Sterling Proffer

The good news is, you have the freedom to pursue the new opportunities. The bad news is, so does everyone else. The good news is you can do it yourself. The bad news is you have to. Again, it looks easy only in retrospect. It always looks doable, from the perspective of people who have already done it.

The artists complaining about TikToks aren’t exactly condemning the platform. But they are showing that being on all the time, influencer-style, takes effort and talent that is different from the kind it takes to perform a great song. Do we really want our entertainers demystified and desperate? Are we too cynical and distracted to enjoy... See more

The first TikTok stars were slow to realize how much negotiating power they actually possessed—they’re just youngsters, after all. So they got dazzled by the promise of a big upfront payment from a label. But in the last few months, many have started to figure out that the so-called ‘advance against future royalties’ is actually just a loan under a... See more

To understand why foundation models represent a “phase change in ai”, in the words of Fei-Fei Li, the co-director of Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centred ai, it helps to get a sense of how they differ from what went before.

The cycle is dizzying and numbing: The allure of authenticity invites fascination and then, inevitably, skepticism. All along, truth and trust aren’t celebrated; they’re destabilized.