“Weird” – Culture and Technology and Politics Collide.

Posted on | August 1, 2024 | 2 Comments

Mike Magee

“It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it,” was an admonition I heard literally hundreds of times growing up. The source was my mother who majored in English and Drama at Rutgers. She was especially tuned in, not only to words and meaning, but also to volume, cadence, speed, and tone.

She passed away in 1995, but her absence was never more apparent than it was this week for two reasons.

The first was the use of the word “weird,” by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on July 27th, at a rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota. The televised insult, delivered with clarity, apparently struck a cord, and quickly went viral. His targets, the Republican ticket visiting his state that day, felt the sting of his remarks, which were delivered with high performance quality, sarcasm, a twinkle in the eye, and a bit of historic context.

Walz began this way: “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”

With the audience warmed up, he continued. 

“They went out, you know — because he’s a TV guy (referring to Trump’s choice of Vance for VP) — they go out and try to do this central casting: ‘Oh, we’ll get this guy who wrote a book, Hillbilly Elegy,’ you know, because all my hillbilly relatives went to Yale and became, you know, venture capitalists.” Embracing classic “beginning/middle/end” storytelling, he finished with, “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

As one would expect, other leaders in the Democratic party, including VP hopeful’s, were quick to echo the word, with varying success. Thoughtful leaders like Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) added context to commentary while transitioning from words to general misbehavior. He said,“I wish I knew a better way to describe it, Your party’s obsession with drag shows is creepy. Your candidate’s idea to strip the vote away from people without kids is weird. The right wing book banning crusade is super odd. It’s just so far outside the mainstream.”

Over the next few days Opinion columnists weighed in as well. The Washington Post’s Monica Hesse, an English major herself, recounted a story she had read in the 2005 book, Freakonomics. It involved a 1946 radio episode of “The Adventures of Superman” called “The Clan of the Fiery Cross.”  Meant to mimic the Ku Klux Klan, the master villain is caught offline describing in dramatic radio voice his own sheeted followers as “suckers” and “little nobodies.” Worse than that, following the episode’s airing, KKK members reportedly returned from work the following evening only to discover their “caped children” chasing and vanquishing their “sheeted siblings.” As reported in the book, one Klan member said, “I never felt so ridiculous in all my life! Suppose my own kid finds my Klan robe some day?” 

My second reason this week for feeling my mother’s heightened presence takes us from the ridiculous to the sublime. On July 30th, ChatGPT maker OpenAI announced that the waiting cautionary period for release of their “conversational voice mode” had now come to an end. The new software, shuttered since May over criticism that AI product “hewed to sexist stereotypes about female assistants being flirty and compliant,” was now good to go.

The original controversy was ignited when Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI CEO Sam Altman of “AI copying of her voice” after she declined to recreate her performance in the 2013 movie “Her” (a human to AI romance featuring the actress as the robot voice). The new (Scarlett-like) voice over, “Sky”, was one of five voices selected from an audition of 400 voice actors. Users now can select their own assistant. However, it’s down to four, since OpenAI chose to disengage from the controversy by killing off “Sky.”

Federal copyright law aside, the new offering’s significance is nothing short of ground breaking. As the Tech wizard Gerrit De Vynck reports, it delivers a “conversational voice mode, which can detect different tones of voice and respond to being interrupted, much like a human… the new voice features are built on OpenAI’s latest AI model, which directly processes audio without needing to convert it to text first. That allows the bot to listen to multiple voices at once and determine a person’s tone of voice, responding differently based on what it thinks the person’s emotions are.”

My mother couldn’t have envisioned culture and technology and politics colliding with such force three decades after her passing. But here we are. And as the Post’s Hesse notes, “When your whole political movement is based on a return to some ‘Pleasantville’ vision of American normalcy, ‘weird’ actually hurts.”

Comments

"Available Everywhere Now"
"Code Blue INDEX online"

 

  Ralph Snyderman
Prospective Health Blog
BIOGRAPHY   Meredith Magee Donnelly
Homegrown Friends
BIOGRAPHY   Eric Dishman
NIH Precision Medicine
BIOGRAPHY   Barbara Ficarra
Health in 30
BIOGRAPHY   William L. (Larry) Minnix, Jr.
Larry's Letters
BIOGRAPHY     Eric Dishman
Precision Medicine, Euthanasia, Abortion, Communism, Trillions of Dollars, Losing Freedom, and Town Hall Mobs BIOGRAPHY   Michael Millenson
Yearning for Universal Coverage Is Not Universal
BIOGRAPHY