Shells

Week Five: Shells — Aesthetics

[ ENG 6806 // FALL 2026 // WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 ]

ChatGPT Images, September 2026: templates for poster, logo, illustration, headshot, product photo, and merch

Demsky's Midjourney image for the prompt the avengers by Jan van Eyck, December 14, 2022: four figures in Flemish dress, one in an Iron Man helmet

The same prompt regenerated in September 2026: five figures in a Flemish interior, including a green-armored knight, a red-cloaked woman, and Iron Man

Left: Demsky, Midjourney prompt “the avengers by Jan van Eyck” (December 14, 2022). Right: the same prompt, Midjourney v8.2 (September 2026)

Variety headline: Warner Bros. Joins Studios' AI Copyright Battle Against Midjourney, by Gene Maddaus, September 4, 2025, with two Midjourney-generated Superman images from the WB lawsuit

The Art Newspaper headline: Midjourney strikes back: sued AI giant demands Hollywood's secrets. According to a recent court filing, the company is adamant that Disney, Universal and Warner Bros reveal their internal use of artificial intelligence. By Daniel Grant, 9 July 2026

Maddaus, “Warner Bros. Joins Studios’ AI Copyright Battle Against Midjourney,” Variety, Sept. 4, 2025 · Grant, “Midjourney strikes back: sued AI giant demands Hollywood’s secrets,” The Art Newspaper, July 9, 2026

A painterly Batman seated in shadow beside a cluster of lit candles on the floor, head bowed, cape pooled around him

Midjourney prompt “batman, brooding, candlelight” (v8.2, September 2026)

Two men in suits, one beige and one red, seated at a small table on the edge of a swimming pool under a flat blue sky, a white dog reflected in the water below

Midjourney prompt “the open happens in the midst of being by nicolas de stael and bo bartlett and david hockney” (v8.2, September 2026)

WIRED headline: OpenAI Just Claimed a Huge Math Discovery. Some Academics Are Crying Foul. A landmark announcement by the frontier AI lab has been overshadowed by accusations of impropriety. By Will Knight and Maxwell Zeff, September 8, 2026

Knight and Zeff, “OpenAI Just Claimed a Huge Math Discovery. Some Academics Are Crying Foul,” WIRED, Sept. 8, 2026

WIRED headline: One of AI's Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is 'Meant to Distract Us'. Timnit Gebru argues that AI companies are stoking fears of extinction to avoid discussing actual harms, like autonomous weapons. By Lauren Goode, September 11, 2026

Goode, “One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’,” WIRED, Sept. 11, 2026

Gebru on the 'math fight': why are companies heavily investing in solving math problems? Subjects like programming, chess, and math were elevated to mean that solving them solves intelligence. The story OpenAI wants you to hear is that this AI did an incredible thing and is super intelligent. The Leiden Declaration warns about mathematics being used by corporations this way; the time from a claimed AI breakthrough to Bernie Sanders proposing a bill is really short

Goode, “One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’,” WIRED, Sept. 11, 2026

Gebru on the Anthropic engineer's resignation: 'Can a bridge decide to collapse?' When a bridge collapses you ask who built it to be so flimsy, not whether it was sentient. What's really existential is AI powering autonomous weapons, climate catastrophe, and bosses using AI to get rid of workers; the machine-god narrative is meant to distract us from these. The industry has become a mix of cults and true believers

Goode, “One of AI’s Fiercest Critics Says All the Doom Talk Is ‘Meant to Distract Us’,” WIRED, Sept. 11, 2026

Melanie Mitchell, Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks: What To Fear from AI Agents and How to Reclaim Our Human Agency, September 10, 2026. The Metaphors: Wired reported OpenAI 'lost control of two AI models'; the New York Times said 'rogue agents had created their own message board' and 'the swarm broke out of its cage again'; the notion of AI as an existential threat has once again blanketed the news cycle

Mitchell, “Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks,” AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Substack), Sept. 10, 2026

Mitchell, AI Agents and Human Agency: OpenAI's vision is an arms race in which good AI fights bad AI, presented as inevitable. But what if the public had some agency? Many people want AI not to replace us but to act as tools for augmenting our own intelligence: interpretable systems whose architecture, weights, and training data are open to examination, tested by independent evaluators, with companies held accountable

Mitchell, “Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks,” AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Substack), Sept. 10, 2026

Mitchell: these proposals might slow progress, but many have asked for a forced slowdown; safe, useful models can be built if we trade the quest for AGI or superintelligence for interpretability, transparency, and concern for the environment. Most challenging of all, it would require reimagining what AI is: leaving behind 'rogue AI agents', perhaps abandoning the project of AI alignment, and embracing AI's role as a set of tools to enhance human thriving

Mitchell, “Misleading Metaphors and Real Risks,” AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Substack), Sept. 10, 2026

Mitchell, Chapter 13: Ask Me Anything, with the Star Trek Data quote on humor and question-answering systems

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Star Trek 'Hello, Computer' meme

Mitchell on the understanding limits of Siri and Alexa

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Mitchell on Watson and Jeopardy, with Ken Jennings's 'human loser' quote

Sample Jeopardy answer clues from Mitchell's Watson discussion

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Mitchell, Chapter 14: On Understanding, with Hofstadter's 'barrier of meaning' quote

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Mitchell on common sense and the Allen Institute for AI

Nature article on DeepSeek-R1

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Mitchell, Chapter 16: Questions, Answers, and Speculations, opening with Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Mitchell's Q&A: Will AI result in massive unemployment for humans?

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Mitchell's Q&A: How terrified should we be about AI? citing Hofstadter and Kurzweil

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Mitchell's Q&A on unsolved AI problems, closing 'as a thinking human'

Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans — Part V: The Barrier of Meaning

Noble describes the UN Women 'genuine Google searches' campaign

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

UN Women ad: a woman's mouth covered by the Google autocomplete 'women shouldn't'

UN Women ad: a woman's mouth covered by the Google autocomplete 'women cannot'

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

Chapter title page: A Society, Searching, from Algorithms of Oppression

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

Noble, page 24 quote and the Figure 1.9 caption

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

Noble quotes Alex Halavais on search engines as an 'object of faith'

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

Noble on Cathy O'Neil's Weapons of Math Destruction

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

Noble: 'In the ensuing chapters, I continue to probe...'

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

Noble, 'The Importance of Google' section text

Noble, Algorithms of Oppression — A Society, Searching

Photorealistic generated image: a massive saucer-shaped spaceship hovers over the UCF campus mall with landing beams lit, palm trees on either side, students walking toward the UCF Student Union

Midjourney prompt “the UCF campus mall with a spaceship landing, photorealistic” (v8.2, September 2026)