6. Van Gogh didn’t paint onions, but garlic
I.
Utrecht-based chef Ernst de Witte visited the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and looked at the painting ‘Red Cabbage with Onions’. But he was absolutely certain he saw garlic instead of onions. For a hundred years, nobody had said a word about it, but thanks to De Witte, a research team was set up and they indeed concluded: it is garlic. Great story.
II.
Casey Neistat had ChatGPT 4 write a script for his latest vlog. Watch it and you’ll probably come to the same conclusion as Neistat: it’s soulless.
The fact that Neistat spouts the lines like a robot doesn’t help. But apart from that, you simply miss creativity and are left with a boring video about New York (which is actually quite an achievement in its own right!).
Sometimes AI is just scary good. [This track by Drake and The Weeknd](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AvU-r80fgI) has already been streamed millions of times online. Created using artificial intelligence (at least according to its creator, Ghostwriter), but it sounds eerily realistic. [The Verge tried to make sense of the situation](https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/18/23688141/ai-drake-song-ghostwriter-copyright-umg-the-weeknd).AI music is everywhere. Here’s a full album by Oasis cover band AISIS. Liam Gallagher has heard a track and says it’s better than “the rest of the snizzle out there”. On TikTok, KanAI (Kanye AI) is taking the world by storm. There are AI covers of The Plain White T’s, Eiffel 65 and even… K3.
How on earth are we supposed to deal with this? Soon you really won’t know what’s real and what’s fake. Not to mention artists who will lie and say AI created it just to get attention for their song. Who then holds the copyright? Who actually owns a computer voice trained using the audio of an existing artist?
Nick Cave reacted strongly to fans who sent him results of lyrics supposedly generated in his style. “Thanks for these lyrics, but with all due love and respect: this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it means to be human.”
Neistat essentially comes to the same conclusion. “The more humanity there is in a creative expression, the more it means to you: the viewer or listener.”
III.
Dan Gheesling (who once won Big Brother and) is one of the most unique Twitch streamers. Only once you’ve been following him for a while do you understand the inside jokes and what he’s actually saying, but he never shouts and always stays positive. He usually plays difficult indie games.
Over the past few months, you could follow his attempts to reach level 7-99 in Spelunky 2. As a big fan of that game (my record is stuck at 7-42), I can only agree that it’s an insane challenge. To reach level 7-5, you have to complete a series of eighteen steps, each of which is complicated in its own right without dying. After that, you have to try to stay alive for another 94 levels, by finding three bubbles in each of those levels, popping them, dodging a giant jellyfish and going through a door to the next level.
Gheesling’s winning run is available in full on YouTube. A session lasting over six hours, nail-bitingly tense. Including all previous attempts, it took Gheesling a total of 173 hours to reach and win 7-99.
---The Velvet Queenis available on NPO Start. A documentary with stunning footage, beautiful music, full of reflections on the beauty of standing still and admiration.
We now know Netflix as a streaming service, but 25 years ago it started with DVDs. These were rented via a website and then arrived in a red envelope in the post. Netflix is set to stop this service soon. Over 5 billion DVDs were sent out in the US. The first was Beetlejuice, the most popular film was The Blind Side.
Starship, SpaceX’s mega-rocket, made its first test flight. It actually took off, started spinning after a while and exploded. What a spectacle!
Who is the man shrugging his shoulders in the photo on the Wikipedia page about shrug?
I’m reading De Mitsukoshi troostbaby company by Auke Hulst.
The Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum was the best gift I could have given myself. It’s amazing to travel back a few hundred years in time and get a glimpse into people’s everyday lives.
