Agalia Tan

The day I compromise what I write to satisfy the whims of some corporate overlord is the day that I quit writing for a career.

"The end of a melody is not its goal."

“Writers, podcasters, video makers, influencers, community leaders… the word people mostly use is creators, which is not perfect but it does capture the broad range of “People who make stuff and put it on the internet.” We also focus just as much on consumers: readers, listeners, viewers, community members, and such like. Put simply, though, it’s... See more

Our current terminology clusters into two failing camps, and both serve interests that aren’t ours.

The diminishing frame - tool, assistant, software, program, bot - licenses cognitive outsourcing without accountability. It creates regulatory blindspots because you can’t harm a tool, you have no obligations to a tool. It permits surveillance under... See more

The main point of concern here is not that an LLM such as GPT-4 is reductionist in its representation of reality per se; it is that various AI models, each reductionist in their own way, are converging. An echo chamber of echo chambers of echo chambers.

Brand and product designer Frank Chimero noted in a 2018 talk at the Substans Conference in Bergen, Norway, that “if we’re setting out to change the character of technology in our lives, we’d be wise to learn from the character of places.”*