Secret Strategy Meeting With Chicago Teachers Union Brass and French Rioters Confirms Conspiracy | Stephen Kruiser, PJ Media A secretly taped video meeting between American teachers union brass in Chicago and the French communist revolutionaries tearing Paris apart confirms what we've long said about Antifa and other revolutionary communist groups causing violence and mayhem from Portland to Sweden: they're connected and part of a conspiracy. Karlyn Borysenko, a researcher and content creator who holds a PhD in industrial and organizational psychology, "infiltrated and recorded" a video meeting between Chicago teachers union leaders that "actively coordinat[ed] with the unions in France," including union vice president Jackson Potter. The call coordinating and strategizing with rioters was a "call of solidarity" that pumped up the rioters to foment more violence. Borysenko says the unionists alluded to previous meetings between the two groups in France. Union officials and students spoke with counterparts in France to strategize. The teachers in the USA are actively coordinating with the unions in France. These are the things Alex Jones will never show you, because they didn't mention working with Muslims (they actually made fun of that idea a few times). The truth matters. Here are the primary source receipts. The Chicago Teachers Union and school nurse Dennis Kossuth, who said that everything nice in the U.S. was done by people "rising up" and not "the 1%," initiated the call. About Time: French Police Are Doing to Antifa Rioters What We've All Been Dreaming About for Years He explained that there's an "international system" that "wants to put the needs of the 1% over the needs of the 99%." The French protest on Saturday showed that "We outnumber them." he said. I don't know about you, but do you suppose Occupy Wall Street Part Infinity is about to launch in America? Sounds like it. And apparently it will include bloodshed this time, not just rape tents and whackos next time around. Union VP Potter called for "solidarity with our siblings in France" over the rise of "extreme of right wing populism in the United States" — that's you and me. Potter mocked Mississippi test scores outperforming other states and posed this non sequitur: "what they don't tell you is that they have the highest informant [sic] mortality in the nation." He went on to deride kicking fraudsters off healthcare programs as "denying people food assistance." "[W]hat France is showing us, and others, Spain, and Belgium, when we build deeper, broader movements for the common good" that change can be made," Potter added The French participants were graying men, middle-aged union instructors, and aging college students. Three younger French students, presumably high school students, eventually showed up in the stream to urge revolution or something. The spokeswoman was speaking rapid French. A man said the police brutalized rioters during arrest, not mentioning whether injuries resulted from resisting and fighting with law enforcement. Perhaps the most quotable was Caitlyn Savato, a Chicago native, "community organizer," and college student at the University of Southern California. She told the French students and professional protesters on the call that the U.S. must fall in order for there to be "freedom" for all. She said rioters needed to decide if they were willing to kill or be killed. Sounds like incitement. Our challenge will be getting people to move the way that you all are moving in France. It will be getting people completely destructive and to allow our fellow Americans to understand that in order for there to be freedom; in order for there to exist liberation, in order for their to exist the things that we now need — the things that they're now targeting in our own humanities; in order for us to receive those things, the United States government must fall. There must be destruction to the material world that they built. There must be a willing [sic] to kill and be killed — all of the things that the Black Liberation movements have taught Americans for years. ...[I]t is now time to engage in that understanding that it is a matter of life and death and it is the matter of what you are willing to do and what you are willing to die for. She doesn't care about what she'll do after college as much as she cares that USC gives her the tools for "revolution." Can someone DM the admissions folks over at USC and have a word? She told the French rioters that she felt all Americans are part of the bourgeoisie and "need to be reflecting on the efforts of you all in France [including] what are we physically willing to engage in? It is the physical and material of society that is sustaining the American Empire." Conspiracy: The Real Target of the Paris Riots Comes Into Focus — and It's Not 'School Funding' We're ruining everything in the world, she concluded. The group promised a wild 2028 May Day; that's the communist high holy day. Lots of bashed-in Starbucks windows, looting, and Bank of America ATMs smashed up as acts of worship. Borysenko says the discussion alluded to previous meetings between Chicago teachers union members in France to coordinate unionist riots. As I pointed out in The Real Target of the Paris Riots Comes Into Focus — and It's Not 'School Funding,' this isn't about dissatisfaction with schools anymore, if it ever was. To call it seditious conspiracy or insurrection might be an understatement. Some of the worldwide unrest is coordinated by an organization in Sweden. I talked with independent reporter Christian Peterson, who detailed that organization. He's also responsible for tracking down the founders of Portland's Rose City Antifa hiding in Sweden. This is no coincidence. Read more: pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/20…

AI is creating a 'human premium' for art created by people | Ros Atkins, BBC A few weeks back, in a former bank building that's now a music venue in Falmouth, Cornwall, I was DJ-ing at a night I run called Rave Machine. It was a noisy, high-energy, sweaty affair, just as a night's dancing should be. All of the elements - the crowd, performers, staff, music, the journey home - connected to create something special, a one-off. It was also completely human. Something, in theory, well out of reach of what technology could possibly offer. In the DJ world, though, technology has already changed the equation. In the 1990s, a DJ had to not only pick the tracks, but also thread them together armed only with vinyl records, a pair of turntables and a mixer. Now, much more assistance is on offer, including software that will sync beats on different tracks should you ask it to (I don't). Apple Music and Spotify have an AI tune-mixing option too. If you were out dancing, would it matter to you if a DJ was, well, not really DJing? If you loved the music being played, would you care if technology was doing the work? It's a question that generative AI - the type of AI that creates content - is asking of us all. One of the thrills of that night in Falmouth was seeing our special guest, Andy Cato from Groove Armada, artfully weaving an array of tracks. How would I feel if a DJ was just pressing play? (And that does happen). I mention all of this because that experience in Falmouth connects to a far broader question: whether we actually care if a piece of art has been created by a human, be that a painting, song, book, poem, or any other type of art. Renaissance frescoes and chess champions The music platform Deezer says 44% of tracks uploaded to it are AI-generated. Its research also found that 97% of listeners couldn't tell what was AI-generated and what wasn't. But here's a third statistic: more than half of those surveyed said they did care if it was made by AI. They want humans to be involved. Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King's College London, says many of us place huge value on the human role in making art. It's what makes the creative process different from more functional, practical tasks, he thinks. "I was once in a room of accountants, and one of them stood up and said, 'My clients come to me for the personal touch, the human process'," he remembers. "And I said, 'That isn't why they come to you, they come because they want their taxes done properly'." But it's different with art, he says. "If I walk into the Sistine Chapel and look at the ceiling, I think not only is that extraordinarily beautiful, but isn't it amazing that a human hand, flesh and blood like my own, came up with that. A mind like mine dreamt that up," he says. As Susskind describes it, what we value isn't just the destination, it's the knowledge that a human - one of us - got us there. We can wonder at that achievement. Of course, it could be argued that computers and AI software were themselves created by humans. If Susskind feels awe walking into the Sistine Chapel, others might experience awe of a different type using a chatbot like ChatGPT. Susskind points to another example, this time a chess match in 1997, when a world champion, Garry Kasparov, lost for the first time to a computer, Deep Blue. At the time, there were fears the computer's success would mean our interest in chess would wane. In fact, chess is more popular than ever, played by millions. "It wasn't simply the moves on the board that people care about. It's the fact that it's a human being sitting behind them, moving those pieces along that matters," Susskind argues. And some think that the advent of AI has actually placed extra value on things created by people. You might call that a human premium. Human touch Kyle Chayka, a journalist at The New Yorker focused on technology, says AI writing is now widely considered to be "generic, obsequious and banal". As a result, he says, "I think readers are coming to value very obviously personal writing, and maybe even writing that's messier, less structurally sound or composed or perfected, than they maybe once would've desired." Chayka goes on: "I think illustration and graphic design is going in the same direction, where the average is too easily accessible, and so designers are leaning into being weirder and more eye-catching and more unusual, trying to find things that AI can't generate so easily." In response to the surge in AI-created content, academics are racing to develop a universally recognised symbol to denote something that is "human made" (similar to the "Fairtrade" label that emerged in the 1980s). Labels like "AI-free" are already appearing on covers of some books, films, and albums. For C Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah, it's a question of our underlying values. He says you can often work out your values by following what he calls a "why chain". If you like something or want to do something, ask "why?". If the answer is to make money or be successful, keep asking 'why?' When the process ends, that will be what you really value, he explains. The question, he says, is whether human involvement and shared human experience will keep its place at the end of the "why chain". Author John Lanchester is optimistic. He thinks the value of what only humans can do will prevail. In fact, he sympathises with the idea of a 'human premium'. "If you commodify one kind of thing, the things you can't commodify start to seem more important," he tells me. The algorithmic loop All of that might sound heartening for people hoping that humans will remain central to the creation of culture. But I'm not so sure. The amount of AI-generated content is increasing so quickly that we may soon struggle to distinguish what has or hasn't involved AI. You may well have seen coverage of the AI 'actor' Tilly Norwood, made last year by a company that bills itself as the world's "first AI talent studio". The Screen Actors Guild in the US was not impressed. "It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion, and, from what we've seen, audiences aren't interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience," they wrote. I'm not saying AI will replace actors - of course not. But what feels untethered and strange now, may not, in some situations, feel so strange in time. It's also worth remembering that long before Large Language Models went mainstream, we'd already allowed technology to shape our cultural tastes. As recently as the 2000s, we still sought out lots of the culture we consumed. We'd buy a book, a cinema ticket, an album. Sometimes we still do. But increasingly, culture just arrives - in an endless stream, sorted and served by an algorithm that is constantly predicting our tastes. At first glance, this sounds convenient. The work's being done for us. But as the role of the algorithm goes up, so the role of humans goes down. "There's the mythical figure of your big brother's friend or something, who passes on good music taste to you," says Chayka, whose book Filterworld explores the impacts of algorithms on culture. "And now we rely on algorithmic recommendations to do that same thing for us. To introduce us to new things." I recognise this from my own habits. Back in the 1990s, when I started collecting dance music, I'd find new music through record shops and recommendations from people I trusted. I can still do that, and do. But these days the algorithm's doing a lot of that work for me - and it can be really helpful. I'll find tunes I wouldn't have discovered otherwise. To an extent, I am letting technology guide me. Chayka thinks algorithms have made us lazy, and "prevent us from going deeper" in our cultural taste. Sometimes we might find a piece of art that requires work - a long, difficult book, perhaps, or a weird-seeming movie. "It might alienate us initially, but eventually it inspires us," Chayka says. "I think that kind of culture has fallen by the wayside in favour of culture as content to consume that's not going to change your life, it's just going to turn your brain off for a few hours." And it's a self-reinforcing loop; creators adapt their work as they seek out the attention the algorithm can provide. And here's the key point: this shift - to discovering culture via algorithms - is one we've already largely accepted. So when AI starts making books, films, and music in large numbers - might we just shrug and accept that too? Calculator backlash Back in 1986, in Washington DC, protesting teachers lined the streets outside a convention centre. They weren't angry about their wages or budget cuts. In this case, the object of their ire was the calculator. Maths teacher John Saxon had taken up the cause. "The kids are not learning their math facts because they're becoming calculator hooked," he proclaimed. " If they had given me a black box, I wouldn't know that… six times eight's 48 'cause it rhymes, and seven times nine is 63 'cause it does not." We all have our ways of remembering times tables. Needless to say, this is an argument that Saxon lost. But some of those arguments feel familiar. Of course, some things are definitely out of range of technology, at least for now. Think of my sweaty DJ night in Falmouth a few weeks ago, with 250 other ravers. Alex Mahon says she's noticed an uptick in appreciation for in-person experiences like these - perhaps as a backlash to the amount of our lives now spent on a smartphone screen. She's chief executive of Superstruct Entertainment, one of the world's leading festival and live entertainment groups. "People want to go to more live things," she says. "They want to have things that are unforeseeable… unpredictable. The special moment is live. The excitement, the discovery is hearing it in person with others." In the case of culture, when is it OK to outsource to technology, and when is it not? The more I look at this, the less I'm sure we can assume what choices we'll make. Each of us will have to decide when it matters if something is made by a human. bbc.com/news/articles/c5vgjm…