Last December, before Elon Musk started wielding his billion dollar chainsaw, an article in Futurism...
<parenthesis subject="The link not followed">
( I had, incidentally, published a link to it in an article in The Byte quoted in this:AI models routinely hallucinate and make up facts. They have no understanding of language, but instead use statistical predictions to generate cogent-sounding text based on the human writing they've ingestedBut I'd made the mistake of leaving a link in that I hadn't followed. Usually I remove any links that I've not followed; it seems to me to be a requirement of responsible blogsmansanship – making sure my blog doesn't lead people astray.)
</parenthesis>
... pointed out that information seen through the distorting lens of Elon Musk's imagination (EMformation?) might not be entirely reliable:
The astonishingly gullible billionaire ...
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(a sequel to The Very Hungry Caterpillar?)
</parenthesis>
...has a well-documented tendency to spread misinformation, an embarrassing and often dangerous quality that's undermined his standing in the world of science and technology.In fact, even his own AI company's chatbot Grok — which Musk himself has branded as a brash truth-teller — has a pretty good grasp on the situation.
"Yes, there is substantial evidence and analysis suggesting that Elon Musk has spread misinformation on various topics, including elections, to a very large audience through his social media platform, X," Grok responded when asked if "Elon Musk spread misinformation to billions of people."
Grok pointed to the wealth of misinformation Musk has shared in recent years, especially when it comes to the most recent presidential election.
"Musk's posts related to elections, which have contained misleading or false claims, have amassed billions of views," Grok wrote. "Musk has shared manipulated videos and debunked claims about voting processes, including allegations about non-citizen voting, which are common themes in misinformation narratives."
Case in point, less than a day after Musk cosigned a meme that called people who "still believe everything shown in [sic] news" dumb, he shared a video that purportedly showed "armed communist Maduro gangs... storming polling stations in Punta Cardón," Venezuela.
As many users quickly pointed out, the video actually showed thieves attempting to steal air conditioners.
This reminded me...
<parenthesis>
Not sure why. Perhaps it was that the bad uses of AI brought to mind the possible good ones. That's me – always looking on the bright side.
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... of a recent addition to the The Rest Is Politics: Leading series. To quote that website's description:
How many people are going to die as a result of American support for USAID programs being removed? What are the limits of thinking of AI as the silver bullet for healthcare? How do we bring the doubling of the human lifespan to everyone alive without bankrupting our societies?
Atul Gawande, late of USAID, and soon to be reinstated as a Professor at Harvard...
<trump-warning>
(that is, if His RoyalMendaciousness...
<inline-ps>
I chose this word to resonate with "Highness", but "mendacity" resonates almost as well with "Majesty" and is much more common, as this Ngram shows:</inline-ps>
I wonder what happened in mid-19th century
to make 'mendacity' so popular. So many
questions, so little time...
...Mendacity doesn't have it closed down for the bare-faced effrontery of having been founded before the USA was [and shame on all the other institutions and people [particularly politicians] kowtowing to the infantile/amoral vandal...<tangent>
[Meanwhile, in Ukraine, where traditional diplomats want 'a just peace' he wants 'just peace' so that he can get on with general exploitation]
</tangent>...]). As Anthony Scaramucci says in another Goalhanger podcast, we can look forward to "a Golden Age of Corruption'.
</trump-warning>
... is well worth a listen He talks with wit and wisdom (and, appropriately enough for a surgeon, incision) about not only Trump and his lying hench-nerd (to call Musk a henchman would be an insult to henchmen), but about the uses of AI in medicine. At one point he says that in the average clinic every hour of contact with patients requires two hours' work on documentation.
Which adds weight to a Medscape survey on the use of AI in medicine, published last September, here
Of all the areas considered by respondents (745 UK based doctors), 'Administration and recordkeeping' us seen by doctors as potentially the most promising area for using AI.
But this doesn't mean much; they might be wrong in that belief; and UK-based doctors may not be the best judges of this anyway; I don't know. Besides, AI may just be the deus ex machina that – in this pipe dream – gets rid of all the pen-pushing.
Towards the end of the survey report we get to the main event:
That last comment is really GOSH-worthy. And don't you agree that the penultimate word is doing a lot of heavy-lifting?
But, although I can't say I'm impressed by the survey, the message seems to be that AI can have a big influence on medicine as long as expectations are kept in check. The tech-bros waving their iPhones at Atul Gawande and saying 'This is gonna replace you' are wrong. As he says 'How is it going to deliver [a] baby?'
There's good news:
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Oh dear. That "61% vs 47%" is a symptom of the confusion and haste that characterizes this report. They should've used AI – and if they did they should have done a decent job of post-editing.
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Enough. But before I go I must mention the next WCS concert, at All Saints in ... oo-er. less than a month.
b
Update 2025.05.27.13:05 – Added <inline-ps />
Update 2025.06.03.20:40 – Added PPS
PPS
Some thoughts about that concert:
- Word painting
Many – if not most – composers make their music reflect the words they are setting. I've referred to this often, passim (which is a fancy way of saying "so often that I can't be bothered to look them all up'; but the word cloud points to a few of the early ones...<rant>
(I say 'early' because Blogger updated their tagging software at some time during the early 2020s; I'm not sure precisely when, because after the change I spent a few months limping along trying to make up for the improvement.<tangent>
I've no reason to doubt that it was an improvement from the coders' point of view and/or from the point of view of the performance of the software. But from the user's point of view it was a great leap backwards.
</tangent>This sort of change is a recurrent feature of the Strong Message Here podcast.
German has a word for it: Verschlimmbesserung.)
</rant>
...).As an example from our 22 June concert, in Parry's I Was Glad, the words 'Jerusalem was builded as a city that is at unity in itself'. These words have a very complex setting in 8 parts (two SATB choirs). At first the two choirs are separated by a bar or two. but ultimately the two choirs come together at the word 'itself'. But Mozart goes one step further, with his music reflecting not only the words he is setting, but their spirit. We are singing his Mass in C...
<future-concert>
(Next Autumn we will be singing a very different Mass in C, Beethoven's – not only the first piece I ever sang with an SATB choir, but also the first piece I sang with WCS in 1985.)
</future-concert>... better known (though not to Mozart himself) as The Coronation Mass. Mozart, a devout believer, ends the Credo with an Amen chorus – a typically Mozartian fugue. But afterwards he ends the movement with a simple 'Credo in unum deum, Amen, Amen', as if to say 'This clever-clever stuff is all very well, but here's what matters: I believe in one God. END OF.'
- I was glad
I have sung this many times (with and without the Vivats – and if you want to know what that means, read this extract from an earlier post:<prescript>
In Latin, 'May he live" is Vivat, traditionally pronounced – in this context – in what Wikipedia calls 'a variant known as Anglicised Latin' though I'm not convinced about the 'Anglicised' bit. It's the traditional seventeenth to early twentieth century English pronunciation: /vaɪvæt/. This section is officially known as "The Acclamation", less formally known in choral circles as "The Vivats".But more often than not, in concerts, the Vivats are not included, and some listeners (though not singers) are surprised by Parry's abrupt change of mood</prescript>
Source (the latest of three posts to this blog on the subject of Parry's setting of the psalm Laetatus sum ('I Was Glad').While the Mozart is known as The Coronation Mass, although the composer himself did not have a particular coronation in mind, 'I Was Glad' was written specifically for a coronation. As I wrote (in the same post to this blog):
<prescript>
When Hubert Parry set verses from Psalm 122 (Laetatus Sum) for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 the text of the middle section readVivat Rex Eduardus...Vivat! Vivat! Vivat!It was revised for George VI, for Elizabeth II, and for Charles III ...
</prescript> - Geistliches Lied
We (30-40 members of WCS) sang this in our tour of the north-east in the summer of 2016, discussed here. It's a gem, and while sounding simple is incredibly intricate. (The reasons are discussed here (not my work – music theory isn't my thing!) At the end there is what may well be my favourite setting of "Amen"; in it the basses. who have previously been following the alto
entries, take the lead...<autobiographical-note>
.
...and end on an Eb. (On a good day I can claim to have a bottom D, but I doubt whether the conductor could hear it, let alone the front row of the audience.)
</autobiographical-note>
(These are not meant to be anything like exhaustive programme notes – just a few thoughts. There's plenty more in this enjoyable evening of fairly light music, both listed on the poster and TBD (sic!). Don't miss it.)