
For Paid Subscribers (December 2023)


When all these effects come together, you almost can’t tell if the streamer is human or AI-generated. They tap into our fascination with the unfamiliar and our paranoia of technology. As we pause in shock, they go viral. The timing of this is equally uncanny: humans are getting rich by pretending to act like robots at a time when robots are getting... See more
Michael Dean • Thank you for the roses
As the internet evolves, especially for us “very online people,” there’s a deepening sense that we are, together, becoming something beyond the scope of our original intentions. We are rapidly approaching a sum far greater and more mysterious than what we often perceive as its cold, mechanistic parts.
While we conventionally think of ourselves as “u... See more
While we conventionally think of ourselves as “u... See more
Dan Hunt • Internet as Practice
The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.
Maggie Appleton • The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.