I know there are communities of people dedicated to doing this with old VHS-tapes and DVDs, so I am guessing somebody is likely chipping away at CD's like this in some capacity. It would be wonderful it it could grow into something like what you're suggesting.
A major surface area for this sort of work is oddly enough on youtube - you can find truly obscure demo tapes and records digitized and uploaded there. You'd think the copyright demons would eat these videos alive, but it seems like they don't.
It's really cocky of them to do this immediately after deleting everyone's purchased movies from their accounts. Nobody should have any illusions about what "buying" a game means when they can do this at will.
Yeah, I think this is an unfortunate casualty of the AI age. Instead of discovering a weird fast food employee orientation CD or somebody's niche garage album from 1996 that was semi-accidentally uploaded by whoever happens to own it now, you're just getting thousands of fake songs made by bots.
It contextualizes all the strange Metaverse and VR-goggles stuff quite well. It always seemed like a weirdly forced product without any particular market fit - who is clamoring for a version of Teams where you need a bulky helmet, and can theoretically buy pretend digital land in order to have a... less useful corporate website? Who is interested in buying dorky goggles that instantly mark you as a weird creep who is probably recording everything you see?
Owning A Platform being the point instead of any actual use-case tracks perfectly with all these weird, forced pitches. These are all products for nobody.
It's continually evolving, but a gold standard tell is being very punchy and listy without any semantic content whatsoever. I don't think you can really fix that without heavier human involvement, which undercuts a lot of the slop use-cases. You have to know what you want to say, or the robot will just spin its wheels - and having something to say and a way to say it is kind of the part that requires the most work, so that's not attractive if you're running a bot farm.
After many years on audible, I left because there was a deluge of AI generated works or AI voice 'readings' of (especially public domain) works on there. It's especially galling because they make up fake names for their AI voice and force me to trawl IMDB to figure out if this is a real guy who just randomly has really inappropriate tone and tempo for the passage I just heard, or if I have been scammed. Regardless, it's a clear and unacceptable deterioration of my product quality as a subscriber, so I'm off.
I don't know exactly how the incentives work for uploading shitloads of different slop readings of old novels on there, but it seemed to show no sign of slowing down.
If it wasn't worth writing for the author, it won't be worth reading for you and I. If you have a point to make, putting it into words is part of how you structure and understand it yourself. I would much rather read a point imperfectly made by a person, than a bunch of algo-noise around the fuzzy outline of a point that nobody has thought through.
If you value your finite human time and attention you have to somehow sift through the deluge of slop and the simplest, most effective filter is to immediately ditch anything that fails the slop sniff test. You are not owed readers.
'These tools will become dangerously powerful, which is why nobody should be allowed to have them except through buying them from specifically me' seems a lot like motivated reasoning to me.
It was in part this, and that when contrasting with the more common tradition of oral transmission and memorization, ancient teachers lamented that their students were not only failing to learn things by heart because they knew they could look them up in the book or notes later, but also as a consequence failing to learn the important life skill of really good memorization and contextual recall. I think this too aligns with modern education theory in that it's not just about students learning the material, but also the meta-skills they are acquiring while doing so.
It's not that they didn't see the usefulness of books, it was more so about the overreliance on them and the effect it had on the education students would come away with, just as you say. A pretty reasonable concern, I think!
As an aside: One of the techniques students would be exposed to was the use of memory palaces, which remains helpful to this day where everyone has a computer in their pocket. Pretty cool stuff - technology of the mind!
I used to have a coworker who could get by using her Office programs fine, but would freeze completely the moment something unexpected happened or there was an error message. She didn't really know how to find stuff independently or navigate the menus, but she had carefully memorized all the little paths and procedures she would need. She did good work with it, but any time there was an update that reshuffled some buttons she would be very distressed about it.
In hindsight I suspect she was dyslexic and having this mental map was her workaround for reading a bunch of buttons with unfamiliar words without clear contexts.
People are very good at figuring out ways to get by in their day to day and get around various personal challenges and limitations. Sometimes so good, you don't even realize they're doing it!
I recently started reading Anna Karenina, and even for me as an adult, there's a lot of people with a lot of interconnected relationships to keep track of. But I am surprised by how moving I find it - I guess I expected it to be more distant somehow, but the people really spring to life. If I'd read it as a kid, I imagine I would be relating differently to all of these very adult concerns.
One of the best gifts I ever got was when my dad plopped down a big box full of old classical adventure novels (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, King Solomon's Mines, Captains Courageous, Three Musketeers, Count of Monte Cristo type of stuff) and I devoured all of them over the course of the next year or so. I'm sure I would appreciate a lot of different things about them if I read them now, but they certainly held up in terms of being engaging in spite of them all being 100+ years old by the time I got my hands on them.
I was a precocious reading kid too, and I sometimes wonder how much I understood of all the stuff I read. I feel like I remember it decently enough, but there must have been a lot going over my head.
I believe this is common to attempt when dealing with very cold water drownings. Obviously this is a very extreme case, but I believe you'd generally be instructed on the phone to start CPR but not try to heat them up until the ambulance arrives. Just in case.
The case below had a person conscious in the water for 40 minutes (with an air pocket under the ice) before going into circulatory arrest, and then spent another 40 minutes clinically dead in under water. The combined 80 minutes in the water lowered her body temperature very dramatically, and played a large part in her almost complete recovery.
Weird! I wonder if there is some exponential complexity going on. More neural pathways leaving more stuff that can potentially break from an uneven freeze/thaw? Or is it literally that the freezing and thawing can't happen evenly when you're too big? A brief transistional period with unfrozen outsides and frozen solid insides is probably not great for you.
I always have a strong hunch that it would be vastly more efficient if they just sent me whatever the prompt was, rather than the output. If you blow 2-3 sentences of intentional information up into a verbose e-mail, you're needlessly wasting both your and my time. Just send me the 2-3 sentences of actual stuff!
A major surface area for this sort of work is oddly enough on youtube - you can find truly obscure demo tapes and records digitized and uploaded there. You'd think the copyright demons would eat these videos alive, but it seems like they don't.