The Whitewashing of Jazz (a dream that seems like an LLM)

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This was a very short dream, but it helped crystalize some thoughts I have had about the mechanisms of dreams.

The dream was essentially a documentary / article arguing against the recent whitewashing of Jazz. I am not a person who listens to a lot of Jazz. I am not deep into the history of Jazz. I do not know if Jazz is being whitewashed in the way the dream described, however this is what the dream was about.

When I say it was a short dream I mean just that I remember very little of it, so it may have been long. The parts I remember was that the whitewashing of Jazz was the whitewashing of its history, that “white people” (which ones were never explained) were rewriting the history of Jazz to minimize black involvement in its origins and making white contributors to Jazz more prominent.

There was a picture of an article in a publication that seemed very Atlantic-like, and the top image in the article was a picture of a guy who looked sort of like Richard Pryor, meaning that he had Pryor’s slick hair look and a similar mustache. It was a black and white image, but it was supposed to be modern. The guy was standing behind some large steel girders giving a speech (this was on stage, there was an audience), the girders were actually part of an art project. I knew they were part of an art project in the dream, but the knowledge was rather diffuse.

Evidently this guy was a prominent critic of the whitewashing of Jazz, and a “noted academic”.

The dream, being a documentary, of course had a voice-over, reading something that was probably the text of the article, and this is pretty much the only other thing I remember other than the image and the general theme, the text it read was about the general historical complexion (color that is) of Jazz and it seemed as if the Onion was satirizing The New York Times style, because it used a few too many synonyms for rich brown in a row.

And this is really where my thoughts about Dreams crystallized. I have noted this before where the dreaming mind seems to make something up to cover its ass.

I don’t know if an LLM will every achieve a General AI, but it seems that dreams can best be described as a number of LLMs working somewhat together but not perfectly in sync. Sometimes the “text” LLM gets ahead of the graphics LLM and generates something that the graphics LLM needs to cover, sometimes the graphics generates something wildly out of sync with what the text has been working on, a “hallucination”, and the text needs to veer off in a weird direction to explain what the dreaming mind is seeing.

I suppose actually 3 components would describe it, the dreaming mind which interprets what it sees and hears, and picks out parts that it considers important from these LLMs to pass between them. Thus the graphics LLM can produce something that does not make lots of sense for the “text” part but if the dreaming mind does not take it and say “hey text LLM, run with this interpretation I have of what I am seeing” then it gets ignored and then when you wake up later you are weirded out because you remember that part of the dream which totally does not make any sense.

Some Notes

Just googled the phrase “Whitewashing of Jazz” evidently it is a thing, which makes sense it would be, but on the other hand I didn’t have any particular knowledge of this thing.

It should also be noted this sort of LLM generation of dreams would explain how you are able to tell if you are in a dream by focusing on particular things, just as you are able to often determine that something was made by generative AI in either graphics of text based on “tells”.

I have tried to find something on Lucid Dreaming and AI, but everything seems to be about Apps to induce lucid dreaming.

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