Severin Matusek

AI tools were meant to automate the boring bits and free up time for meaningful work. Instead, creatives speak of endless iterations, escalating client demands and entirely new categories of digital drudgery. Are we thinking about AI’s place in the creative process all wrong?

Whoever controls AI infrastructure — compute, models, data and cloud — will shape the economic and political order of the 21st century. The U.S. and China understand this and are mobilizing every instrument of statecraft to secure supremacy. Europe must understand it too.

For one thing, the internet has taken the reward circuitry meant for social conditioning and has begun to replace it with parasocial conditioning; our reward feedback loops increasingly run through interactions with people we don’t know and may never meet, who have very little information about us or investment in our lives and wellbeing.... See more

I can’t overemphasize the value of getting hands-on experience, combined with the time I’d previously spent on research. I think it’s unlikely I could’ve gotten to my current point of view just by reading and talking to developers. Through my initial work, I’d become very familiar with what developers think about open source. But in trying to turn... See more

Executives, meanwhile, increasingly believed that they’d found their best bet in “IP”: preexisting intellectual property—familiar stories, characters, and products—that could be milled for scripts. As an associate producer of a successful Aughts IP-driven franchise told me, IP is “sort of a hedge.” There’s some knowledge of the consumer’s interest,... See more

We are fulfilling our desires together with other people. Anti-thesis to “I’m going to Hollywood and going to make it”, the single dream of making it.

Emmanuel Macron, J.D. Vance and Berlin artist collectives may seem like unlikely allies, but they all agree that Europe’s “regulate first, build later (maybe)” approach to AI is not working.

Being raised by TV is a walk in the park compared to being raised by apps.