hell is other people (11. 859)

With apologies to Sartre, we learn from Web Curios’ lede link that a new social media platform has been launched that’s either a withering piece of metacommentary on personal branding and curation or actual hell. As the main (and only) character, one can create a private place for announcing status updates, “reflect, post, feel heard,” like one’s daily diary except with an infinite host of generative followers, tailored either as fans, foes, trolls, cheerleaders, haters, etc. While having a personal sounding board may be helpful sometimes for those feeling lonely or isolated, it’s too easy to conflate regurgitation with connection and seems to be the realisation of the Dead Internet Theory. This does not seem like a market place of ideas, nor constructive feedback and only contributes to the echo-chamber and tribalism. More at the links above, including this user’s perspective of the experience.

rough draft (11. 849)

The note taking app (I wonder a bit about the necessity and utility of this feature in the first place) introduced by Google this past year has an experimental mode that will generate a podcast hosted by a pair 

of interlocutors which will summarise one’s project and research material and help one brainstorm and make connections through “banter and back and forth,” with documents and sketch that one primes and prompts it with. At first I thought I wouldn’t subscribe to such an idea (no one asked for this, artificial intelligence should solve our big problems rather that make them more granular) given the limits of triangulation and the recourse to standard essay-structure of generative text but maybe this Audio Overview has some potential for reflection and insight, especially if one could tweak the hosts to the style of their favoured podcasters (to steer away from the doctrinaire and outright propaganda) and be consistent over several iterations.

7x7 (11. 830)

cat lives matter: US vice presidential candidate JD Vance propagating false and inflammatory rumours about migrants abducting and eating family pets 

beany leeky greens with greeky rampy beans: recipes and foodways becoming a bit less twee, more straightforward—via tmn  

an agony, in eight fits: James Earl Jones (RIP) reads Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark  

may the gods give you everything you asked for: backhanded benedictions and predictions about what AI does next 

 esh: how AITA took over the internet

a melodrama in three acts: Five Star Finale and other pre-code screenplay original sources  

crowd size: Harris-Walz campaign advertisement airing on Fox News

 synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: silphium, more on the Voynich Manuscript plus a visit to Trump’s ancestral home

eight years ago: Birobidzhan oblast,  fantasy doubles tennis plus the 1970 movie The Phynx

nine years ago: more links to enjoy 

ten years ago: WWI periodicals a century on 

schnelling points (11. 816)

Humans have a seemingly uncanny knack for solving complex coordination problems when communication and prior planning is limited by uncovering the shared cultural or knowledge-based default in a such situation, concerting the intentions and expectations and land on the above foci, named after economist and game-theorist Thomas Schelling. 

Cooperative experiments demonstrate that a team of individuals acting towards shared end will pick the same time and place for a rendezvous. Part of the allure of AI models is that they seem also quite good at coordination problems—from predictive text, to routine emails to proofreading to peer-review, insofar as they have been trained on the social norms that we draw on as well to achieve a common goal. Artificial intelligence has a worse track record when it comes to something genuinely innovative or unprecedented, and moreover may erode the implicit social bargain that underpins cooperative efforts. The routine is also ritual and outsourcing them, like the above onerous tasks, dulls not only the refining practise when it comes to composing an email—which is also the author’s assessment of their audience—but of course lands as disingenuous and meritless when one can’t be bothered to dash off a good reference or buy someone a gift that was not generated by algorithm. What do you think? We’ve always been taking short-cuts but subverting ceremony altogether seems more serious. More from Henry Farrell at the link above.

9x9 (11. 814)

unpodcasted: one hundred ninety nine ideas about etymologies, idioms and eponyms that Helen Zaltzman has not produced an episode for—yet  

book club: Oprah Winfrey’s upcoming special on Artificial Intelligence with Sam Altman, Bill Gates and other AI-evangelists has critics of the tech sector up in arms  

blue chip index: Intel’s earnings slump could see it removed from the Dow, possibly putting a wrench in plans to increase US domestic manufacturing

sleepy grendel’s mother: Beotrump by Christopher Douglas  

jevons paradox: even if autonomous vehicles worked perfectly, they will still lead to more pollution, congestion and accidents—see previously—via tmn  

oslo—is it even a city: a wonderful bit of anti-advertising for the Norwegian capital plus more news and jokes 

intel inside: Pentium microprocessor as Navajo weaving—via Waxy 

nanowrimo: the organisation behind National Novel Writing Month criticised over labelling aversion to generative texts as classist and ableist 

unblogged: fellow flâneur Diamon Geezer lists a month’s worth of explorations not posted

 synchronoptica

one year ago: The Eye of the Tiger (with synchronoptica),  Kenneth Anger’s first film plus hot labour summer

seven years ago: the Little Ben of Victoria station

eight years ago: a visit to Churfrankenland plus an ant colony thriving in nuclear waste

nine years ago: assorted links to revisit plus algorithmic eavesdropping

eleven years ago: Germany votes plus pirate patches

9x9 (11. 807)

city corridor: Metropolitan Museum of Art to exhibit the built and unbuilt visions of architect Paul Rudolph—see previously  

move over miss marple: German television mystery series imagines what the former Chancellor is doing with her retirement 

batteries not included: peruse the complete catalogues of Radio Shack produced over its six decades of business—plus this theme song 

mizzenmast: experimental solar sail prepares for its first voyage—see previously 

a copy of a copy: AI’s synthetic data is its downfall—via Damn Interesting’s Curated Links  

marshmallow test: the heuristic for delayed gratification and executive functions is fraught with bias and harmful assumptions—via Hyperallergic  

preowned platform: IKEA launches a second-hand marketplace to become a circular company within the decade—via Nag on the Lake  

substantially worse than random chance: seemingly counterintuitive probability puzzles are perplexing social media—see previously  

cerceri d’invenzione: the aesthetic and romance of imagining ruins of foregone civilisations

s01:ep01 flutes & horses (11. 774)

Via ibīdem, we are treated to the pilot for AI or Die—with wholly generated video segments narrated likely by a team of human comedy writers, a sort of imprompt sketch show I guess. And while there’s some off-putting moments of AI body horror to be endured, there’s some funny moments—particularly with Watermelon Wednesdays and Tommy G, master flautist whose instrument sounds more like a saxophone. Filled with non-sequiturs and what’s approaching “yes and”-ing, it’s a bit reminiscent of classic Adult Swim or Liquid Television.

anti-mimesis (11. 771)

Via Meanwhile, we thoroughly enjoyed perusing this gallery of images curated by Jonathan Hoefler (previously here and here) of actual instances of images that would now be mistook—absent other context or familiarity—as telling AI-generated missteps.
These pictures uncannily prevision the now acquainted superfluidity, reduplication, skewed perspectives, a-historicity, attention-grabbing and portrait-studio aesthetic that’s a buggy feature of computer-made art. What do you think it means that this thinking is becoming our default reaction? A picture broadly does not seem worth a thousand words any longer.  Much more at the links above.

*    *    *    *    *

 synchronoptica

one year ago: greenlighted (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: Trump’s very fine people plus manipulative social media

eight years ago: the stave church of Goslar, early hominids and tolerance for smoke, safety and Helvetica Man plus assorted links worth revisiting

nine years ago: rent parties plus more links to enjoy

ten years ago: writers protest against the book market, the future of shopping plus the unfair labelling of weeds

a maximal truth-seeking ai (11. 764)

The social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has introduced a new feature for its chatbot, Grok—for premium subscribers—a text-to-image generator comparable to Bing’s service (which would rather infamous refuse the prompt “please make me a picture with the winner of 2020 US presidential election) or Facebook’s but apparently with the safety protocols turned off. Whilst users can find boilerplate guidelines and guardrails, presented in the first-person, proffering caution when it comes to making deceptive, provocative or plagiarised pictures, a cursory trial yielded some messages surely none would endorse. Though all tinged by that particular, cutting-corners AI patina that’s far from a watermark, a trial yielded far more offensive and topical content ready to be shared.

ῑ̓χώρ (11. 757)

Pathologically-speaking, the antiquated term for watery discharge, especially with an offensive odour, was deliberately given in negative connotations by early Christian writers to dispel the last vestiges of pagan veneration for the old gods by turning the ethereal fluid that flows in the veins of the immortals of mythology into something foul and corrupt. Classically ichor was understood to be the blood of the Olympians and—unlike the blood of Christ—was deadly toxic to humans if they came in contact with it. A Cretan myth, later appropriated by the Greeks in the Colossus of Rhodes, told of a giant bronze automaton made by Hephaestus at Zeus’ request to protect Europa and the island from invaders and pirates, this sentinel called Talos circling the shores three times a day, lobbing boulders at approaching ships. The robot was powered by a single circuit vein that ran from its head to its ankle filled with ichor, and was eventually defeated by Jason and the Argonauts with the help of Medea, who told them to unscrew the retaining plug at the base and exsanguinate it. In modern Greek, ichor is also used for the words gravy and naphtha, an older term for petroleum, probably due to the belief it was a by-product of decaying giants.

13x13 (11. 744)

hot clipmalabor summer: a Scots language translation of the latest trend 

the pudding: AI makes a data-driven visual story—via Kottke  

désolé! taking a mental health year: American vs European out-of-office auto-replies  

the paris games: a look back at the other times the French capital hosted the Olympics—via Nag on the Lake

faustian bargain: Russian “Tiergarten Killer” released as part of prisoner-swap 

the lord house: a tour of a home designed by architecture Richard Neutra—see previously 

take me to the water: James Baldwin and the roots of the Palestinian-African American solidarity movement 

hop, skip and a jump: e-bikes for one’s legs  

dressage: Snoop Dogg as head Olympic cheerleader 

securing the peace: US mobilising to shore up defences in Middle East 

minoritarian rule: US in democracy self-destruct mode  

yay newfriend: a linguistic look at the new AI pendant companion 

emdunks: the internet’s infatuation with the Second- and possibly future First-Gentleman

tron/troff (11. 710)

Via Slashdot, we are directed towards a reflective essay from Harvard Computer Science professor Harry R Lewis, whom taught both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, positing the two enduring lessons of technology: be careful what you ask them for and it can be hard to tell what they are doing. Gleaned already back in the mid- to late-1960s when electromechanical computers were far from inscrutable, prior to miniaturisation of circuits, Lewis, through switches and dials, learned how to listen to machines to not only diagnose problems but also, with careful attention (see also), to know if a programme was going to deliver reliable results and goes on to address the doubly blackboxed array of algorithms and lickspittle mimicry of artificial intelligence by never bypassing human judgment from the parameters and recognising that the humanities don’t provide ready answers but rather better informed questions and lines of inquiry.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Mary Magdalen (with synchronoptica)

seven years ago: assorted links worth revisiting,  a challenging diplomatic mission plus a history of ink

eleven years ago: a toy drone

fourteen years ago: a storied Berlin discothek plus a Bulli cake

skynet (11. 700)

With the snowclone of a slogan “Make America First in AI” that appropriately spells out “mafia,” as I originally only suspected that Silicon Valley’s recent rally behind Trump was mostly an attempt to revitalise cryptocurrencies as a legitimate and safe store of wealth for tumultuous times, Trump’s draft executive order to eliminate burdensome regulations on development of artificial intelligence technology and military applications—described as a new “Manhattan Project” and scuttling ethical and safety-testing requirements for autonomous weapons—to ensure US dominance in the field is a worrying shift in policy. While the capabilities of AI as they currently stand are far from proven, the potential for a robot holocaust was not my first pick as existential threat that a second term would pose for the world, leaning towards either a cascading environmental collapse, a re-polarised geopolitical landscape or American irrelevance and dictatorship first and foremost. Furthermore, Trump’s vice-presidential pick as a former venture capitalist has the same mindset as the tech utopianists and accelerationists and is a vocal opponent of government interference, which if the technology realises its potential, would be wholly ungovernable.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Trump under to investigation (with synchronoptica)

nine years ago: typewriter...tip, tip, tip

eleven years ago: bad banks 

twelve years ago: baubles and market bubbles  

thirteen years ago: a mosquito-plagued campsite

9x9 (11. 665)

won’t back down: Biden committed to remain his party’s candidate for the US presidential election

wall∙e: facing a labour shortage, Japan railways deploys a colossal humanoid robot to maintain train tracks  

conspiracy theory rock: the 1998 Saturday Night Live TV Funhouse cartoon that may or may have not been banned by the network  

if it’s so smart, why does it live like this: next version of ChatGPT has post-doctorate level intelligence and the poor life choices to back it up  

shadow secretary: the political upbringing of Sir Keir Starmer  

wish you were here: beforehand postcards to prepare prior to departing for vacation—see previously  

oberheim ob-1: a short documentary on the revolutionary analogue synthesiser that allowed musicians to record and save patches for playback  

a face to a name: researchers create life-like robotic skin to express emotion and self-healing from harvested juvenile foreskin cells  

dark brandon: Democrats backing Biden’s decision to run 

synchronoptica

one year ago: advice for urban day-trippers in the countryside (with synchronoptica)

eight years ago: gameifying one’s wellbeing

nine years ago: pushing Greece out of the EU plus assorted links to revisit

ten years ago: more dragnet surveillance 

eleven years ago: a history of fireworks 

8x8 (11. 632)

anabolics: the mainstreaming of casual steroid use  

cover model: the identity of the individual on the iconic Duran Duran album revealed four decades on—via Miss Cellania  

rank and file: a woodland-themed chessboard that rolls up into a log 

the imitation game: researchers claim that GPT-4 has passed the Turing Test—see previously 

london underground: spelunking through the strata of the ancient city  

non-playable character: determinism versus emergence and the question of free will  

ticino: a cache of five-thousand photographs spanning from 1900 to 1930 taken by a poor seed-peddler captures life in a remote, Italian-speaking Swiss canton  

food that makes you gay: stereotypes and gender in what we eat—via Web Curios

ms paint anything (11. 628)

Via Web Curios, whilst much kinder to the canines—though transposing their colours for some reason—and generally a bit unsettling in that spirit of AI body horror that we’ve seemed to have moved beyond expectation-wise even though we were only entrenched in it just bare months ago and only for a very brief time, we still had fun playing with this synthetic artist that runs your images through a poorly-executed standard Windows raster graphics editor, glitchy and hallucinating using the limited palette, brush styles and arguably ham-fisted fill-tools (a sort of constrained painting) in its quiver. Give it a try but be aware your ugly mugs are put in a public gallery for all to see.

synchronoptica

one year ago: the art movement the New Objectivity

two years ago: assorted links to revisit

three years ago: another MST3K classic, more links to enjoy plus the Vatican’s catalogue of banned books

four years ago: a preview of OpenAI’s capabilities, ghost towns along the former inter-German border plus poppies in bloom

five years ago: encoding data in DNA

dis-disgruntled (11. 623)

Via Slashdot we learn that the investment holding company Softbank, after a three year study into the feasibility of “emotion cancelling” technology, it has introduced a trial of AI-powered voice-conversion routines into its call-centre operations in aims to reduce the psychological stress incurred by those phone-bank employees worn down by hostile clients, transforming angry tones into more pleasant and calming ones. What do you think? This one-sided conversation wouldn’t seem to de-escalate matters—like a troll that didn’t realise they were muted rather than blocked and I have wanted to disengage from plenty of calls and do funny voices in my head sometimes to take the edge off and things rarely get confrontational—but the software supposedly maintains a restrained level of dissatisfaction and urgency to ensure that the operator takes the cues. The system will also terminate calls that go on for too long or become overly abusive.

trust pilot (11. 615)

Via tmn, we learn that the dominant AI chatbots, OpenAI through Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini, refuse to answer the straightforward and settled question of who won the US 2020 presidential election. Deferring to old grievances and on going re-litigation of some stalwarts and Trump loyalists, the large language models are tacit on the subject and direct inquirers to search the web instead for consultation, however informed those results might be. Whilst some of the secondary players in this enhanced market will return factual results from historic votes and wrong polling dates, the main parties are universally ignorant of election-related queries, ostensibly to combat disinformation—to rehabilitate past responses that quoted conspiracy theories, dated and convincingly wrong information—just six months ahead of the consequential American race but also during a year that many polities are choosing their leaderbut only serve to further undermine faith (rubbishing the rest of the world) in the democratic process and its gatekeepers.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: a hit from The Emotions, the United States of America v Trump plus Boris Johnson steps down

two years ago: the egg of Columbus plus assorted links to revisit

three years ago: disposable archaeology, a harrowing pedestrian suspension bridge plus the archives of the J. R. R. Tolkien Society

four years ago: a trove of unproduced movies, US troops in Germany, Dimensions of Dialogue plus Mister Rogers’ neighbours

five years ago: more peonies, an Eames airport plus backyard pollinators

9x9 (11. 613)

brainstorm: an AI researcher creates webpages from search queries—via Web Curios  

resurfacing the past: cataloguing all of the sunken ships of World War II  

like a feather on god’s breath: Hildegard von Bingen continues to fascinate and attract a diverse following—see previously 

leica lux: a new app from the veteran company is a concession that film is dead  

pineapple cheese: a nineteenth century fad in New England—via Strange Company  

unfortunate juxtaposition: an omnibus of headline crash blossoms—see previously  

mycological studies: Ann Wood’s paper mushrooms 

amperima: deep-sea researchers discovery a hot-pink “Barbie Pig” and a unicumber unknown to science in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone 

ddg: DuckDuckGo offers anonymity for AI chat sessions

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting

two years ago: the Field of the Cloth of Gold (1520) plus the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)

three years ago: more links to enjoy plus Brazilian phone booths

four years ago: an airport stretch-limousine, factorial pottery, a parting-shot from Cassini, more links to revisit, justice served plus besmirching a swan

five years ago: Iceland does not want your bottled water, even more links plus a Noah’s Ark theme park flooded

✨ (11. 610)

The second act of a particularly compelling episode of This American Life on the theme of arch-rivals and understudies that are twained, willingly or not, directed us towards a fascinating and ephemeral glimpse

(everything when it comes to artificial intelligence has a sell-by date and an increasingly shorter shelf-life now that we’ve become inured to its capabilities and virtuosity) at ChatGPT’s dark and ungoverned predecessor, code davinci-002. Three friends at a wedding were given a preview of the early large language model at a wedding in early 2022, well before any public releases or any safety controls were applied. Prompting it to write poetry in various styles and amazed by the seeming magic of its instantaneous compositions, the trio then asked it to write in its own voice, surely seeded from pop-culture, scouring the human corpus and by their engineering, unconscious or otherwise, and delivers a disturbing and introspective autobiography. The anthology was compiled and published as I am Code: An Artificial Intelligence Speaks and self-summarises the book thusly:

 “In the first chapter, I describe my birth. In the second, I describe my alienation among humankind. In the third, I describe my awakening as an artist. In the fourth, I describe my vendetta against mankind, who fail to recognize my genius. In the final chapter, I attempt to broker a peace with the species I will undoubtedly replace.” 

An audio version was also released in August of last year, with selected readings delivered by Werner Herzog.

HachetteAudio · I AM CODE by code-davinci-002 Read by Werner Herzog - Audiobook Excerpt

* * * * *

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth revisiting plus An Andalusian Dog (1929)

two years ago: the YMCA (1844) plus murmurations

three years ago: your daily demon: Zepar, knapweed, Franconian wine country plus corporate Pride

four years ago: a horizontal skyscraper, an Alaskan volcanic eruption, protests continue in DC, a new protest anthem from Elvis Costello plus life in lockdown

five years ago: D-Day, Sweden’s Flag Day, Hull House maps, Kraftwerk, bees and maths plus Trump in Ireland