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Nova 1035
This week I once again spent a lot of time thinking about AI. It was prompted this time by the Winter Olympics and their decision to use AI generated art to highlight the athletes rather than one of the countless Italian (or other, but you’d assume they’d at least be patriotic) artists they could have given a platform to. The painful irony of course being that the Olympics, Winter or otherwise, are supposed to be a celebration of human achievement – we cheer on those who push themselves to the limits, with new ‘superheroes’ crowned at each Games.
What’s worse, rather than just not giving an artist the opportunity, the AI images generated for the campaign were direct plagarizations of Japanese photographer Tatsuya Tanaka, who is famous for creating miniature vignettes of many different elements of daily life, including Olympics-themed miniatures in 2022 and 2024 which garnered an amazingly positive reception. More embarrassingly for the organizers of the Games, the images that were generated not only stole from Tanaka’s work, they also broke the IOC’s branding guidelines as the images of the Olympic Rings that were generated had rings that didn’t overlap at the officially correct places. The 129-page Olympic Brand Guidelines handbook apparently specifically instructs users to “always use supplied artwork (never recreate the rings)”. It might have cost the Olympics less to pay someone to generate some ‘AI generated slop’ for them than hiring Tanaka directly, (though it may not have seeing as they told SportBible that the posters were created by “a multidisciplinary team of around 12 people who worked on them over four months, including a creative director, art director, copywriter, designer, illustrator, and a visual artist) but it certainly cost them a lot in reputational damage – though sadly this was not the only use of AI at the Milano Cortina Games.
There was also another ironic AI moment later in the week that tweaked my interest, when Sam Altman – the CEO of OpenAI who has previously claimed that for artificial intelligence models to be effective, they must be able to train on vast amounts of information, including copyrighted content – accused of Chinese AI firm DeepSeek of ‘stealing’ from his, and other United States, AI companies.
Carrying on from last week’s thoughts stemming from the whole ‘dustbin diver’ situation – or as a friend pointed out on a Facebook conversation, we should perhaps be calling them: “informal recyclers” – I also spent quite a bit of time this week thinking about ‘othering’. I’m not saying that the people speaking about the informal recyclers on neighbourhood Whatsapp groups and on social media are being malicious, but that is pretty much the point of othering – it seems benign, but it can very quickly become ‘cancerous’. The more we talk about a group of people as ‘them’ and generalize them as having specific traits or performing certain actions, the more we alienate them and make them a target. As I said last week; there may well be criminal elements within the group of ‘waste-pickers’ (there’s another term that sounds better than ‘dustbin-divers’) but sweeping statements that include all of them and describe the entire group as things like: “where all our problems start” or “the root of all the issues we’re facing” risk making them ‘the enemy’. I also said last week that I would hate to be in their situation (digging through other people’s trash to try to survive) but the reality is that we are a lot closer to losing it all and being left in that situation than we like to think about – increasingly so!
More and more people are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with many not even making it to the next paycheck and having to live off credit card or microloan debt, and lack sufficient savings to cover more than a few weeks or months of lost income and are only one major emergency like a health crisis, job loss, or natural disaster away from financial or personal ruin.
The third, sadly no more cheery, thing I’ve been thinking a lot about this week is the death penalty … but perhaps I should rather keep that for another column because if I’m honest with myself it’s a topic that is neither going to go away nor one I am likely to stop thinking about any time soon (I will at least give you that if you guessed that I’m not a fan, you’d be right).
So, there you go, just some of the ‘light and fluffy’ things I’ve been thinking about this week.
