AI is melting people’s brains and it makes the world a sadder place. I found an artist, Quinn, documenting his alternative photography processes who was also writing heartfelt and honest blog posts about his life. His recent work would be more of the same, right? He wouldn’t be publishing AI written slop, right?

It enacts the gravitational pull of the drive, the suffocation of the holding pattern, the way ideology fragments bodies even as it organizes them. The counterclockwise inward spiral isn’t a metaphor I chose to represent an idea, it’s a formal discovery that emerged through material engagement, and it carries meaning that exceeds paraphrase.

- Holding Pattern

This sounds like an overly verbose and pretentiously well-read undergrad read Quinn’s artist statement and rewrote it for us. We’d understand the art better if we got to read the prompts used to generate this text. If I was a better writer I could describe what’s distasteful about the writing style. But what I do know is that it puts distance between us and the author.

Every AI written post could’ve instead been genuine writing by the author. His older blog posts (see here) are well written. We get a peek inside, to learn about his art and the mind behind the work. I hope that anybody reading this doesn’t think I’m picking on Quinn (though I doubt he’d care very much what I think). I’m writing about this ¹ because it makes me sad to see good writers/artists depriving the world of the chance to engage with them.

How close are we to AI generating ads for each individual viewer? A Wells Fargo commercial voiced over by Owen Wilson (one of the two impressions I can do) talking about a person named Oliver (that’s me!) trying to save money by eating before a game (something I am in the habit of) made me worried we were already in a world of per-person unique ads. We’re not, but I think we’re close.

Qwen released a new text to speech model a few days ago. The speech it generates isn’t natural sounding, but it’s realistic enough in short clips e.g. saying your name to get your attention before playing the rest of the ad. The model is small enough to run on device, so the voice generation could be offloaded onto personal devices to avoid data center costs (it’d be sad if on device ad generation is the real use case of all the AI-acceleration hardware on phones today).

Being targeted by advertising is not a good feeling, but we’ve all become used to it. We think nothing of being served ads for a skin care product we googled a week ago. I think it’s less likely that we’ll accept per-person targeting bleeding into the content of the ad. That’s a bit too creepy. But the past 30 years have shown that we trade privacy for convenience.

I’m excited that Death Grips is releasing new music soon (though who knows how soon is soon). The group’s visual identity is tied up with their music so I’m curious to see what else we get when the music releases. I appreciate how web 1.0 their website designs (1, 2) are.

“Don’t it feel good to drive a bus? People need to get picked up.”

- Death Grips

I finished Blood Meridian a few days ago. That is a dense book. There are layers to peel back that I only sometimes understood. While I was reading (and rereading some parts), I thought about a quote from Christopher Nolan on Tenet, where he implores the audience not to try to understand but to just feel it. Choosing not to think too hard and instead feel the rhythm of Cormac McCarthy’s writing made the reading experience more enjoyable.

The book gave me the same feeling as listening to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Godspeed’s music paints a landscape and lets you imagine the suffering inside of it. Blood Meridian does not give you the chance to imagine violence, it shoves it in your face at every opportunity.