Children's books made with Midjourney/Dall-E 2/ChatGPT suffer from a "Whimsy Gap" — they are "moralistic, but not transporting."

The "images... are sometimes cute, even beautiful, but somehow off, with distorted proportions or elements of an idea mashed up to discordant effect."

Writes Alyssa Rosenberg in "Why AI will never beat Maurice Sendak" (WaPo). She tested the tools, trying to make children's books.

So far, these tools are limited to the data sets their creators have used to teach them about language and images. If AI is moralistic, limited in imagination or — as in the case of a powerful new avatar generator — inclined toward porn, that’s on the humans.

Oh? I don't know how she's so sure of that, but it sheds some light on an article I saw the other day that said AI wrote better and more "moral" opinions than the Supreme Court.

I can't find this right now. Did the lawprofs who wrote it withdraw it — perhaps because someone pointed out the flaw in their reasoning? The more "moral" opinions were, as you might imagine, more in line with the political left, and the machine may have been fed that point of view.

But I did find this:

"Estimates of just how many babies will be born because of new abortion restrictions vary. One researcher suggests 75,000, another 180,000."

I'm reading "Many more babies will be born post-'Dobbs.' We need to help them and their moms" by Alyssa Rosenberg (WaPo).

That's 75,000 to 180,000 per year. Rosenberg doesn't seem to notice that to emphasize the number of new babies is to say, implicitly, that during the reign of Roe, that's the number, per year, that were quietly and invisibly kept from our presence.

But Rosenberg calls our attention to the importance of making life in America good for parents and children. The end of Roe creates an opportunity to lobby for things like better child care and health services. I would think most of those who longed for an end to Roe would want to join forces with women's rights advocates and work to lighten the burdens of parenthood. 

That's Rosenberg's pitch:

"I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. I don’t want to lose opportunities. I don’t want to be resentful."

Said the actress Jamie Chung — she's in "Dexter: New Blood" — quoted in "An actor’s use of a surrogate raises radical-feminist questions," a WaPo opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg. 

Chung, 39, acknowledged that people might assume she was “vain”... [S]urrogacy essentially offloads the discomforts and incapacities of pregnancy onto another woman. Yet there’s something galvanizing about hearing a woman bluntly rage against the limits of biology and the costs it imposes on half the population... 

"The sort of readers inclined to buy a 900-page book about [Philip] Roth, of all people, are not readers who are afraid to encounter questions about horrible male behavior. "

"[I]f you can make it through Roth’s novels eager to know more about the man who wrote them and drew so deeply on his own life to do so, surely, you’re prepared to encounter ugliness on the page and off it.... In halting printing and shipping of the Roth book, Norton may want to show that the company is willing to take a financial hit in order to demonstrate its values. But nobody, other than maybe Norton, gets anything out of such a decision. It would be far more productive for the company to publish the book, let the public decide its merits and commit to donating any profits — and maybe even a figure that matches Bailey’s advance — to charity instead. Why didn’t Norton trust the reading public to decide on the merits of the Bailey book for itself?"

From "Why stopping the distribution of the Philip Roth biography was a bad idea" by Alyssa Rosenberg (WaPo). The publisher, Norton, withdrew the book because of allegations that the author, Blake Bailey, "groomed" his middle school students and, after they became adults, pursued them for sex and that he raped a woman. Bailey denies all that.

Roth authorized this biography, which gave Bailey access to many people and to Roth's papers. It's an important book and it shouldn't be suppressed. I think the book should be released even if we saw Bailey murder somebody. The book doesn't further any harm to anyone. If Bailey committed crimes, he should be answerable in a criminal proceeding. If the actions are torts, he could be sued, and if he's made money, it will increase his ability to pay damages.

As Rosenberg speculates, it seems that Norton is attempting to structure the facts to cut off its own responsibility, but it's hard to see how there's liability for a publisher publishing a book written by a criminal/tortfeasor.

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Are long novels still worth reading?