Is it really possible to train an AI?
I found Stet to be a really cool article that had me initially confused at its format until I understood what the author was trying to do. Throughout reading the article, I kept wondering what a human being would do in the place of the AI if they were in the same situation. My guess is that they would obviously save the child and not the woodpecker – however, in other scenarios, to what extent are humans just as prone or even more prone to make accidents happen in comparison to an AI? But precisely because we are beings capable of empathy, morality, and individual decision making skills/unpredictability, I believe that humans can own up to their mistakes/take responsibility and hence should be the only ones driving the vehicles rather than AI driven cars.
Even in shocking possible scenarios like this in the future, the responsibility lies on the person who manufactured and programmed the AI’s morals. Because AI’s can only function within their own programmed self and cannot self generate their thoughts, people cannot account for every possible scenario and program for that in case a certain situation happens. On the other hand, people can think for themselves are not confined to the limits of a “program.”
What really troubles me is the “how they decide who to murder.” The fact that a programmer is inputting data to decide who the AI should choose to “kill” in a possible scenario already has me questioning whether it is truly ethical to program an AI while inputting data as to which human being or thing is valuable over the other. Who is the one deciding that, first of all, and who is approving this?
You cannot overlook race, sex, gender, etc that comes to play when they decide “how they decide who to murder” and also how do AI’s identify which human is more “valuable” over the other? How do they recognize who is a human being while going at a high speed?
Author: yehan
Arya’s Grief
Approaching the Haunted Media Project, I wanted to play to my strengths of not being the most technologically in touch person that I am and incorporating art into my piece instead. Mourning and grievance has been a topic I wanted to explore as pain is a human condition and the ways in which we go about dealing with loss through grievance are different. I found it fascinating how in T.V. shows related to fantasy, morals in that world are different from our present day world. Game of Thrones exemplified grievance and death due to the high number of deaths in the T.V. show. Other than the Starks grievance toward Ned, we rarely see the characters going through grievance because deaths, while tragic, are so normalized in the show. I wanted to explore the grievance and how our emotional and mental health might look like when they are physicalized and how we carry our remembrance of our lost ones in our bodies and memories. 
The dance, Arya’s Grief, captures my reflection and also my actual self as there are two sides to every person: what the internal self is going through vs. the performance of the external self. The dance captures the distance one goes through in order to get up and live with grief. In this dance, the “monster” tormenting or saddening the dancer is grief itself. “The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy…giving them life and an uncanny independence” (Cohen 4). Arya feels this immense “fear, desire, anxiety” in this “fantasy” world of Westeros when she loses her brother and mother as she is just about to see them after a long time of separation. The monster’s body is essentially Arya’s, the dancer’s, body. The body quite literally gives life and independence to grief, fear, and anxiety as grief literally takes refuge in Arya’s sorrow. 
We first see the dancer in the mirror reflection curled up in a ball. The reflection, which is the internal self (the monster, the grief) inside the body, “inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again” (Cohen 4). Grief works exactly by inhabiting the “gap between the time of upheaval that created it,” which is at the Red Wedding, and “the moment into which it is received,” Arya swearing to avenge the deaths of her mother and brother by killing Lord Frey for what he has committed, only to be “born again,” as pain is a human condition and grief will be born again in time of another loss that Arya experiences. The whole dance sequence represents this timeline of the mourning at hand and Arya’s desire to get up and continue with her life but her inability to literally stand up, but once she does, only to fall down again as grief is “born again.”
Game of Thrones, as a T.V. show with elements of horror, “violates our assumption that we live in a predictable, routinized world by demonstrating that we live in a minefield” by unexpectedly killing off their main characters (Pinedo 21). Arya’s grief that is uncontained and exploding at times but also calm and painful, demonstrates that “we live in a minefield” as our lives could be overturned by death at any moment. By performing grievance through a dance, there is an element to my haunted media project that is a bit “self-indulgent, and, like so much else on social media…performative” (Garber). I wanted to take this aspect of grieving and literally turn it into an actual performance as a means to physicalize how grief possesses a person in mourning.
It’s also curious to see that her grief, due to the deaths of her family members, allows viewers of the series to be more empathetic to her taking the lives of other people. “Her gruesome murder of Ser Meryn in a brothel is the execution of a sadistic pedophile. Her elimination of Walder Frey and his sons rids the world of treacherous murderers. There is at least a strong utilitarian justification for the elimination of most of her victims. The explanation for these choices of Arya’s is forcefully presented without it becoming a justification…She relentlessly repeats the names of those for whose death she prays. This is not presented as a healthy state in which to be, but it is made understandable. We’re intended to empathize with Arya and share her hatreds” (Silverman 7). As everyone’s grieving process is different, Arya’s becomes the one of vengeance. Vengeance is also a form of reaching out to the dead as murdering in the name of a deceased person is also a way (at least in Game of Thrones) to come to terms with the passing away or the murder of a loved one. By showing “Arya” walking off at the end of the dance sequence, she continues with her life but the monster, grief, is “ready to stalk again” (Cohen 5). Grief always escapes and never truly goes away, seen by how “Arya,” despite her strength to continue with her life and rise up after the “Rains of Castamere” song, is still grief ridden, knowing grief is ready to stalk again in the future. 
In order to focus on the performative aspect of grievance and how our digital media comes to play with it, the camera is reflected in the mirror, showing how grievance, though inside us, is expressed differently when our digital media comes to interfere (or help) with it. There is an aspect of grief that technology has brought that makes people feel the need to express that they are in grievance or let others know just how affected they are by the death of a loved one. Those who do not post or express their grievance outwardly are criticized or seen to not be as affected, while those who also choose to express a lot through social media are also criticized for their grievance is seen as a mere performance. Either way, people have different ways of going about grieving that as long as they are not negatively harming anyone in their lives, different ways of grieving should be understood and accepted.
Works Cited
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).”
Garber, Megan. “Enter the Grief Police.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 20 Jan. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/01/enter-the-grief-police/424746/.
Pinedo, Isabel. “RECREATIONAL TERROR: POSTMODERN ELEMENTS OF THE CONTEMPORARY HORROR FILM.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 17–31. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688091.
Silverman, Eric J, and Robert Arp, editors. The Ultimate Game of Thrones and Philosophy : You
Think or Die. Open Court, 2017.
Code, Consumerism, & Capitalism
The two articles we read for today were jarring in that these two people had to write these articles in the first place so that something can be done about the ways in which code & algorithms that track your online presence actually does no good to people in grievances. Personally, even as someone who isn’t going through what these people have/are going through, I find these “Year in Review” videos as well as facebooks “friendship” celebration videos and “how many likes you got this year” videos to be freaky and unnecessary. It does not make me feel any warmth or remembrance while watching these videos, but rather, I just see a collection of pictures that I am tagged in on facebook in which facebook can track and say is part of the significance of this year in review, when those moments may not be what I really recall from that year. As facebook is trying to find a way for their site to be more personable, “caring,” and “friendly,” I find it more weird and creepy that they do this by using my own information and doing something more with it, which for me comes across more as a statement that my information really isn’t my information once it’s out on facebook or anywhere as these social media companies/corporations turn me into a data and also own it.
From what I know, I believe there is still very little you can do to turn off the “Year in Review,” considering that article was written four years ago. The only apology that facebook has made about that has been to the person who wrote “Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty,” and the response was, “[The app] was awesome for a lot of people, but clearly in this case we brought him grief rather than joy, “It’s valuable feedback,” Gheller said. “We can do better — I’m very grateful he took the time in his grief to write the blog post.”
It was jarring that he took that article as “valuable feedback,” as though someone’s grief is more valuable data for facebook to incorporate for the well being of their company.
As we live in a capitalistic and consumeristic society, everything we do online, especially in regards to whatever we search/buy/show interest in is monitored & collected as data so that even though you may have searched for let’s say a certain pair of shoes once then it pops up as an add as you scroll through facebook or any other website. As amazing as the internet is, it is also an outlet of advertisements to feed into consumerism and constant reminders that you need this, you need that, & oh that thing you searched for you should get it. What these corporations prioritize is not the well being of people but turning any chance they can get into a possibility for profit. It is sad that despite tech companies 100% knowing that Gillian Brockwell’s child was stillborn, they do not care for that data as it does nothing for their profit. It does not serve them anything to turn off pregnancy ads as they only really care for data that can be used for consumeristic purposes. I’m not exactly sure there is a way to completely disable ads in the first place as websites use advertisements for income & people only have the option to report an ad or close it. What else can we do to make sure things like this don’t happen beyond downloading a program that doesn’t let ads run on your laptop (but then again that would also prevent you from having access to some sites?). My main question is, why are these responsibilities always put on the individual rather than corporations who cause these problems in the first place yet do nothing about them? sidenote example: people urging each other to not use straws, which is great, but my problem with that is that all the responsibilities of consumerism and the environment are put onto the individual (and yes we as individuals need to be responsible) but what are the corporations doing about this that can change the ways in which they manufacture products/preserve the environment? I feel like the sad reality of capitalism is profit is always prioritized over the wellbeing of anything.
Surrealism of Death through a Digital Medium
Dead Set presents reality shown through different mediums (reality tv show/news/reality of the tv room) by exemplifying postmodern horror with the zombies disrupting everyday life. There’s irony/self awareness in Dead Set from the fact that there is a reality tv show within a tv show, using different mediums to mock digital culture and the blurred lines of what is perceived to be “truth” and what is curated to look like the truth. The first appearance of the zombie in the show seemed almost ironic from a 2019 perspective because of the abundance of zombies in our digital culture (from The Walking Dead to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – which is a clash of modern lit with postmodern horror) that in my perspective, the sudden appearance of zombies coupled with its self-awareness that the viewers are watching a tv show of a tv network producing a reality tv show made it quite unbelievable due to its overloaded with its digital mediums and elements of postmodern horror.
What I found the most fascinating was how rules are created and changed depending on the different simulations of reality the characters are in. In the tv network building, the horror of that space is the uncomfortable gaze of the male tv network producer and the significance of eviction night that ensues chaos from people. In the reality tv show, “getting a red card” is the worst case scenario, and being evicted is the horror. In the news, the horror is the uncertainty of the reason behind the riots and the fact that people are getting killed. All three of these simulations are then encompassed by the “true” reality of zombies roaming about and attacking people, and this truth literally clashes into the space of the tv network and the reality tv show, illustrating how different simulations create different realities. When Kelly bursts into the house where Big Brother happens, the people in the tv show clap thinking she is a new guest. Even the attack of the zombies is ridiculed and seen as a Big Brother challenge due to the fact that these people are trapped in the “reality” of this tv show and this is their world. There is a surrealistic element when death is presented through a digital medium as it distances people from recognizing the truth of circumstances or to be in touch with their reality, removing empathy and violating the boundaries of rationality and irrationality.
My favorite quote that stuck out to me from the first two episodes was when one of the characters, with disappointment that there are actual zombies and they’re not being filmed anymore, states, “Does this mean we’re not on telly anymore?”
Dead Set downright mocks pop culture with that quote.