(1) CHIANG THINKS LITTLE ART IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. Ted Chiang says this is “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” in The New Yorker.

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art….

(2) WHERE ARE THE BRASS? “Army Ranger Candidates Get a Trial by Fire in New Sci-Fi Action Thriller ‘War Machine’” – a Military.com review.

Imagine going through a difficult U.S. military special operations training school, such as the Army Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, for months on end. You endure sweat, fatigue and punishment to reach a skill level most soldiers could only dream of. Then just when you think it’s nearly over and time to graduate, those skills are put to the test against an enemy you’ve only ever seen in movies like “Predator.”

That’s the scenario in which a team of Rangers-in-training find themselves in the new science fiction action thriller “War Machine,” which is slated to begin production this week. The Rangers, according to the movie’s official description, are in the final 24 hours of “a grueling special ops bot camp” when they “encounter a deadly force from beyond this world.”…

…In the movie, Ritchson portrays a team leader while James, Courtney, Richardson, Lonsdale and Webber are other soldiers in training. Quaid and Morales are their commanding officers, who we can only assume are either completely useless, die early on or are in cahoots with the otherworldly attackers. (The studios have given Military.com no reason to think this. We just came to this conclusion from personal military experience and watching a lot of military movies, especially ones from the 1980s.)…

(3) RICHARD POWERS PROFILE. “’I no longer have to save the world’: Novelist Richard Powers on fiction and the climate crisis” – in the Guardian.

“Are we legitimate? Is what we want defensible, and can we make it happen?”

Powers believes firmly that, rather than coming up with “another novel about who gets to marry who”, certain parts of the literary world have continued to explore those issues, perhaps most evidently in science fiction. “It’s interesting that literary fiction ghettoised science fiction for those very reasons, because literary fiction, for a long time, put its allegiance entirely in this programme of saying ‘we are unique and unparalleled and absolutely outside of everything else’, and that commitment to understanding the human as sui generis, as something separate and apart, that became so central to the programme [that it] created those kinds of artificial standards of excellence that made other ways of telling stories seem second rate somehow.”…

(4) FLAME ON. “Wētā FX Delivers the Dragons – and More – for HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’” – Animation World Network tells how they do it.

Dan Sarto: So, HBO promised a lot of dragons and we got a lot of dragons. They weren’t just flying through the air, there were dragons on the ground, dragons hanging from the parapets, dragons integrated everywhere. When you’re working on multiple dragons, is there any reuse of assets or other efficiencies, or is each one completely unique?

Wayne Stables: While they’re all unique and there’s parts of them that become bespoke, like how they’re textured and how they’re modeled, there are things that you learn from one dragon to another that you can carry through – things like how they’re shaded. What works really well for transmission on the wings on one dragon will work really well for transmission on the wings of another dragon. You start to develop a certain look across the show.

You get some efficiencies from that and also from really just learning what the client likes, what it is that’s important to them. Once we’ve worked out the pattern for a particular dragon, say Seasmoke, we can take that to Vermithor, or to Caraxes, or to Syrax. So, you create some efficiencies that way, certainly in that you’re no longer trying to explore and see what works. Even if we tune it slightly, we’re going to have a really good baseline on that second dragon starting point….

(5) SECOND THE MOTION. “Skeleton warriors and plasticine chickens: why stop-motion animation is still going strong a century on” – the Guardian dives into the history of this format.

It all started – or stop-started, perhaps – with some tiny pterodactyls. As 1924 drew to a close, Marcel Delgado was putting the finishing touches to 50 model dinosaurs. For months, the sculptor had been meticulously constructing a range of Tyrannosaurus rexes, brontosauruses and pterodactyls. Now he was getting ready to pass them on to pioneering animator Willis O’Brien, who would painstakingly move each creature an almost imperceptible amount, shoot another frame, and then repeat the process.

A year later, The Lost World – the first ever feature film using what was termed “stop-motion” – was released, transforming Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name into an action-packed spectacle. Audiences were astounded, even dumbfounded by its seemingly supernatural special effects.

To modern eyes, the film itself is a bit of a dinosaur. Its technology is prehistoric, its colonialist themes outdated and its animated sequences clunky. But the meteoric impact of these miniature dinosaurs is still felt; a century later, stop-motion cinema is very much alive and flicking.

… Then, on Boxing Day, Aardman’s short film Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers was released in the UK. A commercial smash, it would go on to win the Oscar for best animated short. Among those it inspired was Will Becher, whose fanmail to the studio later landed him a role making plasticine wings for Chicken Run. Now, he is a lead director who helmed the acclaimed A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon. “Aardman’s stories come from a place of character and comedy. They’re very British,” he says. “It’s bold and poppy, all about goofy, googly eyes and brows and big mouth shapes.”

In the 21st century, it’s notable that many of the greatest stop-motion successes have been in children’s horror, with plasticine faces falling in just the right part of the uncanny valley to be both cute and creepy. In 2009, Selick’s Coraline became the third highest-grossing stop-motion film ever, bagging awards for its otherworldly tale of a young girl opening a door to a sublimely strange and unsettling world….

(6) DAVID GRAHAM (1925-2024). Deadline reports “David Graham Dead: Voice Of Peppa Pig, Doctor Who And Thunderbirds”. He was also in seven episodes of the children’s SF series Timeslip.

The man behind one of the world’s most familiar voices has died aged 99.

In a long career, British actor David Graham provided the voices for characters in TV series including Peppa Pig, Thunderbirds and Doctor Who.

For today’s generation of children, his voice will be instantly familiar as that of Grandpa Pig, in the Peppa Pig series.

Previously, for nearly two decades he created the sound of the evil Daleks in the long-running sci-fi show Doctor Who – adopting a staccato style and then feeding his voice through a synthesiser.

And previously, he lent his dulcet tones to Lady Penelope’s butler and chauffeur Parker, in Gerry Anderson’s Thunderbirds TV series and films. The BBC reports that he also played the show’s pilot Gordon Tracy, and Brains the engineer, between 1965 and 1966. In 2015, Graham became the only original cast member to return for an ITV remake of the show….

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Mike Glyer.]

Sepetmber 21, 1964 — Andy Duncan, 60. “Beluthahatchie”, Duncan’s second published story, was written while he was attending the 1994 Clarion workshop, appeared in Asimov’s in 1997, and earned his first Hugo nomination in 1998. The experience yielded him this bit of wisdom: “I’m glad I didn’t know then, as I know now, that enough fantasy stories about Robert Johnson have been written in recent years to fill an anthology; I might well have abandoned the idea, assuming it had ‘been done.’  Advice to writers: It’s never been done, until you do it.”  Within a few years, when Duncan had enough work to fill a collection, it graced the title, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories, a volume which won a 2001 World Fantasy Award. (And that same year his story “The Pottawatomie Giant” won the WFA for Short Fiction.)

The next year, his novella “The Chief Designer” won the prestigious Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Duncan’s other awards have included a 2013 Nebula for the novelette “Close Encounters” , and a 2014 World Fantasy Award for the novella “Wakulla Springs” co-written with Ellen Klages. The latter was also up for a 2014 Hugo and I voted for it but to no avail.

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• The Flying McCoys have monster support.
• The Argyle Sweater is being nosy.
• Loose Parts has a plan that makes scents.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal makes a convincing wedding proposal.
• Tom Gauld forsees the “benefits” of AI.

My latest @GuardianBooks cartoon. pic.twitter.com/YLBiNx8VW2

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) September 21, 2024

(9) LORD, HELP THE MISTER THAT COMES BETWEEN ME AND MY SISTER. Hermoine helps found the Bene Gesserit? “Dune prequel release date: Here is when Dune: Prophecy debuts on Max” at Popverse.

Can’t get enough Dune? Then you’ll want to mark your calendar for the upcoming streaming series prequel, Dune: Prophecy. A prequel to 2021’s Dune, the story is centered on the origins of the Bene Gesserit. But when can you expect to watch the show on Max for yourself?

While Dune: Prophecy is a spin-off of Denis Villeneuve’s big-screen Dune adaptations, it is set 10,000 years before the events of those movies. The series centers sisters Valya (Emily Watson) and Tula Harkonnen (Olivia Williams), who are responsible for establishing the Bene Gesserit. This fabled sisterhood is known for undergoing intense training so as to acquire superhuman abilities.

The series was ordered in 2019, and principle photography took place in Hungary and Jordan. Originally titled Dune: Sisterhood, the series is based on the original 1965 Dune novel by Frank Herbert and the 2012 prequel novel, Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. 

The first episode of Dune: Prophecy, “The Hidden Hand,” is scheduled to debut on Max on November 15, 2024….

(10) RABID PUPPY RELIC. In case you ever wondered, which seems unlikely, Camestros Felapton checked and — “Voxopedia still exists”.

… When I last checked in 2022, the permanently out-of-date clone of Wikipedia was down to three regular editors….

Looking now and I think it is down to just Sd-100 and Bassiano…

Bassiano appears to be running through some external source of biographies of 19th century Irishmen and English clergy? This activity does appear to be generating articles that you won’t find on Wikipedia, although not particularly interesting ones….

…Basically Infogalactic is, in the words of Miracle Max, mostly dead.

(11) ‘BRILLIANTLY DISGUSTING’. “’The Substance’ review: Brilliantly disgusting and deranged” is the opinion of this AP News reviewer.

In its first two hours, “The Substance” is a well-made, entertaining movie. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat treats audiences to a heavy dose of biting social commentary on ageism and sexism in Hollywood, with a spoonful of sugar- and sparkle-doused body horror.

But the film’s deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitably polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable.

What begins as a dread-inducing but still relatively palatable sci-fi flick spirals deeper into absurdism and violence, eventually erupting — quite literally — into a full-blown monster movie. Let the viewer decide who the monster is….

(12) LOVE IS BLUE. “Doctor Who-mad father and son build TARDIS complete with control console” – Manchester Evening News has the story. Photos of the work in progress at the link.

A father and son who share a love for Doctor Who built a TARDIS complete with a control console and the iconic blue box.

Pablo Agurcia, 37, has been a fan of the British science fiction series for almost 15 years. When watching the first episode with Ncuti Gatwa in the lead role in December 2023, his son Joaquim Agurcia, six, joined him and instantly became hooked….

… The pair used an old carboard box, polystyrene foam and a collection of old wires and bolts from the garage to create what is now their TARDIS console. To build the exterior they used a book shelf in the shape of phone box and painted it blue….

(13) CYBORG. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] “’Meeting a real-life cyborg was gobsmacking’ says film director” in this BBC article.

For the past 20 years, self-declared “cyborg artist” Neil Harbisson has provoked debate with his “eyeborg” – a surgically attached antenna.

Harbisson, who grew up in Barcelona, is colour blind, having been born with the rare condition achromatopsia, which affects one in 33,000 people.

This means he sees in what he calls “greyscale” – only black, white and shades of grey.

But he decided to have surgery in 2004 which changed his life – and his senses – attaching an antenna to the back of his head, which transforms light waves into sounds.

When film director Carey Born came across Harbisson, classed by Guinness World Records as “the first officially recognised ‘cyborg’,” she was “gobsmacked and astonished”.

Her next move was to meet him, and then make a film about him – Cyborg: A Documentary.

It explores how he navigates his life, along with effects and implications of his unusual surgical procedure.

“The reason he did it was not to substitute the sense that he was lacking – it was in order to create an enhancement,” Born tells the BBC.

“So that was really the main hook that I thought was fascinating.”

(14) EUROPA CLIPPER MISSION. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] This week’s Science journal takes a look at NASA’s forthcoming mission to the Jupiter moon Europa. There is a good chance that this will give us some exobiological clues, or at the very least some insights into prebiotic chemistry.  Nonetheless, I do remember Arthur’s warning…

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

The Europa Clipper mission is expected to launch in October (2024) and arrive in 2030.

You can read the article here.

(15) RYAN GEORGE AS A GROCERY CLERK/DETECTIVE. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] It’s not really sfnal, but I think it’s sort of adjacent given the whole “Sherlock/Mentalist/CSI/solving crimes out of nowhere“ vibe. “When Cashiers Comment On Your Purchases”.

[Thanks to Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, N., Steven French, Kathy Sullivan, Teddy Harvia, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day OGH.]