home
previous archive
January 23. Great piece by Cory Doctorow, AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. The most important bit is about "centaurs". With a regular centaur, the human is in charge and makes use of AI tools. That's good. With a reverse centaur, the machine is in charge and makes use of humans. That's bad, and it's happening more and more often. Doctorow's example is a delivery driver who is completely regulated and monitored, a "squishy meat appendage" for stuff the big machine can't do. There are a lot more good insights and you should read the whole thing.
Of course I disagree with him about images:
Here's what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, a poem, a painting, a drawing, a dance, a book or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind.
That's just rarely what actually happens. When I feel that as a writer, and when my readers feel like that, it's about different stuff. My top 20 R.E.M. songs and R.E.M.'s top 40 R.E.M. songs have only two songs in common. In the 90s I bought a painting from a friend, I love it and I've had it on my walls ever since, but I would be very surprised if my own feelings about it were a facsimile of his. What he talked about was the process of making it, how it came out of him so fast.
In literature the reader is encouraged to find meanings that the author did not intend, and I think images are the same way, and it's best to consider the making and the viewing as two separate events. AI cannot have the experience of making art. But if a person is looking at an image, they can totally have a "numinous, irreducible feeling" regardless of where the image came from. Otherwise you could reliably tell where it came from by looking for that feeling, and you can't.
Here's a quiz to tell the difference between human-made and AI-made images. This is often framed as AI vs "real", and this makes sense if AI is trying to fake a photograph. But human imaginative images are already unreal, and then the only question that matters is: Do you like it? I suggest taking the quiz with that question, "Do I like it?" instead of "Can I tell if this is AI so I know I'm not supposed to like it?" The key to navigating media in the age of AI is not counting fingers, it's taste. Only by exercising taste can you avoid being drowned in the rising sea of low-quality stuff, wherever it comes from.
I know there are social reasons to prefer human-made images to machine-made images, but those reasons are all because of capitalism and not technology. Under capitalism, it's important for artists to make money because you need money to not starve and die on the streets. If human artists are replaced with AI, those humans no longer deserve to live. In a more just system, humans replaced by machines would still get the money, but that's pretty complicated, so let's just declare the entire population to have already been replaced. With a guaranteed basic standard of living, people who want to do art can just do art -- or anything cheap that they enjoy doing. Whether or not machines can do it too, you can do your own thing and not have to try to wedge it into the cracks of commerce.
Back around to centaurs, a lot of human-made images are already in reverse centaur territory, where a human in a dreary office is required to make images that meet bland standards for mass distribution. I make videos like a regular centaur, by applying my inscrutable subjective taste to images that I outsource. I've done it with both human-made and AI-made images, and the process of pulling gems out of slop, and putting them in order, is exactly the same, and very satisfying. But with AI I get the additional fun of feedback, tweaking prompts to get the machine to do something I like.
These are my two best AI videos: Wireheads - Sonic Spaces Blues and The Garbage and the Flowers - Carousel
January 29. Is Life A Game? is a bad title for good article reviewing the book The Score by C Thi Nguyen. I would title it "How quantification ruins fun":
It's interesting, he writes, to see what happens when scores are introduced into activities where they've previously been absent. He finds, for instance, that scorekeeping has pushed skateboarders to focus more on obvious, badass tricks than on "steeze", or stylish ease, which is more difficult to quantify. He suggests that the advent of scores for wine has made bold, fruity wines more popular at the expense of subtler ones... The more we standardize our experience and stress goals over purposes, the less variety we cultivate.
February 3. I don't want to write about Trump and just say the obvious stuff. So here's something you don't hear every day: Trump is a scientist, and a good one. For his entire career, not just the presidency, he has been methodically doing experiments on human institutions and the human psyche, to see how they stand up to raw power. The most honest thing he ever said was during a debate with Hillary Clinton, where she accused him of tax evasion and he said something like "It was your job to stop me." That was Trump announcing to the world that he is beyond good and evil. He has the ethos of a fire or flood. ICE is not arresting the most dangerous immigrants, but the most compliant, for the same reason a flood fills in the lowest places first.
If it's our job to stop Trump, how are we doing? Imagine you're a teacher giving out letter grades. Around 30 percent of Americans are currently riding an F. With the long memory of the internet, it's going to be hard for anyone openly supporting the Minneapolis killings to walk it back. (And how weird is it that their names are Good and Pretti?) Europe gets a C for eventually standing up for Greenland. Congress and the Supreme Court might yet squeak out a D. If anyone gets an A it's the people quietly fighting in the courts.
The American media get a flat F. The experiment is how much naked power does it take for them to report it as naked power, and the answer is we don't know yet. Their expectation of normalcy has been Trump's number one ally, the fog of war of the supposedly unthinkable. They swallowed Trump's tale that Greenland is a buffer against Russia, when his actions have made it clear that Europe is his adversary and Russia is his uneasy ally. I used to think propaganda meant lying. Now I know that propaganda is saying stuff that's technically true while never saying the most obvious and important stuff.
Trump's obvious electoral strategy is to stir up enough trouble in the cities to cancel midterm elections. If he tries, the states will turn the tables: We're still having elections, try to stop us. MAGA will have to defend federal power over states rights, further pushing the experiment of how much cognitive dissonance the human brain can tolerate. We don't know yet.
Domestically, Trump doesn't have a lot of cards left to play, which is why he's focusing on Iran, and I appreciate the honesty of his foreign policy. No more iron fist in velvet glove, it's all iron fist, fuck you. If somebody goes nuclear, all bets are off. If not, I expect this to be over soon. Historians will surely say that America caught the same disease as Nazi Germany, but that we resisted it better. I know there are full-on concentration camps right now, but I am confident that Trump's eventual death toll will be less than one percent of Hitler's death toll, unless you count the global poor killed by canceling USAID.
I'm confident because I live in the city. If you don't live in an American city, you might have the idea, from the news, that we're all delicate intelligentsia and gutter trash. What I see are tens of thousands of competent, determined, and cheerful people. Even the homeless are tougher than ICE, give them guns and you'll find out. This feels to me like a very slow mass shooting. The shooter is inside the building, he has the upper hand at the moment, and he's not finished. But he can't win, that's not how this works.
February 13. Today, 2025 films. There were two sprawling political thrillers, both technically well made by respected writer-directors. Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another grossed over 200 million, got rave reviews, and will probably win Best Picture. It is Hollywood bullshit. Ari Aster's Eddington grossed under 14 million, got middling reviews, and no Oscar nominations. It was the best film of the year.
Sean Penn will probably win best supporting actor for playing the villainous Colonel Lockjaw, and it really is great acting. But that character, like every character in One Battle After Another, is a cartoon with zero moral complexity. Meanwhile, Joaquin Phoenix in Eddington, and Jesse Plemons in Bugonia, got snubbed for awards by playing complex and fully human red tribe characters.
I'm avoiding the words right and left, but Eddington gave me a sense of how a person might be tagged as "right" for finding what passes for the "left" unbearable: cringey teens and politicians who are tools of big money. Also, Eddington is tagged as a satire, but what I see is authenticity. Reality itself is absurd, especially political reality, and any work of fiction that shows it accurately will seem satirical, while any work of fiction that plays it completely seriously will be propaganda.
Some other 2025 films. Most overrated: Frankenstein, which is flat out just a superhero movie, with great set design, total bullshit dialogue, and they even gave the monster super powers. Most underrated: Rabbit Trap, 4.8 on IMDB but it's a solid 7, a weird horror/art film about fairyland. Most enjoyable: Companion, a comedy thriller about a weaponized sexbot. Least enjoyable: Marty Supreme, in which Timothee Chalamet plays the most unlikeable protagonist of all time -- even Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler was admirable for being cool-headed. Best horror film and second best film of the year: Bring Her Back.
February 16. Last year I mentioned a severe AI personality called Absolute Mode. That's Keith's blog post on it, and this is his latest post about wrangling with ChatGPT to actually do it. What I think I understand, is that it is possible, but somewhat difficult, to give an AI a custom personality. If so, this is going to be huge. I mean the whole bubble might pop any day, but if not, someone is going to make a lot of money from slicing and packaging chatbot personalities for mass consumption. Give me a sassy bitch. Give me a Klingon. Give me a golden retriever. Or maybe we won't go down that road because too many people want to talk to a cult leader.
Isn't it funny how talking computers turned out? In old-time sci-fi, they're rational, robotic, precise, and never wrong. Instead, they're like goofy sidekicks, offering encouragement and ideas, but clumsy and unreliable. We thought we were getting the Professor and we got Gilligan.
February 20. Woo-woo links. New theory proposes that consciousness is the universe's foundation, not atoms. Yeah, this is not a new theory, and this version doesn't go far enough. They're thinking, first there's the universal field of consciousness, then there's the big bang, galaxies, stars, the earth, humans, the brain, and finally you. I'm thinking, first there's the universal consciousness, then there's you, a fragment or aspect of the universal. Then there's your environment, which is not there until you pull it out of the infinite range of possibilities into this specific thing: humans, the earth, the sky. Then, out of the still wide range of possibilities for the sky, we pull out stars, galaxies, and finally the big bang. Just one step back and we could have an eternal universe in which quasars are spat out of galaxies like seeds.
This is the best NDE thread I've seen on Ask Reddit, People who have died briefly, what did you hear, see, and feel?
Getting weirder, a sub-thread from a thread about unbelievable experiences, with several reports of flipping reality instead of dying.