Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
Retrospective
I have learned so much for the past 15 weeks especially on my topics regarding ethics and gender diversity. I chose technology and social change as my WRIT-150 topic because I wanted to write essays that are about my major, which is film production. I came to this class imagining that I would write all of my papers about film so that I can use my knowledge in film. However, I ended up writing a diverse range of topics that made me think about the whole society rather than just a specific area. The ethics in AI creativity and gender diversity issues in China all make me contemplate. The research I did all adds to my knowledge as a person who’s now more socially aware than before.
The collaborative writing experience also helps me to learn the ways to give other people advises. It is very beneficial for me as when I give suggestions to others’ works, I tend to reflect the problem onto my own writing as well. I have noticed some of the recurring problems I have during the workshops that will help me in my future writings.
Sources
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370298000551
This article talks in-depth about the specific ways and applications of AI creativity and how it works, divided into three different types. This is important when categorizing creativity itself and what AI can achieve at the moment and it calls into question whether contents produced by AI can be defined as creative contents. Furthermore, while AI technology keeps advancing, will it become a separate genre that differs from human-generated work?
https://link-springer-com.libproxy2.usc.edu/article/10.1007/s11023-010-9202-2
Holding an opposite view, Erden argues that to call AI productions or acts as creative is to “misunderstand the use of this word in the language.” Hence, he calls into question of the definition of creativity, which is part of the reason why there’s an ethical dilemma regarding this topic. Should we as humans narrow down the scope of creativity to only human-produced works or should the AI be accredited toward their creative products? Though, this article focuses on the replication of AI and how that could not be defined as AI being creative.
A.I. Creativity
The area I want to focus on for my WP4 is on Artificial Intelligence and how it could be used to replace even creative aspects of our jobs.
The use of A.I. is getting more and more diverse where it’s able to play chess, perform surgeries and write scripts. With a set of codes, computers can generate a brand new script within seconds. However, the script might not make sense and will need some revisions. But this is a lot faster than a normal script writer where they would take months or even years to finish a script. If this technology gets implemented into film businesses, they would be able to shorten the pre-production process and possibly the cost of buying the script. Though, it might impact the script-writers where it might be hard for them to sell their stories when A.I. gets more and more advanced.
This impacts everyone in the world as we originally thought that creativity was something that the technology can’t accomplish. It leads to an ethic issue on how humans could be fully replaced by technology if it keeps on developing.
Film Museum Proposal
The museum I want to create is a experience-focused museum that dedicates on providing people with different environment when watching films. These environment will be created based on a timeline of film’s history of inventions where people get to learn film’s origin and how it evolved to now. At the start of the film origin, people view films in exhibitions as there were zoetropes and later on kinetoscopes that screens moving image. Hence, this experience was typically public and people would be standing up.
Nowadays, some people choose to watch films on their laptops or at home or even on airplanes when traveling. Thus, this makes their experience private and on small screens.
This is also a social campaign that lets people examine their changes in the way they get entertained and how that’s effecting their experience of watching a film. A discussion board might also be posted as people get to decide which way of viewing is their most preferred way.
Museum Review
I went to visit the California Science Center during the weekend and I was meaning to take a tour around the technology section but ended up in the natural history section. From this visit, I felt the most important thing for an exhibit is the way the theme of the exhibit is presented and displayed.
In an vast space, samples were organized in a logical and interesting way to attract the visitors into delivering the information brought by these samples. Each sample or piece of exhibit comes with a board that explains its origin or the way it works, which is the main way a museum delivers information to its visitors. Although I would wish the information board to be a little bit more detailed and clarified as some of the labels were quite hard to see from afar. For my museum proposal, I would definitely ponder on the way I present my topic and hopefully think of an interesting way that best displays my topic.
Resource on under-representation of women in China
https://www.ixueshu.com/document/6a3261ae85e489b89ab78b513da0297b318947a18e7f9386.html
This is a link to a Chinese Journal on the exploration of Chinese women in STEM fields and its limitations. I find this article to be very engaging and valid as it employs a lot of the statistics. It’s published in 2018, hence, making the data quite up to date when comparing to some essays that are written decades ago. It helps me to understand the recent situation of the diversity in the STEM fields in China, which I wasn’t fully aware before. The journal comes from a renowned university in China, which enhances its reliability.
Though, I would not recommend it to my classmates as it is very specific towards the context of my paper and it is completely in Chinese. It is unfortunate that I could not find any detailed articles that focus on the Chinese situation alone in English, so I had to turn to research browsers in China.
Stereotypes of Tech Workers Presented in Media
From the TV shows and programs I’ve seen, the representation of the stereotypical role of tech workers are mostly reinforced in the media.
This is a comic representation of tech workers in a Chinese website and it exaggerates many of the stereotypical characteristics of tech workers that exist in people’s preconceptions. These elements include glasses, shirts, and looking antisocial. Another comic figure is found on a English website, showing the same characteristics of a tech worker.
It is interesting to see how both figures are similarly portrayed regardless of the region they are created in. It suggests how tech workers are been represented has nothing to do with the country people are in but to do with people’s stereotypical way of presenting this group across the world. This image of the tech workers are reinforced in all kinds of media where they tend to give a superficial setting to the characters that has resulted in this fixed concept.
However, as people are very different in terms of what they do, stereotypes on a certain group of people might lead to bias and discrimination.
Problems when drafting
One of the biggest problems I face during writing my second draft is that I found it hard to maintain the fluency in my writing. I simply threw out the points I want to talk about in my first draft but some of them don’t link well with each other and may be difficult to follow as I move into the next topic. I would like to work on the fluency of my paper by the end where I have all the information I want to put in and start to look at it as a whole.
As I’m moving towards my final draft, I need to spend some time on my word choices and prepositions since I’m an international student and English is not my native language. So, I would want to make sure that my grammar is right and my sentence structures are clear and efficient in order for me to elaborate on my points.
Also, I want to further develop my thesis as I finish writing the whole essay. I still think the wording of it could be more precise and accurate in terms of the argument I’m trying to convey. I need to make sure that all my paragraphs are centered around this thesis.
Review on “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “How to Read Like a Writer”
Starting off, both essays begin with the writers’ own anecdote in which they introduce the main topic they are going to talk about. However, Carr and Bunn take very different approaches in their style of writing not just in the anecdotes but throughout the essays. Carr uses informal language and Bunn writes in the style of academic writing. This makes Carr’s article more easily accessible towards the public audience, which then naturally attracts more readers that might increase his ability to influence them. Though Bunn’s language enables him to deliver a more precise message to his target readers as he carefully selects his use of words or phrase.
Despite the fact that both writings have very different literary choices, their choices of evidence are quite similar. They both use experiences from friends or students to support their claims. This will make their essays more persuasive as the audience sees more people going through the same experience. This is a method I consider using but I would like to find more studies and data to back up my argument rather than using opinions from a friend.
Milly's Blog 