AI creates a popular music artist out of thin air

 

AI does not think for itself.  It only knows what it has been fed.  It can do amazing things WITH that information, but that's how it works.  So now, AI skeptic and musician Rick Beato has invented a musical artist out of thin air using AI.  

 Where do things go from here?  AI can not claim copyright.  So that's good.  But now real musicians have competition from non-existent competitors.  Is this good?  

 "The promise of automation was to do the mundane so human creativity can flourish.  Instead, human creativity is demeaned as mundane so Big Tech's machines can flourish." [Thinking Like a Human, by David Weitzner, p. 114] 

Would you buy a Black Box from a bunch of billionaires?

 

Imagine if a bunch of billionaires and large corporations got together and tried to push a shiny Black Box on the world. It would require that electricity production be doubled. It would take 20% of fresh water. The positive claims for it are that it would reduce work loads for humans. It would be inventive, smart, and powerful. And that’s all you know about the Black Box. Would you buy it?

This is AI, or the new Artificial Intelligence. It’s promoted as a sort of one-size-fits-all panacea for mankind. AI is training the Black Box to think more like a human, but still only being a Black Box that is limited to the data it is fed. The selling point is that AI can then replace humans in jobs.

“We believe that it is possible that deep learning systems are less than a decade away from superintelligence,” Pachocki added. He described superintelligence as systems smarter than humans across a large number of critical actions.  [https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/28/sam-altman-says-openai-will-have-a-legitimate-ai-researcher-by-2028/]

Is there a need for AI? Do we need to replace humans in jobs? Are there down sides to the Black Box? Take for example a newly graduated student. He needs to make a resume. So he asks the Black Box to make him a resume after feeding it bits and pieces that need to be put together to impress a company enough to hire him. The AI quickly spits out an impressive looking resume, and off it goes to several companies. These companies are swamped with impressive looking AI-generated resumes, so it uses AI to process them and pick the best candidates for each job. Is this an improvement of some sort thanks to the Black Box? No. The resume does not represent the actual human. The companies are using the Black Box to decide which human is best to work in a human job. The Black Box only knows data. It does not know people.

Certainly there are good uses for AI, perhaps in the military to replace a human that would be in a dangerous situation. AI can look through data faster than a human, so looking for a medicine to fit a particular disease could be speeded up. But that is not how AI is being sold. It is being sold as a universal panacea. Its goal is to replace people with a more intelligent, capable employee that doesn’t need to be paid. This is why the corporations and billionaires are so excited about AI.

But there are many down sides to replacing humans. AI is not human. It does not know what unemployment is like, for instance. It does not know human to human interaction. It is an attempt to make humans unnecessary. “The promise of automation was to do the mundane so human creativity can flourish. Instead human creativity is demeaned as mundane so Big Tech’s machines can flourish.” [Thinking Like a Human,, by David Weitzner, p. 114]

Do we need a Black Box that sucks up half of our electricity and 20% of our water? Are the promoters of the Black Box pushing it for personal benefit instead of societal improvement? These are things that need to be considered and thought through before we just give in to all the hype.

Up with Oligarchy, Down with Democracy

 Why does Trump even want to be president when he’s just tearing everything about our government down? DOGE comes along and fires thousands of employees, Russ Vought comes around and fires 4000 more, hoping to keep firing. Trump shuts down any help for states that didn’t vote for him. He tears down part of the White House. The only thing that’s doing well under him is ICE, which got a huge increase in their budget. Does he want to be president so he can destroy our government?

Trump wants to absorb the powers of both the judicial and legislative branches into the executive, thus negating a key part of the Constitution.

Trump’s tariffs are decimating many small businesses, from farmers to bourbon producers. Some may never recover.

Make America Great Again refers to around 1901, when corporations held huge power over the country and the government was weak. This is what Trump wants; let the oligarchs do what they want and keep any potential trouble source for them at bay. And how will that work out for you?

"I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” [Grover Norquist, Republican operative, 2004]

“Because we are draining the swamp. It’s very simple.” [Trump at Congressional speech, 3/4/25]

“We want to be very aggressive where we can be in shuttering the bureaucracy — not just the funding, but the bureaucracy — and we now have an opportunity to do that,” [Russ Vought, White House Office of Management and Budget Director, 10/15/25]

Who is the information gatekeeper for the US president?

 https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/trump-seems-to-back-off-portland-military-plan/283-e9c6bdfb-92d6-4881-bb74-09bb325a5270

 Based on something he saw on TV, 79-year-old President Trump believed that a sort of war was going on in Portland, Oregon.  So he felt the need to send in National Guard troops.  But then he got a call from Oregon's governor saying that there was no war and no need for troops...  

"I spoke to the governor, she was very nice," Trump said. "But I said, 'Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what's happening? My people tell me different.' They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place...it looks like terrible."

So somebody showed Trump some video on TV that convinced him Portland was on the verge of collapse.  Who did that?  What was he shown?

 In another instance, Trump was convinced that all the glittery trimmings put up in the White House were actual 24 karat gold...

https://polinews.org/people-outraged-after-trump-brags-about-using-24-karat-gold-in-the-oval-office/ 

Trump declared on Truth Social: "Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, 'freak out' when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever..."

 But is this actually pure gold?  Or is it store-bought wall bling?   It's fake crap that Trump likes so he thinks he's a king.  And he especially likes it because he's wrongly told it's pure gold.

Our president makes life-or-death decisions based on the information he receives and reviews.  If someone is manipulating the information getting to him, they can manipulate him.  We need to know who that is and why they are doing it. 

 

 

What the US president should be doing, and how it is now

What should be the guiding principle of the United States president? We know this from the Constitution, that the major duties of a president are:

Commander in Chief

appoint judges, ambassadors, and department heads

“shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”

There is a guiding star for presidents written in the Constitution. But there is also a way it is being handled today.

The American Way

1. “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity “

2. I will find a way to help accomplish this.

For example, a president might try to ensure that American citizens can access medical care in a quick and affordable manner.

But instead we have this, The Trump Way

1. They have done something terrible to us.

2. I will react in a cruel way.

For instance, Trump rails against how other countries are somehow “ripping us off” in trade. So Trump declares a national emergency and slaps high tariffs on our trading partners, even those that we have had many years of stable, friendly relations.

In order to remedy this perceived trade balance problem, Trump is trying to bully foreign companies to open production facilities in the US, so they not only sell their products here, but Americans will build those products. This has recently hit a snag because another group that has done something terrible to us (according to Trump) is immigrants. To correct this problem, ICE raided the Korean Hyundai plant in Georgia, arresting 475 mostly Korean workers, declaring that they were all illegal. Foreign companies considering whether to cave into Trump’s pressuare and open factories in the US will now know that their employees are not safe from the US government arbitrarily deporting them.

The American way is to treat people with respect and dignity, and seek ways to be helpful. The Trump way is to treat people with suspicion and even animostiy, and try to force some capitulation from them. But the Trump way has tons of blowback, wherein the US reputation itself is tarnished. People will not trust us. They will view us as unstable. And they will go elsewhere for trade and partnerships.

How goes the coup?

 

On February 3 I posted here that “A coup has begun in the US.” A big part of that was creating the Department of Government Efficiency, which by subsuming another department, was able to waltz into many governmental departments and start slashing and destroying projects that had taken years to build up and were appropriated by Congress. Eventually Elon Musk, who was heading DOGE, left in disgrace, and it has been shown that DOGE actually made things worse instead of better. But now, almost 7 months later, how goes the coup?

At this point, I don’t think you can call it a coup as much as an attempt at a complete takeover of the entire society. Trump has influenced both the Legislative and Judicial branches of the federal government, thus weakening the Constitutional tri-partate system. He has super-charged a paramilitary service called Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was originally touted as going after illegal immigrants and criminals but has somehow managed to deport immigrants here legally and even US citizens. He has taken over the police department of Washington DC. He has forced our most venerable universities to kow tow to his demands. He has weakened science in many ways, including a current attempt to destroy satellites that he thinks are too woke. He is trying to force the Smithsonian Institute to alter its displays so they are more to Trump’s liking. He has deeply cut into solar and wind energy programs and tried to push us back into burning coal for electricity.

Anyway, it’s not looking good. People need to push back. However, many of the people in power who could conceivably push back are under Trump’s spell somehow. Congress, the Supreme Court, some media, and of course his avid MAGA followers are all praising these moves as “Making America Great Again.” A minority of people are speaking out, holding rallies, and attempting to counter what is happening. But so far, the Trump wagon is moving steadily forward toward complete oligarchy.

I don’t think, though, that MAGA people have thought this through. Trump is 79 years old. He will not be capable that much longer (there is evidence his faculties are fading now). So what happens after the US has turned into an autocracy, and the autocrat you put in place is gone? Who comes next? Will it be someone you like? If not, how do you then get rid of that autocrat? The Constitution was specifically designed to handle that, but Trumpism is making the Constitution less relevant every day.

It’s not too late. I haven’t fled the country yet. There is hope. But it will take a lot of work and effort to save us from what is happening.

AI brings little, but comes with huge cost

 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/ai-in-wyoming-may-soon-use-more-electricity-than-states-human-residents/

 

"The project's energy demands are difficult to overstate for Wyoming, the least populous US state. The initial 1.8-gigawatt phase, consuming 15.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, is more than five times the electricity used by every household in the state combined. That figure represents 91 percent of the 17.3 TWh currently consumed by all of Wyoming's residential, commercial, and industrial sectors combined. At its full 10-gigawatt capacity, the proposed data center would consume 87.6 TWh of electricity annually—double the 43.2 TWh the entire state currently generates."

 AI sucks up energy like a vacuum cleaner sucks up dust; it takes everything it can get.  But do we really need AI if it comes at such a cost?  Who will benefit from AI?  Who is pushing it on the public?  What are all the hidden costs?

 “The promise of automation was to do the mundane so human creativity can flourish. Instead, human creativity is demeaned as mundane so Big Tech’s machines can flourish.” [Thinking Like a Human, by David Weitzner, p. 114]