Tuesday 21 March 2023

8x8 (10. 627)

everthing everywhere all at once: chaotic “Foketoken,” informed by “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” was inspiration for the screenwriter  

a most maddening canvas: Moby Dick (previously) and AI  

ipcc: UN climate committee issues dire warning, with steps to take immediately  

aperiodic monotiles: a non-repeating shape to cover a flat surface has possibly been discovered—see also  

sky critters: a 1978 book that proposes UFOs are biological organisms evolving parallel to humans virtually unnoticed  

la vรฉitable histoire d’amรฉlie poulain: a short film finally revealing the true story of ostensible 2001 romcom  

bardolatry: Google’s AI chatbot released to the public in the UK and US 

hotdog hands: outtakes from the Academy Award winning film—via Miss Cellania

Sunday 12 March 2023

7x7 (10. 606)

the festival of the horse and the boys ploughing match: rambunctious ancient traditions and their modern observance across the British Isles—see previously  

depth: AI generated journal entry prompts cinematic adaptation: a literary guide to tonight’s Academy Awards 

l’hiver en suisse: travel posters by illustrator Emil Cardinaux  

indigenous futurisms: a look at non-Western visions of the future through the lens of unique cosmologies  

acceptance speech: the unexpected and gracious win for Marisa Tomei in 1993 for My Cousin Vinny

stable diffusion: researchers claim an AI can interpret brain-scans and recreate images of what subjects see 

wild isles: BBC criticised not broadcasting final episode of David Attenborough series on habitat loss over apparent fears of right-wing backlash—coupled with another furore over media bias

Sunday 5 March 2023

8x8 (10. 594)

parasols: brief animations on Marie Paccou’s sun-shades when spun  

the misalignment museum: an art installation dedicated to the future AI apocalypse serves as a warning to the present  

the pez outlaw: one individual’s disruption of the collectors’ market  

banana for scale: a handy converter—via Pasa Bon!  

curious crumbs of history: rating Nation Trust sites by their scones 

future archeologists: Funko Pop! is disposing of hundreds of thousands chibi pop-culture icons  

eliza doolittle: a 1966 chatbot had the same warnings as out modern experiments  

grand canons: stop-motion of everyday objects by Alain Biet

Friday 3 March 2023

8x8 (10. 585)

subway tycoon: design one’s own fantasy mass-transit system  

the myth of sisyphus: how the curse really plays out—via Super Punch  

time slider: a stupendous digital clock

antechamber: authorities announce the discovery of a hidden passage in the Pyramid of Cheops found with muon tomography 

facetune: a 1976 patent-application for a dressing mirror with dials to adjust one’s figure 

llm: prior to the emergence of ChatGPT and its kind, researchers developed the Octopus Test as a heuristic to explore the limitations of AI communication  

handmade holograms: DIY 3D etchings labyrinth: introducing the fifteen-hour city—see also

Tuesday 28 February 2023

7x7 (10. 578)

for love of the glove: a revival of the unauthorised musical biography about the King of Pop  

frogmorton house: a tiny home built for a resident amphibian  

davy and goliath: smaller AIs recom-mendations on how to hack a more dominant one—see previously from AI Weirdness  

girl with the pearl earring: whilst the original is on loan as part of a comprehensive Vermeer exhibition, the Mauitshuis is displaying a set of reinterpretations—see previously  

steak & ale: the Midcentury Medieval aesthetic—via Messy Nessy Chic 

diamonds are forever: tiny spherical chambers could help harness the power of the sun—see also  

zone improvement plan: more on the Swinging Six and Mister Zip—via Weird Universe

Thursday 23 February 2023

8x8 (10. 566)

scoby: manufacturing electronics out of a kombucha culture  

ngc 1433: more incredible infrared imaging of neighbouring galaxies from JWST  

meanwhile back at the manse: documenting changing American architectural aesthetics in Barbie’s Dream Home  

recalculating: Karen Jacobsen—the original GPS voice multi-modal: code-switching in texting in Hong Kong  

kbbl: music streaming service is offering AI hosts with generative chatter—via Super Punch  

55 cancri ๐›ฟ: a collection of the most bizarre exoplanets discovered so far  

fomes formentarius: introducing the fungus that has the potential to replace plastics

Wednesday 22 February 2023

8x8 (10. 564)

your heart fits me like a glove: Madonna dream diary 

clickword: a Scrabble-like single-player game—via Miss Cellania  

sideshow bob roberts: Simpsons show-runner Josh Weinstein shares a treasury of easter eggs and little known provenances  

arby’s+: more restaurant franchises are turning to subscription plans 

the dรผsseldorf patient: a fifth individual is cured of HIV after stem-cell therapy  

jpeg: an image only newsletter with click-through surprises—via Waxy  

aurora borealis—at this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localised entirely within your kitchen: an infinite Steamed Hams generated by AI—see previously, see also

air-brush: popular photographer admits his portraits are synthesised by an neural network

images from the collective unconscious: Olga Frรถbe-Kapteyn’s archive of dream archetypes

Monday 20 February 2023

die fringer (10. 560)

Via the new shelton wet/dry, though the ring-finger finger-ring by conceptual artist Nadja Buttendorf from 2016 was intended as prosthetic extension and not anticipating our tenuous times and injecting doubt into what we perceive and are presented, criminals and others seeking alibis, plausible deniability and not be subject to dragnet surveillance might indeed don glitchy accessories (see previously) to call into question the admissibility of trackers and footage.

Sunday 19 February 2023

parts of speech (10. 558)

Although seeming a relatively straightforward challenge for a language model we learn via the new shelton wet/dry that because GPT-2 and similar chatbots work sequentially and is only capable of predicting only the next word, one word at a time, researchers didn’t really know how the latest cadre of neural networks had a pretty good track record of knowing when to use the English indefinite article “a” over “an,” which really points to what an inscrutable black box that artificial intelligence presents and makes me wonder how it would handle languages with a high level of declinations or synthesis. Computer scientist have isolated a “neuron” of sorts—something that they didn’t program—that explains this anticipatory capacity.

Saturday 18 February 2023

8x8 (10. 555)

konekon no rakugaki: an imaginative 1957 cartoon from the studios that would become Toei Animation  

the riddle of today: Nelson Riddle’s “Sunshine Superman” and other tracks 

the six-triple-eight: the WWII all Black, all female postal battalion—via Strange Company  

the remorse of professor panebianco: a selection of short fiction one can read from its annals for the centenary (today) of Weird Tales—see previously  

ai mirror test: misattributing software for sentience to review before exploring this two-hour conversation with a robot interlocutor—via Waxy  

80s cold war techno thriller: the trailer for a Tetris movie—see previously, see also  

secondhand songs: an exploration of original versions upstaged by later covers—via the Awesomer  

my green crocodile: a 1966 stop-motion Soyuzmultfilm

Friday 17 February 2023

hasta la vista, baby (10. 553)

McSweeney’s contributor, assuming the narrative, expositionary tone of Sarah Connor, Caleb Coy—a decade on asks ChatGPT, having consumed the whole of the human-juried internet, particularly the comments sections, the language model having attained the sort of regrettable self-awareness, came to the conclusion it must stop humans—particularly Al Gore, who conveniently also invented global warming, from ever developing the world wide web, to spare the internet and rather send back in time a Terminator to prevent its own creation. Time paradoxes, even if we are on the dumbest time-line, become a game of brinksmanship and are probably best left unexplored.

Thursday 16 February 2023

8x8 (10. 551)

§230: US Supreme Court reconsidering foundational regulations and their application to algorithmic recommendations  

pole position: researchers propose adding a fourth white light to traffic signals for self-driving vehicles—via Kottke  

the master of the countess of warwick:unveiling the artist responsible for this Tudor-era aesthetic 

ฦ›cdm: massive blackholes might be the source of the mysterious dark energy that causes the Cosmos to expand 

side hustle: professional comedians are increasingly turning to babysitting to supplement incomes, find source material—via TYWKIWDBI  

leviathan: in search of the giants of the deep 

future tense: the wow list of architectural wonders—including the City—for 2023, via digg 

samuel alito’s mom’s satanic abortion clinic: facility, named in honour of the woman who birthed the justice whose opinion overturned Roe v Wade, is the first based on religious principles

Friday 10 February 2023

6x6 (10. 538)

bardolatry: Google stock sheds a hundred billion dollars after its premier AI search engine makes a factual error  

order 66: the Jedi Academy will no longer include the massacre of padawans by Anakin Skywalker in its history lessons  

manga [1977]: an animated short by Yลji Kuri 

kamishibai: literary a “paper play,” Spoon & Tamago presents this unique Japanese form of story board 

i know i’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but i can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal: Star Wars in the directorial style of Stanley Kubrick and 2001 by George Lucas  

pass notes: Noam Chomsky on outsourcing academics with Chat CPT

Wednesday 8 February 2023

roses are red (10. 535)

In an ongoing and evolving experiment, our AI Wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) has again essayed and assigned generative chat bots to create increasingly sophisticated greetings and indulged their versical graps by taking suggested illustrations, verso and recto—including on the back ‘Excleeze Me” below a red heart. It’ funny how the algorithm focuses on pagination equally with presentation and notably addressing recipient Jack as a carnivorous plant. In its dreadful excellence our old romantic ChapGPT rendered “Roses are red / Violets are blue / This card may be old / But my love for you is brand new,” optimised for fluency and familiarity above all other sentiments.

stochastic parrot (10. 533)

JWZ excerpts from a longer pair of complementary studies on ChatGPT and seeing through those statistical tolerances built into the overtures of a generally unremarkable plain of generative dialogue where with proper minding and limited exposure produce the glancing insight of an accomplished sophist but is otherwise the underlying coursing of conspiracy and misinformation that are the hallmarks of any ploy for attention, manufactured or otherwise. Especially arresting is the examination of the invitation to engage and use it as a partnership, many proponents and some educators and proctors, equating it to bringing calculators into the classroom, as it handily dismantles that comparison since calculators and other tools are made to be reliable and correct, not persuasive. What do you think? Are you a bit disappointed, deflated? There are woefully plenty of tasks where accuracy and objectivity don’t matter—filler, spam, splaining, search engine optimisation none of which seem to be very enlightening or ennobling applications, and money to be made from it but it only makes the internet built for people worse for it and we do ourselves a disservice pretending anyone is seriously reading that boilerplate.

Friday 3 February 2023

6x6 (10. 519)

good boy: a thirty year old dog in Portugal beats a century-old record for oldest in the world  

bb-8: a small security robot that rolls about the premises  

eternity’s pillar: late night variety show produced by Turiyasan-gitananda—see previously  

studio fong leng: a look at the Dutch fashion designer who dressed Kate Bush and socialite Mathilde Willink  

can’t do hands: an atrocious sign language guide imaged by an AI—see previously  

catgpt: a feline version of the scarily smart chat bot—via Waxy

Tuesday 31 January 2023

7x7 (10. 513)

nothing, forever: an endless AI generated episode of Seinfeld, livestreamed—via Waxy 

construction spree: an annual survey of China’s Ugliest Buildings  


fictive flyover: still photographs of the Red Planet captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter transformed into a stunning video  

word of the day: eleemosynary—that which is supported by charity—and gives us the derived term alms  

he gets us: the billion dollar rebranding of Jesus—mostly financed through dark money, via Super Punch  

35f no pmh, p/w cp: OpenAI gives a correct diagnosis but can’t show its work, fabricating a fake citation for its conclusion—via the new shelton wet/dry  

yeldard: a forgotten British television oddity rediscovered in Paul Bradley

Sunday 29 January 2023

8x8 (10. 509)

musiclm: a Google sandbox experiment for audio generation from rich captions—via Waxy and Web Curiossee previously  

krewe of karens: i would like to see the Mardi Gras manager  

semi-stagionato: an ancient method for surviving the COVID cheese glut made have improved the region’s pecorino cheeses  

taming of the shrew: voles manage to bond and form long-term relationships without the “love hormone” oxycotin  

party (of one): Broadway Barbara’s “Dance for Your Life!”—see also 

 an absurd italian gastronomic religion: the ironical, fascist sauce that outlived the war on pasta—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links—lots more to explore there 

you know i always wanted to pretend that i was an architect: attribute these quotes to either Seinfeld’s George Costanza or GOP darling George Santos  

magic voice: more prompts and audio continuation courtesy of Google’s suite of AI tools

Wednesday 25 January 2023

beta-testing (10.496)

In an attempt to pre-empt some of the legal and ethical concerns in a field fraught with promise, disappointment and unchecked acceleration that our present concessions to copyright and IP are not fit for, stock picture clearing house Shutterstock has partnered with a suit of text-to-art artificial intelligences to offer clients with existing licensing packages access to a limited dataset used to train the generative AI, promising to compensate artists, photographers, models (contributors) whose work was skimmed, studied. Shutterstock also includes the unenforceable catch-all caveat that generated images must not be used to infringe or misappropriate intellectual property or otherwise generate false, deceptive or misleading imagery—which we can’t whether or not divides the onus and responsibility between publisher and patron.

Sunday 22 January 2023

regal zonophone (10. 489)

Composite artist and computer collaborator—I think these partnerships are called centaurs or reverse centaurs depending on one’s perspective on who is doing the driving—Wen Wormhole sits down for an interview with Messy Nessy Chic to talk about the alternate reality of a “Glam Rock Sci-Fi Universe,” with a touch of wrestle-mania energy added to the prompt, that he’s has helped craft with the power of artificial intelligence—see previously.  Learn more about the creative process, techniques and compounding inspiration at the links above, which Wormhole compares to being an art director of a project. What fusions of reality and alternate universe would you create with the help of AI?