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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.