That's a very good question. The child eventually learns to stop using symbols and instead begins to copy the shapes, negative spaces, curves, etc. in front of them and makes an assemblage of otherwise-meaningless shapes, lines, curves which is interpreted by viewers as a representation of the real thing. Does AI have the potential to do that? I don't know.
It's also an American problem. I notice it most in the pressure to have a nice front lawn. In some American neighborhoods, if you don't regularly cut your grass, people will call the police.
I think you're right, but I would qualify that the AI is bullshitting in the same way that a child's drawing of a stick figure, house, and smiling sun is bullshit designed to get approval. The AI is giving symbols--very visually stunning ones, to be sure, but symbols nonetheless--of what it is prompted to create, just like a child learns that "circle with lines coming out of it" is a symbol that can be read as "sun" and praised by adults.
Same here. I was pretty upset when the Borders in my city closed; a few years later, the closest B&N to me also shut down. 100% agree with the article writer that bookstores provide a sense of identity. I wonder if we're in the middle of a shift in how the culture chooses to do relationships - maybe the pandemic showed people that, on its own, the internet just isn't able to provide the social framework that people want? I don't know. It's probably too early to tell if all this stuff is a passing fancy, or the beginnings of a new mode of relating.
Quite right - and it's been that way for a very long time in novels (Jane Austen and Anton Chekov come to mind). It's fascinating to watch the development of video games as a character-driven art form; certainly for a long time they have been able to cultivate an aesthetic sense and an idea of beauty but lately we're seeing games which delve into characterization, and that only promises good things for the medium.
I looked at the city on Google maps; the street grid is prominent but I didn't feel like I good a good idea of how the city is laid out into sectors as the article mentioned. One thing I did notice were some blocks of the city that did not conform to the overall grid (there's a prominent one in the southwest of the central city). Does anyone know if these were instances of post-Corbusier demolition and rebuilding, or were these part of the original plan? It would be interesting to know how much the city has changed sense it was designed and built (in the 60s I guess?).
I'm currently reading Suburban Nation by Duany et al, and they talk about this exact thing - how the most desirable neighborhoods in old US cities like Boston or Washington are the old, dense, mixed-use parts of town. The book is twenty years old but it is still a good introduction to some of the problems of American-style suburbia.