AI-Written Stereophile Articles

A high school friend of mine who went to Harvard and eventually became head of the Clemson psychology department once told me that grade inflation was in his mind much more serious than economic inflation.

@mike4597 + 1

I occasionally watch YouTube celebrity biography and history videos. My wife and I laugh at the obvious A.I. generated narration which mispronounces names often and not in accordance with any foreign living person would do to the English language.

As to audio reviews, nearly all are positive and they are often subtle in their negative observations. Combine that with system synergy issues, acoustics and music selection for reviews, I cannot rely on reviews. I have to hear the equipment in my system. I attend audio shows where I have found phenomenally great sounding systems despite the acoustic and electrical limitations. Those were a few great systems. I also met a great distributor and dealer who understands and shares my preference for acoustical music reproduction first. My current audio system is based on use of his recommendations that didn’t cost me $1+ million but sounds close at 15% or $150,000 the cost. My best friend’s system which is just as satisfying if lower in resolution costing 15% of that, or $22,500. We have both have Von Schwiekert speakers.

AI is only a bandage for a slow decay in our education system. My wife is a graduate of one of the more better (see what I did there) journalism schools in the country. She has both taught English and worked for major associations as a writer/editor and marketing chief.

I, on the other hand am not nearly as skillful with language. Perhaps a minor excuse is that English is not my first language. I have spoken it almost exclusively since about 7 years old. I am pretty good at parroting so I can get by (usually) without embarrassing myself. My marriage to her has significantly improved my skill in regard to language use as can be attested to by the slap marks on my wrists.

To the point, she currently writes and edits a monthly for a professional trade publication. She has to edit, and many times re-write articles submitted by engineers. As nonoise mentioned about "educated idiots", Too many of them are excellent engineers but are unable to write coherent sentences.

I recall reading something many years ago to the effect that current college graduates don't have near the command of language of high school graduates of yore when working as secretaries. Excuse me, administrative assistants.

Perhaps we need to blow up the teacher's unions and start over. Less DEI, or as I like to refer to it, DIE and more of the three R's.

I attended a University of California campus (UC Davis, formerly the University Farm) in the 1960s.  All incoming freshmen had to take a Subject A English exam; if you failed the exam, you had to take a 3-hour one-semester course in remedial English that earned zero graduation credits for an additional fee.  If I recall correctly, about 35% of the freshmen—the top 10% of California high school graduates—failed the exam.  Again, If I recall correctly, by the 1980s the failure rate was over 50%, and I read reports that they eventually dropped the requirement.  This would indicate a failure in our elementary and secondary education system, but serious problems exist in higher education, as well.  I have read in a reputable source that at one of the Ivy League Universities, you can earn a BA in History without taking any American History.  When I was a freshman, all students in the College of Letters and Sciences had to take History 17A&B, two semesters of American History.  My suspicion is that as colleges and universities have added a wide range of new and at times narrowly-defined degrees in functional fields, they have jettisoned many of the basics.  

Finally, after receiving my BA in History, I earned my MA in Political Science.  When I started those graduate courses, I was very concerned that I did not know all the Poli Sci jargon, but I quickly found out that the younger students did not know their history, one student at the school even insisting that the U.S. started the Korean War in 1950 by attacking North Korea, an absurd position even before we learned from Soviet archives that Stalin gave Kim Il Sung the go-ahead to attack the South.  One of my best professors taught a course on revolution and change in the 20th century, an excellent examination of the Bolshevik, Italian Fascist, and Nazi seizures of power; by the 1980s, however, he wrote me that the most of the students just wanted to know “how to make bombs.”
 

Ignorance, and mindless activism in many cases, is bliss … at least to some.