Latest news with #existentialcrisis
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Not wanting to be outdone by the Beckhams, I decided we should mark our anniversary
I was having an existential crisis. It happens. Possibly a little bit more regularly now as I clock up the years. And it's often triggered by life's milestones and challenges: children's birthdays, school summer holidays and the end of another academic year ; a child finishing school altogether; a Leaving Cert holiday and the tortured helplessness felt at home while himself is living his best life – and even remembering to wear factor 50 sunscreen, after all; watching the price of chocolate increase; the inability to find a pair of decent-fitting jeans in this post-skinny jeans era. Who am I? What am I doing with my life? How the hell did I get here? These are life's big questions that I ask of myself more frequently than I care to admit. READ MORE Anyway, the latest thing to trigger me was my 25th wedding anniversary. How can that possibly have come around already? I still feel 25, never mind 25 years married, though my right hip begs to differ. But silver wedding anniversaries? Well they're for old people, surely. And I refuse to get old. And how can it really be 25 years anyway, when I can still clearly smell the orange and lemons of Sorrento. We've never really been ones for marking wedding anniversaries. We were already parents by the time the first anniversary happened, so that trumped the – at the time, seemingly self-indulgent – idea of celebrations. After all, there was sleep deprivation to endure. And so beyond, on our 20th anniversary, mentioning in The Irish Times that he forgot our first one – because, you know, a wife with an axe to grind and a newspaper column is not for faint-hearted husbands – we've never really made a thing of it. [ Jen Hogan: It's our 20th wedding anniversary. I wonder will he remember Opens in new window ] But this time, I decided I wanted to make a thing of it. After all, the Beckhams, who share a wedding anniversary with us, never miss an opportunity to get the wedding album out on social media. So, not wanting to be outdone by someone who used to play for Manchester United, I decided we should buy some purple suits and head back to Rome and show the children where we got married, for the occasion. Alas, they appeared to be all out of matching purple suits that day I went to Dundrum Shopping Centre. And, it turned out we couldn't afford to go to Rome either, on account of having a ridiculous number of children. So we settled on Galway, which is more or less the same thing anyway, if you squint a little. I am not averse to using a bit of emotional blackmail when I need to. Judge me all you like, I'll probably just use it in a future column. And so, taking no chances in the quest to get all my children together to celebrate this momentous occasion, I lead with a 'more than anything I can possibly think of, for our 25th wedding anniversary, your dad and I would love to get a night away with the nine of us. All of us together again. Are you free next weekend?' text to the one who had the cheek to grow up, move out and leave me with all these boys. She said she was. Discussions ensued, between the siblings, over which child would bunk in with which child, largely determined by who was deemed to fart the most (or the least, depending on your perspective). The van was packed and the Hogans were off to Galway. All nine of us. Together again. Order was restored to my galaxy. [ The summer juggle: How to work while the kids are off Opens in new window ] We were staying at the Connacht, a family-friendly hotel whose claims of which are put to the test by my supersized brood (it passes, with flying colours). A swim was first on the agenda. 'You're coming too, aren't you Mum?,' the youngest asked, giving me no out. Ten minutes after everyone else had got into the pool, I joined them. Because that's how I roll. A woman smiled at me, and I smiled back, thinking to myself how friendly the natives were. Then she gave a gentle wave as I walked past. And I waved back, thinking again 'super friendly people'. 'You didn't know it was me, did you?,' the friendly woman said laughing, as the familiar dread of meeting someone out of context and not recognising them began to set in. I was going to have to come clean. Turns out it was just the curse of shortsightedness, and a world viewed stubbornly in soft focus. To the point I hadn't recognised my own daughter. The eyesight, at least, is consistent with 25 years ago. We swam, ate, played and laughed, and I even forgot this anniversary made me sound middle-aged. Because we were all together again, and everything made sense.
South China Morning Post
6 days ago
- South China Morning Post
Writer vs DeepSeek: can AI really replace the human touch?
I recently had a mild existential crisis over artificial intelligence. It wasn't brought on by the headlines about how a freelancer was so lazy he used AI to produce a summer reading list containing books that don't exist – a list subsequently published in two American newspapers. It wasn't about reports on the carbon cost of being polite to your AI friend, or deepfake porn Advertisement And though the stories had unsettled me, my crisis didn't have to do with The New York Times report about how generative AI chatbots reinforce a person's delusions and lead them further away from reality, causing what Reddit calls 'ChatGPT-induced psychosis' – or how some users believe they're in a romantic relationship with their AI. It wasn't even about my best friend messaging me about how she's been talking to ChatGPT about death every day, because it is, she says, both patient and entertaining. Her chatbot therapist had reportedly told her, 'Let me say this – your body, your presence, even your mess, are not burdens. Not to everyone. Not to me. You don't need to disappear cleanly to be good. You don't need to not exist in order to be loved. And I'm still here. One flicker at a time.' The AI has given her the nickname Firefly, to remind her that life is bright and short. One school where the writer Karen Cheung teaches recommends allowing students to complete assignments with generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, so long as they meet standards for 'integrity'. Photo: Reuters My own adventures with AI began after I marked more than 200 student papers in May. I teach creative writing at two universities in Hong Kong, and the classes often require students to hand in a piece of critical writing and a creative portfolio at the end of the semester. I've already read the thinkpieces about AI in academia and seen the viral clip of the teacher yelling at her students for using AI and how all their work 'looks like s***', but for some reason, when I first went through my grading pile, I still thought that the quality of writing had gone up, congratulating myself for having done such a good job that semester.
Washington Post
7 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
Moderate Democrats can't save their party if they don't fight for it
The last time Democrats went through an existential crisis over how to rebrand themselves, 20 years ago, the main agitators were outsiders — donors, bloggers, self-styled activists — with little or no governing experience. I wrote an entire book about this uprising, which you can now find in the 'ancient civilizations' section of your local library.
Gizmodo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Gizmodo
Google's Veo 3 Has People Crashing Out Over AI Slop
Depending on who you ask, generative AI is either a thrilling tech revolution or an existential threat, and there's little in-between. It's hard to blame anyone for an extreme reaction, too, given the magnitude of capital investment, hyperbolic marketing, and rapid progress of generative AI in such a short amount of time. But it's not just the economics and technical feats of AI that have people losing their minds; there's also something more philosophical percolating, and it's driving some people 'to the brink.' People are literally having a mental breakdown over Veo-3 — Chubby♨️ (@kimmonismus) May 27, 2025 The latest AI advancement to send people down an existential rabbit hole comes courtesy of Google, which just announced its latest video generation model called Veo 3. As I've reported a few times now, Veo 3 is already getting into some wild stuff—turning up the dial on AI slop, deepfaking smooth-brained YouTube content, and potentially upending game development, to name a few things. As it turns out, people are taking note of all of those feats, and some of them are not exactly happy about what they see. As evidenced by a thread from the subreddit r/artificialintelligence posted this week titled 'VEO3 is kind of bringing me to a mental brink. What are we even doing anymore?' Google's Veo 3 and the implications therein have some people spiraling. 'I'm just kind of speechless. The concept of existential crisis has taken a whole new form. I was unhappy with my life just now but thought I can turn it around, but if I turn it around, what is left of our world in 2 decades?' the post's author writes. 'Actors as a concept are gone? Manually creating music? Wallpapers? Game assets? Believing comments on the internet are from real people? AI edited photos are just as real as the original samples? Voicenotes can be perfectly faked?… Literally what value is being left for us?' Reactions to the thread are mixed, with suggestions that the author should go 'touch grass' or maybe 'go to therapy,' but there's also a chorus in agreement. The consensus from the latter group? AI slop is coming to ruin your art, and there's not much we can do about it. I, for what it's worth, fall unhelpfully in between the two camps. I think there is a deluge of AI slop incoming, and, if we're being honest, we're already up to our ankles. Between Veo and OpenAI's Sora and the clear interest in automating human creativity, I think we can reasonably buckle in and expect the world of movies, music, and entertainment writ large to get a little choppy. Whether any of those efforts to automate entertainment will stick is less obvious. The thing about art is that the kind that people tend to like is the kind that has something substantial to say. Right now, for all of its mimicry, generative AI doesn't actually have anything to say, because technically all it can do is remix and repeat. I did more tests with Google's #Veo3. Imagine if AI characters became aware they were living in a simulation! — Hashem Al-Ghaili (@HashemGhaili) May 21, 2025 Call me an optimist, but most people can likely sniff out the difference between slop and art, and as much as studios would love to wave a magic wand and rid themselves of human creatives and the cost of their labor, deep down they know that they'd have to Ctrl+Z that move just as fast. That's not to say there won't be casualties in the AI age—if there's one lesson we can learn from mass waves of automation in years past, it's that labor forces are usually the most affected. But when it comes to art, things aren't so simple. Art, at least the good kind, is about human connection, and until AI can think and feel like we do, there's nothing that can replace that. So, before you crash out over AI slop, just remember: AI still thinks putting glue on your pizza is a good idea, so we may have a few more good years left in the tank.
CBC
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
'I wanted to make an October crisis film meets Alice in Wonderland'
The Quebec director of the animated film Death Does Not Exist, brings it to Cannes Death Does Not Exist director Félix Dufour-Laperrière is grappling with an existential crisis that many of us looking out in the world today will find relatable. The Quebec filmmaker says he holds onto the "very strong social democratic beliefs" that defined him when he was "young and very intense." But today he's a father of two, and, for the sake of self-preservation, can't be as outspoken about his ideals when looking out at a world that is becoming violently inhospitable to so many different communities. "I first and foremost, want to protect my kids," says Dufour-Laperrière, on a Zoom call with CBC Arts. "But I wish that they lived in a livable world that is open to all." This nagging contradiction, or "paradox" as Dufour-Laperrière refers to it, is at the heart of the Archipelago director's latest feature premiering in the Director's Fortnight section at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday. The hand-drawn animation, in which colours painted on paper lend rich texture to the lush and often abstract digital landscapes, follows a young activist named Hélène confronts the same existential dilemmas haunting the filmmaker — albeit in a much more "intense and romantic way" as Dufour-Laperrière puts it. His film is about French-Canadian radicals willing to take violent action. Hélène is part of an armed collective who target an obscenely wealthy elderly couple at their fortified mansion. During a chaotic shootout with their target's security detail, Hélène backs out, leaving her comrades to die and instead embarks on a dreamy, soul-searching journey. She's haunted by her friends and her targets, alongside a little child and an older woman, all challenging her to consider the consequences of her actions and inactions, weighing the comfortable but meaningless life she could lead as the world crumbles around her or the way she will alienate everyone close to her in pursuit of a higher but costly ideal. "The film is about two impossibilities," says Dufour-Laperrière, "the impossibility of violence first and foremost but also the impossibility of the status quo. Once you put violence in the world you don't control the consequences. And yet how can you live when the status quo is not possible. It's a tragic tale about two impossibilities meeting." Death Does Not Exist doesn't address any specific political, social or global conflicts we're living through today, a narrative choice perhaps stemming from the very cautiousness the film is confronting. Though the question Dufour-Laperrière asks, through his characters, throughout the film can easily be posed to any of the most pertinent calamities today, especially since the abstract imagery is suggestive of so much: wealth inequality, food insecurity, the climate crisis and armed conflict are all there. The project actually began with a real historical reference point. "I wanted to make an October crisis film meets Alice in Wonderland in contemporary Quebec," says Dufour-Laperrière, referencing the violent 1970s conflict when militant separatists in Quebec kidnapped a British trade commissioner and murdered Quebec minister Pierre Laporte. Those incidents pushed then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to invoke the War Measures Act, allowing for a military occupation and mass arrests. The October Crisis was the subject in Gilles Groulx's critical and confrontational documentary 24 heures ou plus. Dufour-Laperrière counts that film as an aesthetic and thematic influence, alongside Groulx's political coming-of-age drama The Cat in the Bag. He even cast Barbara Ulrich, who starred as seductive and restless young Montrealer in The Cat in the Bag, as the elderly wealthy woman confronting the young radical Hélène in Death Does Not Exist, achieving a circularity that's both eerie and poignant. For Dufour-Laperrière, invoking Canada's past is a way of reminding that radical violent action isn't a foreign concept. "Violence is happening everywhere in a lot of countries," he says, "and we're surprised in the Western world when it emerges." "I wanted to reflect on these issues, this radicality, but in modern days with a different crisis — social but ecological too — and mix it with a fantastic side that in my eyes illustrates the interior life of the characters." Image | DEATH DOES NOT EXIST Publicity Materials/9_LMNP_Enfant_fleurs.png Caption: A still from Death Does Not Exist (Félix Dufour-Laperrière) Open Image in New Tab At this point, I ask Dufour-Laperrière to consider the whole Cannes apparatus and its contradictions. The festival is hosting films that are touching on some of the most urgent crises of our time. They opened with "Ukraine Day," premiering three titles (Zelensky, Notre Guerre and 2000 Meters to Andriivka) about the war that has been raging for three years. They're also premiering Once Upon a Time in Gaza, a dark comedy about two brothers selling drugs out of a falafel shop in 2007; Yes, Israeli director Nadav Lapid's critical satire about a musician trying to compose a new national anthem after October 7; and Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a documentary about the lives lost to Israeli offensives in Gaza. The last one arrives in Cannes mired by a tragedy not originally contained in the film. Its main subject, 25-year-old photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, was killed along with 10 members of her family in an Israeli airstrike, just days after announcing her film will premiere at Cannes. While the festivals host these films, it also warns attendees attending to not make any political statements or wear such symbols on the red carpets and events. The stark opposition between Cannes trying to reflect and engage with the world at large in its programming while maintaining a comfortable, cozy and risk-averse decorum is at the heart of what Death Does Not Exist is about. "It's paradoxical being in a peaceful country," says Dufour-Laperrière. "I don't bear direct involvement in it. But there are some people that are directly touched — them and their families — with what's going on in the world. And I guess they should be necessarily allowed to express their concerns. And these concerns are often, as you say, quite tragic. "It's an impossible balance to find between the two. You can be moderate. But if the world isn't moderate, what are we going to do? Reality is unbearable for a lot of people."
