Rene Magritte: Not to Be Reproduced

I’ve resigned myself to the reality that I can’t always distinguish an AI-altered video from what might be an actual recording of people or animals or vehicles moving in real time in three dimensional space. Hence, I’m not confident of the validity of some of what I see online. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a reel on X where Donald Trump was allegedly cheating at golf, whiffing a drive, surreptitiously picking up the ball and tee, as if the ball were arcing over the middle of the fairway.  Other X viewers asserted that what I had seen was AI fabricated and substituted it with what they claimed to be the unaltered original where Trump legitimately smacks the ball and picks up the tee.  Then a couple of days ago, there he is at the FIFA Club World Cup keeping for himself a gold medal designated for one of the players, pocketing the medal as he had the golf ball.

I have no idea which videos are real.

A young friend of mine, a musician who this fall will be touring the country from coast to coast with a band I’ve never heard of, told me this afternoon that there’s an AI “band” being promoted by Spotify that cranks out catchy pop tunes that are racking up big time numbers.  

Hey, AI, conjure me some light pop grooves. like the Monkees meet BTS.

Is it a real band or is it AI?  Did she filter that photo?  This has gotta be a parody account?

All anyone seems to care about on this broiling planet is attention and megabucks, amassing followers, becoming an influencer, wielding power, casting illusions.

Meanwhile, the government of the United States of America, an erstwhile beacon of hope, has slapped together a concentration camp in Florida and sadistically christened it “Alligator Alcatraz.” ^[1] Although supposedly a temporary hell for violent, criminal immigrants before they’re shipped off to God-knows-where, some parties claim that the incompetent Trump regime has rounded up any number of law abiding house framers and farm workers and dumped them there, which I bet is true.  Rather than tapping experts to run the government, Trump has selected an array of television personalities, mostly Fox News shills, who look good on TV but, in the case of the head of FEMA, wasn’t aware there was something called a hurricane season.  Holograms as opposed to seasoned professionals are running the country.

The citizenry’s response –– and I include myself in this censure –– seems more or less “meh.” 

I’m powerless, busy, can’t really influence domestic or geo-political events, an attitude that brings to mind Richard Wilbur’s sardonic elegy for Delmore Schwartz, “To An American Poet Just Dead:

In the Boston Sunday Herald, just three lines

Of no point type for you who used to sing

The praises of imaginary wines,

And died, I am told, of the real thing.

*

Also gone, but a lot less forgotten

Are an eminent cut-rate druggist, a lover of Giving,

A lender, and various brokers: gone from this rotten

Taxable world to a higher standard of living.

*

And the soupy summer is settling, full of yarns

Of Sunday fathers loitering late in bed,

And the sshhh of sprays on all the little lawns.

*

Will the sprays weep wide for you your chaplet tears?

For you will the deep-freeze units melt and mourn?

For you will Studebakers shred their gears

And sound from each garage a muted horn?

*

They won’t. In summer sunk and stupefied

The suburbs deepen in their sleep of death.

And though they sleep sounder since you died

It’s just as well that now you save your breath.

Well, at least I know that Wilbur’s poem was written on a typewriter or in longhand.  Of that I can be assured. It’s not ersatz.

Delmore Schwartz

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^[1] Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman visited the camp and reports that detainees are kept in cages, 32 per cage, served substandard food, and get their drinking water from, as she puts it, “the unit” where they defecate.