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:

Ben Sasse impresses me. He seems pretty intelligent and articulate.

He's got a book, "The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance."

From the "Face the Nation" transcript, about the book:

Yes, so this book is 100 percent not about politics, and it's 99 percent not about policy. It's about this new category of perpetual adolescence. And, first, let's just say that, over the last two millennia or so, the emergence of a category called adolescence is a pretty special gift. We believe that, when our kids become biological adults, when they hit puberty, they don't have to be fully formed, morally, emotionally, economically, educationally, in terms of household structure. They don't have to go out and be fully adult immediately. They don't have to go off to war, and they don't have to become economically self-sufficient. That's glorious, to have that protected space between childhood and adulthood. But it's only glorious if you understand that it's a transitional state, it's a means to an end. Peter Pan's Neverland is a hell. It's a dystopia. And we don't want to be -- have our kids caught at a place where they're not learning how to be adults. And, right now, we're not tending to the habit formation aspects of a republic.

I boldfaced the sentence that jumped out at me. It's funny, I was just listening to a 2011 "Fresh Air" interview with the children's book author, Maurice Sendak, and he said that when he was a boy, he couldn't imagine growing up, but...

I mean, being a child was being a child - was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child. I remember how much - when I was a small boy I was taken to see a version of "Peter Pan." I detested it. I mean the sentimental idea that anybody would want to remain a boy, I don't - I couldn't have thought it out then, but I did later, certainly, that this was a conceit that could only occur in the mind of a very sentimental writer, that any child would want to remain in childhood. It's not possible. The wish is to get out.

"Fresh Air’s 10 Favorite Terry Gross Interviews."

Explanations and audio here.

I'm going to listen to all of these, beginning with Maurice Sendak.

"And Guy sank upon a couch of flowers/In an ice-ribbed underworld..."

"Awash in blossoming gold from a new sun/Tumbling out dark long-ago clouds..."

Maurice Sendak's last work.

Growing old tests your atheism.

"Live your life."

Goodbye to Maurice Sendak.

We were just talking about his saying "Go to hell"... and now he's gone. Not to hell, I'm sure. He was 83.

A largely self-taught illustrator, Mr. Sendak was at his finest a shtetl Blake, portraying a luminous world, at once lovely and dreadful, suspended between wakefulness and dreaming. In so doing, he was able to convey both the propulsive abandon and the pervasive melancholy of children’s interior lives.

His visual style could range from intricately crosshatched scenes that recalled 19th-century prints to airy watercolors reminiscent of Chagall to bold, bulbous figures inspired by the comic books he loved all his life, with outsize feet that the page could scarcely contain. He never did learn to draw feet, he often said.

Here's an excellent, recent interview with him:

The term "children's illustrator" annoys him, since it seems to belittle his talent. "I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person." He and Eugene never considered bringing up children themselves, he says. He's sure he would have messed it up. His brother felt the same way: after their childhood, they were too dysfunctional. "They led desperate lives," he says of his parents. "They should have been crazy. And we – making fun of them. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me and his eyes were all teary. And he said, 'Why were we so unkind to Mama?' And I said, 'Don't do that. We were kids, we didn't understand. We didn't know she was crazy.'"

Maurice Sendak says "Go to hell"...

... and a lot of other fascinating art-related things in a beautiful video shot in a beautiful room:



(Via Metafilter.)

"I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it."

"I was young just minutes ago."