data, last updated in December, the average Division I university loses nearly $17 million annually on its athletics program. The numbers are actually even higher for the schools in the vaunted Football Bowl Subdivision, one of which (not named in the NCAA report) lost a staggering $81.4 million in 2023. The scholar Scott Hirko gathered data for 229 public Division I schools and found that in 2022 just 18 of them had profitable athletics programs. The University of Houston and the University of Connecticut—both of which are NCAA darlings with teams in the men's and women's Final Fours this weekend—nearly tied for dead last in terms of revenue, with net losses exceeding $45 million each. But the most important part of canceling college sports is not the millions saved but the message sent. It will take months, even years, for Americans, even those currently enrolled in college, to feel the impact of the cuts to higher education. Research labs are closing now, but the loss of medical breakthroughs and technological progress will be a slow-rolling catastrophe, as will the likely triumph of China in the race for academic prowess and innovation. Universities are enacting hiring freezes now, but class sizes won't balloon and majors and departments won't be eliminated until future fiscal years. These are very real problems but not ones that will grab the attention of voters, taxpayers, and policymakers in the short term. Canceling the 2025–26 athletics season certainly will. Imagine a year without Penn State football, without Michigan basketball, without University of Florida track and field. No NCAA tournament. No Rose Bowl. No College World Series. Slash research and jack up student tuition? Meh. Take away college football? You'll have a few hundred million angry Americans paying attention real quick. Of course, the NCAA itself will not go along with this plan. Neither will the individual athletic conferences, or most institutions in red states that would have to face down hostile governors and legislatures if they made such a bold move. But one group can lead the way. The Association of American Universities is a 125-year-old group that represents the 69 most elite research universities in the United States (plus two in Canada). The association has recently made strong statements decrying the Trump administration's cuts to higher education, but it could do a lot more. And it should, considering its prominence and the simple fact that it has the most to lose in the clawback of federal grant money. Indeed, the extent of federal research support is the leading criterion it uses to determine which universities will receive membership in the highly exclusive organization. The AAU could vote now to collectively suspend its schools' athletics programs for one year, starting this summer. Such a vote wouldn't be binding for the institutions, but it would give them the solidarity and collective voice to back up decisions that would certainly stoke backlash, especially from their alumni and donors. Now, not all those 69 schools are athletics powerhouses. Very few people will be moved by the cancellation of MIT's football season. But others are: UNC, UCLA, Texas, Mizzou, Oregon—and dozens more. Perhaps most significantly, 15 out of the 16 universities in the Big Ten are AAU members. (Nebraska will get pretty lonely playing by itself.) And those 15 include all the leading institutions in the Rust Belt states that now decide every presidential election and control of the Senate: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Cancel the Big Ten season, with clear messaging about the reasons why it's necessary to do so, and those voters will very quickly become informed about the dire position of American higher education. Some of my colleagues in higher-education research are very pessimistic about the options available to U.S. colleges and universities in this perilous moment. It seems the schools can only capitulate—as Columbia recently has—or brace themselves for budgetary crisis and a dramatic curtailing of their mission and impact. But the American higher-education sector is much more than a supplicant kneeling at the foot of the federal government. For better or for worse, it is absolutely central to the nation's economy and society. And a big part of that centrality—one that some of us in academia try hard to ignore—is the spectacle of college sports. College and university sports teams are proudly represented on bumper stickers, billboards, hoodies, and barroom TVs in every city and every state. All that a small group of university presidents has to do is hit pause on that spectacle for one season. In doing so, they'll save millions of dollars and also broadcast to the nation that a cherished and essential American institution is under attack from its own government.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Hayao Miyazaki's AI Nightmare
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here. This week, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, one of the models powering ChatGPT, that allows the program to create high-quality images. I've been surprised by how effective the tool is: It follows directions precisely, renders people with the right number of fingers, and is even capable of replacing text in an image with different words. Almost immediately—and with the direct encouragement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—people started using GPT-4o to transform photographs into illustrations that emulate the style of Hayao Miyazaki's animated films at Studio Ghibli. (Think Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away.) The program was excellent at this task, generating images of happy couples on the beach (cute) and lush illustrations of the Kennedy assassination (not cute). Unsurprisingly, backlash soon followed: People raised concerns about OpenAI profiting off of another company's intellectual property, pointed to a documentary clip of Miyazaki calling AI an 'insult to life itself,' and mused about the technology's threats to human creativity. All of these conversations are valid, yet they didn't feel altogether satisfying—complaining about a (frankly, quite impressive!) thing doesn't make that thing go away, after all. I asked my colleague Ian Bogost, also the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, for his take. This interview has been edited and condensed. Damon Beres: Let's start with the very basic question. Are the Studio Ghibli images evil? Ian Bogost: I don't think they're evil. They might be stupid. You could construe them as ugly, although they're also beautiful. You could construe them as immoral or unseemly. If they are evil, why are they evil? Where does that get us in our understanding of contemporary technology and culture? We have backed ourselves into this corner where fandom is so important and so celebrated, and has been for so long. Adopting the universe and aesthetics of popular culture—whether it's Studio Ghibli or Marvel or Harry Potter or Taylor Swift—that's not just permissible, but good and even righteous in contemporary culture. Damon: So the idea is that fan art is okay, so long as a human hand literally drew it with markers. But if any person is able to type a very simple command into a chatbot and render what appears at first glance to be a professional-grade Studio Ghibli illustration, then that's a problem. Ian: It's not different in nature to have a machine do a copy of a style of an artist than to have a person do a copy of a style of an artist. But there is a difference in scale: With AI, you can make them fast and you can make lots of them. That's changed people's feelings about the matter. I read an article about copyright and style—you can't copyright a style, it argued—that made me realize that people conflate many different things in this conversation about AI art. People who otherwise might hate copyright seem to love it now: If they're posting their own fan art and get a takedown request, then they're like, Screw you, I'm just trying to spread the gospel of your creativity. But those same people might support a copyright claim against a generative-AI tool, even though it's doing the same thing. Damon: As I've experimented with these tools, I've realized that the purpose isn't to make art at all; a Ghibli image coming out of ChatGPT is about as artistic as a photo with an Instagram filter on it. It feels more like a toy to me, or a video game. I'm putting a dumb thought into a program and seeing what comes out. There's a low-effort delight and playfulness. But some people have made this point that it's insulting because it's violating Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki's beliefs about AI. Then there are these memes—the White House tweeted a Ghiblified image of an immigrant being detained, which is extremely distasteful. But the image is not distasteful because of the technology: It's distasteful because it's the White House tweeting a cruel meme about a person's life. Ian: You brought up something important, this embrace of the intentional fallacy—the idea that a work's meaning is derived from what the creator of that work intended that meaning to be. These days, people express an almost total respect for the intentions of the artist. It's perfectly fine for Miyazaki to hate AI or anything else, of course, but the idea that his opinion would somehow influence what I think about making AI images in his visual style is fascinating to me. Damon: Maybe some of the frustration that people are expressing is that it makes Studio Ghibli feel less special. Studio Ghibli movies are rare—there aren't that many of them, and they have a very high-touch execution. Even if we're not making movies, the aesthetic being everywhere and the aesthetic being cheap cuts against that. Ian: That's a credible theory. But you're still in intentional-fallacy territory, right? Studio Ghibli has made a deliberate effort to tend and curate their output, and they don't just make a movie every year, and I want to respect that as someone influenced by that work. And that's weird to me. Damon: What we haven't talked about is the Ghibli image as a kind of meme. They're not just spreading because they're Ghibli images: They're spreading because they're AI-generated Ghibli images. Ian: This is a distinctive style of meme based less on the composition of the image itself or the text you put on it, but the application of an AI-generated style to a subject. I feel like this does represent some sort of evolutionary branch of internet meme. You need generative AI to make that happen, you need it to be widespread and good enough and fast enough and cheap enough. And you need X and Bluesky in a way as well. Damon: You can't really imagine image generators in a paradigm where there's no social media. Ian: What would you do with them, show them to your mom? These are things that are made to be posted, and that's where their life ends. Damon: Maybe that's what people don't like, too—that it's nakedly transactional. Ian: Exactly—you're engagement baiting. These days, that accusation is equivalent to selling out. Damon: It's this generation's poser. Ian: Engagement baiter. Damon: Leave me with a concluding thought about how people should react to these images. Ian: They ought to be more curious. This is deeply interesting, and if we refuse to give ourselves the opportunity to even start engaging with why, and instead jump to the most convenient or in-crowd conclusion, that's a real shame. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Hayao Miyazaki's AI Nightmare
This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here. This week, OpenAI released an update to GPT-4o, one of the models powering ChatGPT, that allows the program to create high-quality images. I've been surprised by how effective the tool is: It follows directions precisely, renders people with the right number of fingers, and is even capable of replacing text in an image with different words. Almost immediately—and with the direct encouragement of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—people started using GPT-4o to transform photographs into illustrations that emulate the style of Hayao Miyazaki's animated films at Studio Ghibli. (Think Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away.) The program was excellent at this task, generating images of happy couples on the beach (cute) and lush illustrations of the Kennedy assassination (not cute). Unsurprisingly, backlash soon followed: People raised concerns about OpenAI profiting off of another company's intellectual property, pointed to a documentary clip of Miyazaki calling AI an 'insult to life itself,' and mused about the technology's threats to human creativity. All of these conversations are valid, yet they didn't feel altogether satisfying—complaining about a (frankly, quite impressive!) thing doesn't make that thing go away, after all. I asked my colleague Ian Bogost, also the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, for his take. This interview has been edited and condensed. Damon Beres: Let's start with the very basic question. Are the Studio Ghibli images evil? Ian Bogost: I don't think they're evil. They might be stupid. You could construe them as ugly, although they're also beautiful. You could construe them as immoral or unseemly. If they are evil, why are they evil? Where does that get us in our understanding of contemporary technology and culture? We have backed ourselves into this corner where fandom is so important and so celebrated, and has been for so long. Adopting the universe and aesthetics of popular culture—whether it's Studio Ghibli or Marvel or Harry Potter or Taylor Swift—that's not just permissible, but good and even righteous in contemporary culture. Damon: So the idea is that fan art is okay, so long as a human hand literally drew it with markers. But if any person is able to type a very simple command into a chatbot and render what appears at first glance to be a professional-grade Studio Ghibli illustration, then that's a problem. Ian: It's not different in nature to have a machine do a copy of a style of an artist than to have a person do a copy of a style of an artist. But there is a difference in scale: With AI, you can make them fast and you can make lots of them. That's changed people's feelings about the matter. I read an article about copyright and style— you can't copyright a style, it argued—that made me realize that people conflate many different things in this conversation about AI art. People who otherwise might hate copyright seem to love it now: If they're posting their own fan art and get a takedown request, then they're like, Screw you, I'm just trying to spread the gospel of your creativity. But those same people might support a copyright claim against a generative-AI tool, even though it's doing the same thing. Damon: As I've experimented with these tools, I've realized that the purpose isn't to make art at all; a Ghibli image coming out of ChatGPT is about as artistic as a photo with an Instagram filter on it. It feels more like a toy to me, or a video game. I'm putting a dumb thought into a program and seeing what comes out. There's a low-effort delight and playfulness. But some people have made this point that it's insulting because it's violating Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki's beliefs about AI. Then there are these memes—the White House tweeted a Ghiblified image of an immigrant being detained, which is extremely distasteful. But the image is not distasteful because of the technology: It's distasteful because it's the White House tweeting a cruel meme about a person's life. Ian: You brought up something important, this embrace of the intentional fallacy—the idea that a work's meaning is derived from what the creator of that work intended that meaning to be. These days, people express an almost total respect for the intentions of the artist. It's perfectly fine for Miyazaki to hate AI or anything else, of course, but the idea that his opinion would somehow influence what I think about making AI images in his visual style is fascinating to me. Damon: Maybe some of the frustration that people are expressing is that it makes Studio Ghibli feel less special. Studio Ghibli movies are rare—there aren't that many of them, and they have a very high-touch execution. Even if we're not making movies, the aesthetic being everywhere and the aesthetic being cheap cuts against that. Ian: That's a credible theory. But you're still in intentional-fallacy territory, right? Studio Ghibli has made a deliberate effort to tend and curate their output, and they don't just make a movie every year, and I want to respect that as someone influenced by that work. And that's weird to me. Damon: What we haven't talked about is the Ghibli image as a kind of meme. They're not just spreading because they're Ghibli images: They're spreading because they're AI-generated Ghibli images. Ian: This is a distinctive style of meme based less on the composition of the image itself or the text you put on it, but the application of an AI-generated style to a subject. I feel like this does represent some sort of evolutionary branch of internet meme. You need generative AI to make that happen, you need it to be widespread and good enough and fast enough and cheap enough. And you need X and Bluesky in a way as well. Damon: You can't really imagine image generators in a paradigm where there's no social media. Ian: What would you do with them, show them to your mom? These are things that are made to be posted, and that's where their life ends. Damon: Maybe that's what people don't like, too—that it's nakedly transactional. Ian: Exactly—you're engagement baiting. These days, that accusation is equivalent to selling out. Damon: It's this generation's poser. Ian: Engagement baiter. Damon: Leave me with a concluding thought about how people should react to these images. Ian: They ought to be more curious. This is deeply interesting, and if we refuse to give ourselves the opportunity to even start engaging with why, and instead jump to the most convenient or in-crowd conclusion, that's a real shame.
