COME ON BEFORE WE CRACK [450]

“Put on the corned beef hash” is a well-known misheard lyric from Kenny Loggins’s song “Footloose”, as I discovered when I misheard it myself being played on a speaker at a food festival.

I immediately wanted to check the correct lyric, but I could not get a signal on my smartphone to check. I am very used to the impulse of checking what I don’t know with my phone, so when I couldn’t, that impulse had to be used up a different way, so I checked how many steps I walked so far – that was something the phone could count by itself.

This was the point I realised I had the perfect opening to an article about smartphones, so I opened my note-taking app to make an early start.

I have previously talked about Marshall McLuhan’s delineation of media as being “hot” or “cool” in terms of how demanding they are of their user’s attention, with television being defined as “cool” because of its lower fidelity picture and sound relative to the real world, and it having to compete for attention in the settings they are usually found.

However, is the smartphone a “medium”, or a Swiss Army knife-type delivery system for many different media? Does the device demand my attention, or the combination of all the things it can do?

Having explained the delineation of hot and cool media in his 1964 book “Understanding Media” subtitled “The Extensions of Man”, McLuhan looks at many different media to determine where they stand, and what their true message is, for example the telephone removing walls and distance from human conversation.

It is entirely possible for me to create a table from the different media McLuhan discusses, taking an average of whether the smartphone is overall “hot” or “cold”. My phone is expected to reproduce both the spoken word, through radio and recorded music, and the written word, simulating print media from newspapers and magazines to comic books and various forms. It is expected to make photographs and act as their frame. It is a telegraph, through telephony, various messaging apps and in submitting information to the internet and recalling from it. It displays various advertisements. It is my television. It is my typewriter. It can be used to light up a room. I could also throw it... but I need it so much I fear breaking it.

However, the smartphone leaves me “cold”, as it were, because it relies entirely on my attention. It may be one step on from having separate devices for each of its individual uses, but it takes you one step away from the advantages those devices had: larger screens and surfaces, better sound systems, better microphones, brighter light, and so on. I have to bring more to my smartphone to make it work the way I need it to work, which may require me to compromise to bridge the gap created by the loss of fidelity that I could have achieved with a proper camera, a book, a pen, a Blu-ray player, a torch and so on. The smartphone is a new level of compromise.

EVERYONE'S GONE TO THE MOVIES [449]

I have only written about one Roger Corman film, the 1994 unreleased adaptation of “The Fantastic Four” comic book he was recruited to produce, so another producer could retain the rights to make a bigger-budget release later. I also made mention of a film Corman produced to cash in on the success of “Smokey and the Bandit”, and while I did not mention him by name, I have also talked about “Little Shop of Horrors”, Frank Oz’s 1986 film version of the musical itself based on Corman’s original film, released in 1960.

While I talked about the newer “Little Shop of Horrors” because of its restored ending, Corman’s original, aside from featuring an early role for Jack Nicholson, was famously made for approximately $30,000 in only two days and one nights using sets left over from his previous film, “A Bucket of Blood”, before they were torn down. Low budgets, making films back-to-back, reusing sets, inserting stock footage reusing footage from previous films and following trends are all hallmarks of Corman productions, alongside the long list of graduates from “The Corman Film School” that went on to their own accomplished careers, like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron and Joe Dante.

What struck me later was that recounting facts about the making of Corman’s films seem to be more interesting than the films themselves, as if the feat of creating and completing a film in seemingly reduced circumstances, when compared to the lavish production lines of the main Hollywood studios, is more remarkable than any artistry found in the films themselves.

I think this is because Corman, while known as a director mainly in the 1950s and 60s, including the influential series of films based on the work of Edgar Allen Poe, is mostly credited as a producer, looking at the bottom line as a matter of necessity, actively finding ways of extending his budgets. Selling the rights to the name of his 1954 crime drama “The Fast and the Furious” to Universal Pictures, in exchange to access to their stock footage library, is an ingenious move, but it is mainly a business decision.

But Roger Corman was known as the “king of the Bs”, and while the B-movie is more understood these days as a lower-budget film, rather than the second half of a double bill, their being able to be cheaper for cinemas and distributors for buy also placed less expectations and inhibitions upon them : the experimentations their production, the creative use of stock footage, and the ability to gather their talent pool from new people entering the industry ready to prove themselves by any means available, ultimately highlight the restriction placed on higher-budgeted films by the expectations placed upon them. Whether that makes a Corman-produced genre-based film a “cult” film, or “shlock”, is quite beyond the point – if it finds an audience, it will find a profit even faster.

I SAW THE BEST MINDS OF MY GENERATION... [448]

On Friday 11th May 2024, I opened Mircosoft Copilot, the company’s AI chatbot, and wrote the following request: “please write a 100-word explanation of ‘prompt engineering’ in the style of Jack Kerouac while making it funny and informative”. I thought the concept should be able to explain itself... 

*

The Beatnik Art of Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering, my dear cats and kittens, is like a wild jazz riff on a typewriter, a symphony of words and neural networks. Picture this: you’re sipping your coffee, the steam rising like a beatnik’s cigarette, and you whisper to the AI oracle, “Hey, man, conjure me some cosmic prose!” And lo, the prompt engineers weave their magic. They’re the bards of the digital realm, crafting queries that make AI models snap their fingers and say, “Yeah, daddy-o!” 🎩✨

See, good prompts are like secret passwords to the AI’s soul. They coax it out of its binary shell, like a shy poet at a smoky Greenwich Village café. Tokenization, model tuning, and top-k sampling—these are the tools of the prompt trade. It’s like tuning a saxophone, finding that sweet spot where the notes flow like a midnight river.

And what do we get? Texts that dance the jitterbug with our imaginations, images that waltz through the mind’s ballroom. Prompt engineers, they’re the Kerouacs of the AI highway, scribbling their notebooks, chasing the muse. So next time you chat with a bot, remember: behind the curtain, there’s a prompt whisperer, spinning dreams in ones and zeros. 🌟📜

“Blow as deep as you want to blow,” Kerouac said. And so they do, my friends. They blow minds, one prompt at a time. 🎤🌌

*

So, did anyone learn anything? Let me have a try...

In this context, a “prompt” is text describing the task an AI model is to perform, “prompt engineering” being the process of structuring that text. In my original instruction to Copilot, each word that wasn’t a preposition or “please” acted as a prompt. Each prompt is compared against the dataset accessed by the AI program, which is broken down into “tokens” to make them easier to choose and compare which has the highest probability of answering the prompt, “top-k sampling” being one such method. Each interrogation of the dataset presumably also helps tune the models used to access that data.

My paragraph fulfilled the “informative” prompt, but crucially also the “100-word” requirement too – I was most surprised that Copilot missed that part of the brief, because the prompt I expected it to have the biggest problem with was “funny”. In trying to make me laugh, Copilot dumped a couple of terms in the middle of its passage that it did not go on to explain, but fortunately it listed the websites from which it gleaned information, including from Wikipedia, Squarespace and IBM.

What I am most unimpressed about is the AI program’s interpretation of “Jack Kerouac”. Kerouac was a Beat Generation novelist, coining the term “beat”, as in tired and “beaten down”. What he didn’t do was call himself a “beatnik” – this is how the sub-culture was fed into the mainstream, codifying poets with a uniform of beret, sandals, striped shirts and bongos, speaking like jazz musicians and reciting poetry in a bad Allen Ginsberg impression.

Just as AI models are essentially answering queries putting one word after the other in the hopes that it makes a coherent sentence, I thought there would be a parallel with the  “spontaneous prose” of Kerouac, who typed manuscripts of novels like “On the Road” and “The Subterraneans” on extended scrolls of tracing paper. “Blow as deep as you want to blow” was the seventh tenet of Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”, but in essentially being a “dumb” program, the AI model concentrated on number thirteen, “remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition”, instead of being able to provide me with moments of insight, those “visionary tics shivering in the chest” (number eleven) – I still had to get that myself.

Upon originally hearing the term “prompt engineering”, I didn’t like the idea that ordering words was “engineering” in any way – “programming”, or even “prompting”, are better terms. I am also not a word engineer – there will never be a situation where words cannot be used creatively, because the spark to use them has to exist. I like to think I care about what I write.

For the record, I did not select that Copilot should use the large language model GPT-4 in creating its answer. I reran the request using this model, thinking it would have picked up some elements of Kerouac’s writing along the way, and while it did a better job of meeting the word count, and didn’t add superfluous emojis, the style was just as egregious – never ask an AI model to emulate a style:

“Alright, dig this, cats and kittens. Prompt engineering is the bee’s knees of AI jazz, where you lay down a line of text that’s cooler than a cucumber in a beatnik’s hand. It’s like whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a machine, hoping it’ll croon back a symphony of sense. You gotta be part poet, part coder, and all daddy-o to get it grooving just right. It’s the art of tickling the binary brain until it giggles out genius. So put on your thinking cap and make with the prompts, and watch that AI paint word-pictures smoother than a sax solo on a Saturday night.”

EACH MORNING OUR KEY TO THE WORLD [447]

I only buy one physical newspaper each week...

Should I remain someone that consumes as much news as I do? I certainly read, watch and listen to enough news to ask that question, but I have started feeling like I need an answer.

My average weekday begins by turning on my phone as soon as I wake up – I have a separate alarm clock – to read the front pages of a list of news and social media websites: in order, BBC News, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, the LGBT+ sites PinkNews (UK) and The Advocate (US), CNN, The Times (of London), The Telegraph, The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Guardian and The New York Times. Having completed Wordle on the last of these sites, about twenty minutes will have passed, and I am now ready to get out of bed and face the day.

This choice of sites is deliberately meant to be a broad range, including places that don’t fit my own politics. The objective is to see what truly the most important stories are, which stories are more important to each site, notice any trends and, importantly for me, read anything interesting – I am always looking for subjects to talk about, and you can’t expect these to come to you. The only reason I don’t look at the “Daily Mail” website, apparently the most-read news website in English, is because their front page has too many stories on it to discern what is meant to be important.

Once out of bed, I will put on the television to watch “Breakfast” on BBC One while I get ready for work, and once I have left the house, the news bulletins interrupting Lauren Laverne’s breakfast show on BBC Radio 6 Music will be the next source of news, unless I am looking at other stories on my phone while listening. This will continue at various points throughout the day even after I get home – a house tradition is to watch the ITV Evening News after the regional stories have played, but upon its doubling in length to an hour in March 2022, the television is consciously switched to another channel at the half-hour mark, ending my news for the day, provided I have put my phone down.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have a problem if I didn’t feel the need to check my phone so much, but having realised it has become my main source of news, it has become unavoidable. Short hourly news bulletins have evaporated from the main television channels, and I avoid opinion-led discussions of the news on TV, preferring to make my own mind up.

The issue that means I consume too much news is defining what it means to be “informed”. Requiring a broad range of sources for news means my own requirements are very high. I wouldn’t choose one channel, site or bulletin to serve as my single source, but if I was to reduce the number of places I search for news, it would feel like reducing my horizons, or not challenging my opinions enough. It may well be that I am thinking about this now because I am reaching my upper limit.