If you serve as a mechanical slave to mass media and online algorithms, you’ll end up with intellectual diabetes. To find quality information, you have to rebel against the incentives of mass media and the algorithms that threaten its business model.Make no mistake. For the conscious news consumer, there has never been a better time to be alive. Th... See more

It would be uncomfortable to remove me entirely from the workflow. I might feel lazy, guilty, even nervous about it. Did the bot book the right flight? Does it know I prefer morning flights, hate red eyes, and am a loyal Delta SkyMiles member? A better path would be the chatbot saying, “Sure Rex, here are three options for you to choose from.” I fe... See more

AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.

If AI chatbots and AI-powered search results are summarizing everything for you, why would you go to a website? And if we all stop going to websites, what’s the incentive to put new content on the web? What’s going to stop shady characters from flooding the web with AI-generated spam to try and game these systems? And if we succeed in choking the w... See more

datafied understanding

We are familiar with A.I. helpers, like Apple’s Siri, which are modeled after feminine stereotypes, but here it feels as if the opposite is happening: A mother has been recast as a robotic being, her work dismissed as rote and easily outsourced.

Artificial Intelligence is not going to make this any better. New research suggests that AI is reducing complexity, or at least our experience of it. A recent study, The Platonic Representation Hypothesis , shows that as AI models become more powerful, they form increasingly similar statistical representations of the world. The result is that we ar... See more

I’ve struggled with this balance myself. When the audience responds to something I’ve written, it can be tempting to chase the revenue and viewership by repeating the format. Repeatability and audience fervor can build a business, but kill the artist.

Why it’s a problem that AI-generated art assumes that data is the best/truest way to understand the world.