the impact of AI

I don’t talk about it much but I do work at Google and I just want to contribute, as a small addendum to the wider conversation about AI, and how much it sucks, and how stupid it is, and how if you make garlic oil like it tells you to you will give botulism to your entire family -

we don’t use it.

like internally. we don’t use it.

I mean that we... See more

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.... 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.

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... See more

Great software products aren’t simply a collection of buttons, icons, and menus. They shape how we think and who we aspire to be.

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.

There are no shortcuts to hard-won insight.

No one does this in a snap.

But it’s hard to... See more

The rise of Grid Zero has prompted Meta to turn its focus to DMs, and one of their new features is an AI assistant to “help” send messages. It’s a horrifying concept to me. The app already mediates our existence, reducing it to branding, professionalism, activism or some combination of those three. One of the few pleasures left are the semi-private... See more

I used to fear that AI would trap each of us into our own universe. Now I’m imagining a future that’s far more mundane. It’s one where I use AI to write you a thing. Then you have your AI summarize it. Then you have your AI write back. And then my AI summarizes it. Why wasn’t it all just summarized in the first place? Does anyone need to have a... See more