Designed by AI

So, the good folks give me humanities department at UCLA have decided to Teach a completely AI generated course in literature and history.

If the course it's half as incoherent as the book cover, the students will flee the course screaming, "Tekeli Li!!!!

UCLA announced the other day 2BW will be the first course in the UCLA College Division of Humanities to be built around the Kudu artificial intelligence platform. The textbook: AI-generated. Class assignments: AI-generated. Teaching assistants’ resources: AI-generated.”

.......

But what really got me fuming was the horrible, horrible textbook cover that was extruded for this course.

This image is for a book that’s apparently called History & Fiction: Survey of Literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th Century, but you won’t find those words on the book’s cover — already this AI is failing at a basic job. The AI decided to put some letter shapes in the spot where we might find a title that look like “Of Nerniacular Latin to An Ecoolitun on Nance Langusages”. Not even close!

The images are even worse. A Greco-Roman revival building sits between two grainy hills, while rivulets of faded blues, browns, and yellows flow down like sewage spills, carrying along all sorts of unintelligible debris and pixels.

Floating awkwardly above this sludge are melted saints and smudged Rennaissance-esque folks, crowded out by processions of object-shaped blobs: a stack of pancakes made with drywall dust and covered in syrup, a banana in a custom leather scabbard that’s sealed with a wrist watch, a crab’s legs peeking out from under a purple Victorian lampshade.

But since this is a comp-lit course, there’s some attempt at a flow chart of something thrashing its way through this yard sale of Cronenberg rejects. Two unseaworthy boats pour streams of golden piss into a word box labeled “Sgiaiviaescm” which leads to “Frodiidawes,” two unforgettable movements in literary history, I’m sure. This history doesn’t last long though, as they’re blocked from developing further by the curling procession of “Poiuchance” morphing into “Vuilao Luainles,” a process that is hindered or aided by a croissant that someone tried to play like an accordion and then abandoned, right in the middle of the flow of literature’s evolution.

Somewhere out there, as always, is “Italian.”

Read the rest, it is an epic rant.