And Another Thing: Pianos
I thought I had said everything I had to say about that Crush ad, but… I keep thinking about the Piano.
One of the items crushed by the hydraulic press into the new iPad was an upright piano. A pretty nice looking one! There was some speculation at first about how much of that ad was “real” vs CG, but the apology didn’t include Apple reassuring everyone that it wasn’t a real piano, I have to assume they really did sacrifice a perfectly good upright piano for a commercial. Which is sad, and stupid expensive, but not the point.
I grew up in a house with, and I swear I am not making this up, two pianos. One was an upright not unlike the one in the ad—that piano has since found a new home, and lives at my uncle’s house now. The other piano is a gorgeous baby grand. It’s been the centerpiece of my parent’s living room for forty-plus years now. It was the piano in my mom’s house when she was a little girl, and I think it belonged to her grandparents before that. If I’m doing my math right, it’s pushing 80 or so years old. It hasn’t been tuned since the mid-90s, but it still sounds great. The pedals are getting a little soft, there’s some “battle damage” here and there, but it’s still incredible. It’s getting old, but barring any looney tunes–style accidents, it’ll still be helping toddlers learn chopsticks in another 80 years.
My point is: This piano is beloved. My cousins would come over just so they could play it. We’ve got pictures of basically every family member for four generations sitting at, on, or around it. Everyone has played it. It’s currently covered in framed pictures of the family, in some cases with pictures of little kids next to pictures of their parents at the same age. When estate planning comes up, as it does from time to time, this piano gets as much discussion as just about everything else combined. I am, by several orders of magnatude, the least musically adept member of my entire extended family, and even I love this thing. It’s not a family heirloom so much as a family member.
And, are some ad execs in Cupertino really suggesting I replace all that with… an iPad?
I made the point about how fast Apple obsoletes things last time, so you know what? Let’s spot them that, and while we’re at it, let’s spot them how long we know that battery will keep working. Hell, let’s even spot them the “playing notes that sound like a piano” part of being a piano, just to be generous.
Are they seriously suggesting that I can set my 2-year old down on top of the iPad to take the camera from my dad to take a picture while my mom shows my 4-year old how to play chords? That we’re all going to stand in front of the iPad to get a group shot at thanksgiving? That the framed photos of the wedding are going to sit on top of the iPad? That the iPad is going to be something there will be tense negotiations about who inherits?
No, of course not.
What made that ad so infuriating was that they weren’t suggesting any such thing, because it never occurred to them. They just thought they were making a cute ad, but instead they (accidentally?) perfectly captured the zeitgeist.
One of the many reasons why people are fed up with “big tech” is that as “software eats the world” and tries to replace everything, it doesn’t actually replace everything. It just replaces the top line thing, the thing in the middle, the thing thats easy. And then abandons everything else that surrounds it. And it’s that other stuff, the people crowded around the piano, the photos, that really actually matters. You know, culture. Which is how you end up with this “stripping the copper out of the walls” quality the world has right now; it’s a world being rebuilt by people whose lives are so empty they think the only thing a piano does is play notes.
Crushed
What’s it look like when a company just runs out of good will?
I am, of course, talking about that ad Apple made and then apologized for where the hydraulic press smashes things down and reveals—the new iPad!
The Crush ad feels like a kind of inflection point. Because a few years ago, this would have gone over fine. Maybe a few grumps would have grouched about it, but you can imagine most people would have taken it in good humor, there would have been a lot of tweets on the theme of “look, what they meant was…”
Ahhh, that’s not how this one went? It’s easy to understand why some folks felt so angry; my initial response was more along the lines of “yeaaah, read the room.”
As more than one person pointed out, Apple’s far from the first company to use this metaphor to talk about a new smaller product; Nintendo back in the 90s, Nokia in ’08. And, look, first of all, “Nokia did it” isn’t the quality of defense you think it is, and second, I don’t know guys, maybe some stuff has happened over the last fifteen years to change the relationship artists have with big tech companies?
Apple has built up a lot of good will over the last couple of decades, mostly by making nice stuff that worked for regular people, without being obviously an ad or a scam, some kind of corporate nightmare, or a set of unserious tinkertoys that still doesn’t play sound right.
They’ve been withdrawing from that account quite a lot the last decade: weird changes, the entire app store “situation”, the focus on subscriptions and “services”. Squandering 20 years of built-up good will on “not fixing the keyboards.” And you couple that with the state of the whole tech industry: everyone knows Google doesn’t work as well as it used to, email is all spam, you can’t answer the phone anymore because a robot is going to try and rip you off, how many scam text messages thye get, Amazon is full of bootleg junk, etsy isn’t hand-made anymore, social media is all bots and fascists, most things that made tech fun or exciting a decade or more ago has rotted out. And then, as every other tech company falls over themselves to gut the entirety of the arts and humanities to feed them into their Plagiarism Machines so techbros don’t have to pay artists, Apple—the “intersection of technology and liberal arts”—goes and does this? Et tu?
I picture last week as the moment Apple looked down and realized, Wile E Coyote style, they they were standing out in mid-air having walked off the edge of their accumulated good will.
On the one hand, no, that’s not what they meant, it was misinterpreted. But on the other hand—yes, maybe it really was what they meant, the people making just hadn’t realized the degree to which they were saying the quiet part out loud.
Because a company smashing beautiful tools that have worked for decades to reveal a device that’ll stop being eligible for software updates in a few years is the perfect metaphor for the current moment.
Last Week In Good Sentences
It’s been a little while since I did an open tab balance transfer, so I’d like to tell you about some good sentences I read last week.
Up first, old-school blogger Jason Kottke links to a podcast conversation between Ezra Klein and Nilay Patel in The Art of Work in the Age of AI Production. Kottke quotes a couple of lines that I’m going to re-quote here because I like them so much:
EZRA KLEIN: You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest, single things I’ve heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy, but an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.
NILAY PATEL: Yeah first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something — at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content.
“Building traffic instead of an audience” sums up the last decade and change of the web perfectly. I don’t even have anything to add there, just a little wave and “there you go.”
Kottke ends by linking out to The Revenge of the Home Page in the The New Yorker, talking about the web starting to climb back towards a pre-social media form. And that’s a thought thats clearly in the air these days, because other old school blogger Andy Baio linked to We can have a different web.
I have this theory that we’re slowly reckoning with the amount of cognitive space that was absorbed by twitter. Not “social media”, but twitter, specifically. As someone who still mostly consumes the web via his RSS reader, and has been the whole time, I’ve had to spend a lot of time re-working my feeds the last several months because I didn’t realize how many feeds had rotted away but I hadn’t noticed because those sites were posting update as tweets.
Twitter absorbed so much oxygen, and there was so much stuff that migrated from “other places” onto twitter in a way that didn’t happen with other social media systems. And now that twitter is mostly gone, and all that creativity and energy is out there looking for new places to land.
If you’ll allow me a strained metaphor, last summer felt like last call before the party at twitter fully shut down; this summer really feels like that next morning, where we’ve all shook off the hangover and now everyone is looking at each other over breakfast asking “okay, what do you want to go do now?”
Jumping back up the stack to Patel talking about AI for a moment, a couple of extra sentences:
But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas. […] The human creativity is reduced to a prompt, and I think that’s the message of A.I. that I worry about the most, is when you take your creativity and you say, this is actually easy. It’s actually easy to get to this thing that’s a pastiche of the thing that was hard, you just let the computer run its way through whatever statistical path to get there. Then I think more people will fail to recognize the hard thing for being hard.
(The whole interview is great, you should go read it.)
But that bit about ideas and reducing creativity to a prompt brings me to my last good sentences, in this depressing-but-enlightening article over on 404 media: Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher
A small publisher for speculative fiction and roleplaying games is shuttering after 22 years, and the “final straw,” its founder said, is an influx of AI-generated submissions. […] “The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” [founder Julie Ann] Dawson told me. “These are people who think their ‘ideas’ are more important than the actual craft of writing, so they churn out all these ‘ideas’ and enter their idea prompts and think the output is a story. But they never bothered to learn the craft of writing. Most of them don't even read recreationally. They are more enamored with the idea of being a writer than the process of being a writer. They think in terms of quantity and not quality.”
And this really gets to one of the things that bothers me so much about The Plagiarism Machine—the sheer, raw entitlement. Why shouldn’t they get to just have an easy copy of something someone else worked hard on? Why can’t they just have the respect of being an artist, while bypassing the work it takes to earn it?
My usual metaphor for AI is that it’s asbestos, but it’s also the art equivalent of steroids in pro sports. Sure, you hit all those home runs or won all those races, but we don’t care, we choose to live in a civilization where those don’t count, where those are cheating.
I know several people who have become enamored with the Plagiarism Machines over the last year—as I imagine all of us do now—and I’m always struck by a couple of things whenever they accidentally show me their latest works:
First, they’re always crap, just absolute dogshit garbage. And I think to myself, how did you make it to adulthood without being able to tell what’s good or not? There’s a basic artistic media literacy that’s just missing.
Second, how did we get to the point where you’ve got the nerve to be proud that you were cheating?
Monday Snarkblog
I spent the weekend at home with a back injury letting articles about AI irritate me, and I’m slowly realizing how useful Satan is as a societal construct. (Hang on, this isn’t just the painkillers talking). Because, my goodness, I’m already sick of talking about why AI is bad, and we’re barely at the start of this thing. I cannot tell you how badly I want to just point at ChatGPT and say “look, Satan made that. It's evil! Don't touch it!”
Here’s some more open tabs that are irritating me, and I’ve given myself a maximum budget of “three tweets” each to snark on them:
Wherein Cory does a great job laying out the problems with common core and how we got here, and then blows a fuse and goes Full Galaxy Brain, freestyling a solution where computers spit out new tests via some kind of standards-based electronic mad libs. Ha ha, fuck you man, did you hear what you just said? That’s the exact opposite of a solution, and I’m only pointing it out because this is the exact crap he’s usually railing against. Computers don’t need to be all “hammer lfg new nails” about every problem. Turn the robots off and let the experts do their jobs.
I abandoned OpenLiteSpeed and went back to good ol’ Nginx | Ars Technica
So wait, this guy had a fully working stack, and then was all “lol yolo” and replaced everything with no metrics or testing—twice??
I don’t know what the opposite of tech debt is called, but this is it. There’s a difference between “continuous improvement” and “the winchester mystery house” and boy oh boy are were on the wrong side of the looking glass.
The part of this one that got me wasn’t where he sat on his laptop in the hotel on his 21st wedding anniversary trip fixing things, it was the thing where he had already decided to bring his laptop on the trip before anything broke.
Things can just be done, guys. Quit tinkering to tinker and spend time with your family away from screens. Professionalism means making the exact opposite choices as this guy.
AI Pins And Society’s Immune Responses
Apparently “AI Pins” are a thing now? Before I could come up with anything new rude to say after the last one, the Aftermath beat me to it: Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing?
I resent the imposition, the idea that since LLMs exist, it follows that they should exist in every facet in my life. And that’s why, on principle, I really hate the rabbit r1.
It’s as if the cultural immune response to AI is finally kicking in. To belabor the metaphor, maybe the social benefit of blockchain is going to turn out to have been to act as a societal inoculation against this kind of tech bro trash fire.
The increasing blowback makes me hopeful, as I keep saying.
Speaking of, I need to share with you this truly excellent quote lifted from jwz: The Bullshit Fountain:
I confess myself a bit baffled by people who act like "how to interact with ChatGPT" is a useful classroom skill. It's not a word processor or a spreadsheet; it doesn't have documented, well-defined, reproducible behaviors. No, it's not remotely analogous to a calculator. Calculators are built to be *right*, not to sound convincing. It's a bullshit fountain. Stop acting like you're a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit. The lesson one needs about a bullshit fountain is *not to swim in it*.
What Might Be A Faint Glimmer Of Hope In This Whole AI Thing
As the Aftermath says, It's Been A Huge Week For Dipshit Companies That Either Hate Artists Or Are Just Incredibly Stupid.
Let’s look at that new Hasbro scandal one for a second. To briefly recap, they rolled out some advertising for the next Magic: The Gathering expansion that was blatantly, blatantly, AI generated. Which is bad enough on its own, but that’s incredibly insulting for a game as artist-forward as MTG. But then, let’s add some context. This is after a year where they 1) blew the whole OGL thing, 2) literally sent The Actual Pinkertons after someone, 3) had a whole different AI art scandal for a D&D book that caused them to have to change their internal rules, 4) had to issue an apology for that stuff in Spelljammer, and 5) had a giant round of layoffs that, oh by the way what a weird coincidence, gutted the internal art department at Wizards. Not a company whose customers are going to default to good-faith readings of things!
And then, they lied about it! Tried to claim it wasn’t AI, and then had to embarrassingly walk it all back.
Here’s the sliver of hope I see in this.
First, the blowback was surprisingly large. There’s a real “we’re tired of this crap” energy coming from the community that wasn’t there a year ago.
More importantly, through, Hasbro knew what the right answer was. There wasn’t any attempt to defend or justify how “AI art is real art we’re just using new tools”; this was purely the behavior of a company that was trying to get away with something. They knew the community was going to react badly. It’s bad that they still went ahead, but a year ago they wouldn’t have even tried to hide it.
But most importantly (to me), in all the chatter I saw over the last few days, no one was claiming that “AI” “art” was as good as real art. A year ago, it would have been all apologists claiming that the machine generated glurge was “just as good” and “it’s still real art”, and “it’s just as hard to make this, just different tools”, “this is the future”, and so on.
Now, everyone seems to have conceded the point that the machine generated stuff is inherently low quality. The defenses I saw all centered around the fact that it was cheap and fast. “It’s too cheap not to use, what can you do?” seemed to be the default view from the defenders. That’s a huge shift from this time last year. Like how bitcoin fans have mostly stopped pretending crypto is real money, generative AI fans seem to be giving up on convincing us that it’s real art. And the bubble inches closer to popping.
End Of Year Open Tab Bankruptcy Roundup Jamboree, Part 2: AI & Other Tech
I’m declaring bankruptcy on my open tabs; these are all things I’ve had open on my laptop or phone over the last several months, thinking “I should send this to someone? Or Is this a blog post?” Turns out the answer is ‘no’ to both of those, so here they are. Day 2: AI and Other Various Tech Topics
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft | The New Yorker
At one point, I had a draft of Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself with a whole bunch of empty space about 2/3 down with “coding craft guy?” written in the middle. I didn’t end up using it because, frankly, I didn’t have anything nice to say, and, whatever. Then I had two different family members ask me about this over the holidays in a concerned tone of voice, so okay, lets do this.
This guy. This freakin’ guy. Let’s set this up. We have New Yorker article where a programmer talks about how he used to think programming was super-important, but now with the emergence of “the AIs”, maybe his craft is coming to an end. It’s got all the things that usually bother me about AI articles: bouncing back and forth between “look at this neat toy!” and “this is utterly inevitable and will replace all of us”, a preemptively elegiac tone, a total failure to engage with any of the social, moral, or political issues around “AI”, that these “inevitable changes” are the direct result of decisions being made on purpose by real people with an ideology and an agenda. All that goes unacknowledged! That’s what should bother me.
But no, what actually bothered me was that. I spent the whole time reading this thinking “I’d bounce this guy in an interview so fast.” Because he’s incredibly bad at his chosen profession. His examples of what he used GPT for are insane. Let’s go to the tape!
At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.
Fine: commands like those are notoriously fussy, and everybody looks them up anyway. It’s not real programming.
Wait, what? What? WHAT! He’s right, that’s not real programming, but a real programmer can knock that out faster than they can write. No one who writes code for a living should have to think about this for any length of time. This is like a carpenter saying that putting nails in straight isn’t real carpentry. “Tried Googling?” Tried? But then he follows up with:
A few days later, Ben talked about how it would be nice to have an iPhone app to rate words from the dictionary. But he had no idea what a pain it is to make an iPhone app. I’d tried a few times and never got beyond something that half worked. I found Apple’s programming environment forbidding. You had to learn not just a new language but a new program for editing and running code; you had to learn a zoo of “U.I. components” and all the complicated ways of stitching them together; and, finally, you had to figure out how to package the app. The mountain of new things to learn never seemed worth it.
There are just under 2 million iOS apps, all of them written by someone, usually many someones, who could “figure it out”. But this guy looked into it “ a few times”, and the fact that it was too hard for him was somehow… not his fault? No self-reflection, there? “You had to learn not just a new language but a new program…”? Any reasonably senior programmer is fluent in at least half of the TIOBE top 20, uses half-a dozen IDEs or tools at once.
But that last line in the quote there. That last line is what haunts me. “The mountain of new things to learn never seemed worth it.” Every team I’ve ever worked on has had one of these guys—and they are always men—half-ass, self-taught dabblers, bush league, un-professional. Guys who steadfastly refuse to learn anything new after they made it into the field. Later, after all the talk about school, it turns out his degree is in economics; he couldn’t even be bothered not to half-ass it while he was literally paying people to teach him this stuff. The sheer nerve of someone who couldn’t even be bothered to learn what he needed to know to get a degree to speak for the rest of us.
I’ve been baffled by the emergence of GPT-powered coding assistants—why would someone want a tool that hallucinates possible-but-untested solutions? That are usually wrong? And that by defintion you don’t know how to check? And I finally understand, it turns out it’s the economists that decided to go be shitty programmers instead. Who uses GPT? People who’ve been looking for shortcuts their whole life, and found a new one. Got it.
And look, I know—I know— this is bothering me way more than it should. But this attitude—learning new things is too hard, why should I care about the basics—is endemic in this industry. And that’s the job. Thats why we got into this in the first place. Instead, we’re getting dragged into a an industry-wide moral hazard because Xcode’s big ass Play Button is too confusing?
I’ll tell you what this sharpened up, though. I have a new lead-off question for technical interviews: “Tell me the last thing you learned.”
looonnng exhale
Look! More links!
Defective Accelerationism a concise and very funny summary of what a loser Sam Altman is; I cannot for the life of me remember where I saw the link to this?
Tech Billionaires Need to Stop Trying to Make the Science Fiction They Grew Up on Real | Scientific American; over in SciAm, Charlie Stross writes a cleaned up version of his talk I linked to back in You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”.
Ted Chiang: Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism
Finally, we have an amusing dustup over in the open source world: Michael Tsai - Blog - GitHub Code Search Now Requires Logging In.
The change github made is fine, but the open source dorks are acting like github declared war on civilization itself. Click through to the github issue if you want to watch the most self-important un-self-aware dinguses ruin their own position, by basically freaking out that someone giving them something for free might have conditions. WHICH IS PRETTY RICH coming from the folks that INVENTED “free with conditions.” I accidentally spent half an hour reading it muttering “this is why we always lose” under my breath.
Fully Automated Insults to Life Itself
In 20 years time, we’re going to be talking about “generative AI”, in the same tone of voice we currently use to talk about asbestos. A bad idea that initially seemed promising which ultimately caused far more harm than good, and that left a swathe of deeply embedded pollution across the landscape that we’re still cleaning up.
It’s the final apotheosis of three decades of valuing STEM over the Humanities, in parallel with the broader tech industry being gutted and replaced by a string of venture-backed pyramid schemes, casinos, and outright cons.
The entire technology is utterly without value and needs to be scrapped, legislated out of existence, and the people involved need to be forcibly invited to find something better to send their time on. We’ve spent decades operating under the unspoken assumption that just because we can build something, that means it’s inevitable and we have to build it first before someone else does. It’s time to knock that off, and start asking better questions.
AI is the ultimate form of the joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible and also the portions are too small. The technology has two core problems, both of which are intractable:
- The output is terrible
- It’s deeply, fundamentally unethical
Probably the definite article on generative AI’s quality, or profound lack thereof, is Ted Chiang’s ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web; that’s almost a year old now, and everything that’s happened in 2023 has only underscored his points. Fundamentally, we’re not talking about vast cyber-intelligences, we’re talking Sparkling Autocorrect.
Let me provide a personal anecdote.
Earlier this year, a coworker of mine was working on some documentation, and had worked up a fairly detailed outline of what needed to be covered. As an experiment, he fed that outline into ChatGPT, intended to publish the output, and I offered to look over the result.
At first glance it was fine. Digging in, thought, it wasn’t great. It wasn’t terrible either—nothing in it was technically incorrect, but it had the quality of a high school book report written by someone who had only read the back cover. Or like documentation written by a tech writer who had a detailed outline they didn’t understand and a word count to hit? It repeated itself, it used far too many words to cover very little ground. It was, for lack of a better word, just kind of a “glurge”. Just room-temperature tepidarium generic garbage.
I started to jot down some editing notes, as you do, and found that I would stare at a sentence, then the whole paragraph, before crossing the paragraph out and writing “rephrase” in the margin. To try and be actually productive, I took a section and started to rewrite in what I thought was better, more concise manner—removing duplicates, omitting needless words. De-glurgifying.
Of course, I discovered I had essentially reconstituted the outline.
I called my friend back and found the most professional possible way to tell him he needed to scrap the whole thing start over.
It left me with a strange feeling, that we had this tool that could instantly generate a couple thousand words of worthless text that at first glance seemed to pass muster. Which is so, so much worse than something written by a junior tech writer who doesn’t understand the subject, because this was produced by something that you can’t talk to, you can’t coach, that will never learn.
On a pretty regular basis this year, someone would pop up and say something along the lines of “I didn’t know the answer, and the docs were bad, so I asked the robot and it wrote the code for me!” and then they would post some screenshots of ChatGPTs output full of a terribly wrong answer. Human’s AI pin demo was full of wrong answers, for heaven’s sake. And so we get this trend where ChatGPT manages to be an expert in things you know nothing about, but a moron about things you’re an expert in. I’m baffled by the responses to the GPT-n “search” “results”; they’re universally terrible and wrong.
And this is all baked in to the technology! It’s a very, very fancy set of pattern recognition based on a huge corpus of (mostly stolen?) text, computing the most probable next word, but not in any way considering if the answer might be correct. Because it has no way to, thats totally outside the bounds of what the system can achieve.
A year and a bit later, and the web is absolutely drowning in AI glurge. Clarkesworld had to suspend submissions for a while to get a handle on blocking the tide of AI garbage. Page after page of fake content with fake images, content no one ever wrote and only meant for other robots to read. Fake articles. Lists of things that don’t exist, recipes no one has ever cooked.
And we were already drowning in “AI” “machine learning” gludge, and it all sucks. The autocorrect on my phone got so bad when they went from the hard-coded list to the ML one that I had to turn it off. Google’s search results are terrible. The “we found this answer for you” thing at the top of the search results are terrible.
It’s bad, and bad by design, it can’t ever be more than a thoughtless mashup of material it pulled in. Or even worse, it’s not wrong so much as it’s all bullshit. Not outright lies, but vaguely truthy-shaped “content”, freely mixing copied facts with pure fiction, speech intended to persuade without regard for truth: Bullshit.
Every generated image would have been better and funnier if you gave the prompt to a real artist. But that would cost money—and that’s not even the problem, the problem is that would take time. Can’t we just have the computer kick something out now? Something that looks good enough from a distance? If I don’t count the fingers?
My question, though, is this: what future do these people want to live in? Is it really this? Swimming a sea of glurge? Just endless mechanized bullshit flooding every corner of the Web?Who looked at the state of the world here in the Twenties and thought “what the world needs right now is a way to generate Infinite Bullshit”?
Of course, the fact that the results are terrible-but-occasionally-fascinating obscure the deeper issue: It’s a massive plagiarism machine.
Thanks to copyleft and free & open source, the tech industry has a pretty comprehensive—if idiosyncratic—understanding of copyright, fair use, and licensing. But that’s the wrong model. This isn’t about “fair use” or “transformative works”, this is about Plagiarism.
This is a real “humanities and the liberal arts vs technology” moment, because STEM really has no concept of plagiarism. Copying and pasting from the web is a legit way to do your job.
(I mean, stop and think about that for a second. There’s no other industry on earth where copying other people’s work verbatim into your own is a widely accepted technique. We had a sign up a few jobs back that read “Expert level copy and paste from stack overflow” and people would point at it when other people had questions about how to solve a problem!)
We have this massive cultural disconnect that would be interesting or funny if it wasn’t causing so much ruin. This feels like nothing so much as the end result of valuing STEM over the Humanities and Liberal Arts in education for the last few decades. Maybe we should have made sure all those kids we told to “learn to code” also had some, you know, ethics? Maybe had read a couple of books written since they turned fourteen?
So we land in a place where a bunch of people convinced they’re the princes of the universe have sucked up everything written on the internet and built a giant machine for laundering plagiarism; regurgitating and shuffling the content they didn’t ask permission to use. There’s a whole end-state libertarian angle here too; just because it’s not explicitly illegal, that means it’s okay to do it, ethics or morals be damned.
“It’s fair use!” Then the hell with fair use. I’d hate to lose the wayback machine, but even that respects robots.txt.
I used to be a hard core open source, public domain, fair use guy, but then the worst people alive taught a bunch of if-statements to make unreadable counterfit Calvin & Hobbes comics, and now I’m ready to join the Butlerian Jihad.
Why should I bother reading something that no one bothered to write?
Why should I bother looking at a picure that no one could be bothered to draw?
Generative AI and it’s ilk are the final apotheosis of the people who started calling art “content”, and meant it.
These are people who think art or creativity are fundamentally a trick, a confidence game. They don’t believe or understand that art can be about something. They reject utter the concept of “about-ness”, the basic concept of “theme” is utterly beyond comprehension. The idea that art might contain anything other than its most surface qualities never crosses their mind. The sort of people who would say “Art should soothe, not distract”. Entirely about the surface aesthetic over anything.
(To put that another way, these are the same kind people who vote Republican but listen to Rage Against the Machine.)
Don’t respect or value creativity.
Don’t respect actual expertise.
Don’t understand why they can’t just have what someone else worked for. It’s even worse than wanting to pay for it, these creatures actually think they’re entitled to it for free because they know how to parse a JSON file. It feels like the final end-point of a certain flavor of free software thought: no one deserves to be paid for anything. A key cultual and conceptual point past “information wants to be free” and “everything is a remix”. Just a machine that endlessly spits out bad copies of other work.
They don’y understand that these are skills you can learn, you have to work at, become an expert in. Not one of these people who spend hours upon hours training models or crafting prompts ever considered using that time to learn how to draw. Because if someone else can do it, they should get access to that skill for free, with no compensation or even credit.
This is why those machine generated Calvin & Hobbes comics were such a shock last summer; anyone who had understood a single thing about Bill Watterson’s work would have understood that he’d be utterly opposed to something like that. It’s difficult to fathom someone who liked the strip enough to do the work to train up a model to generate new ones while still not understanding what it was about.
“Consent” doesn’t even come up. These are not people you should leave your drink uncovered around.
But then you combine all that with the fact that we have a whole industry of neo-philes, desperate to work on something New and Important, terrified their work might have no value.
(See also: the number of abandoned javascript frameworks that re-solve all the problems that have already been solved.)
As a result, tech has an ongoing issue with cool technology that’s a solution in search of a problem, but ultimately is only good for some kind of grift. The classical examples here are the blockchain, bitcoin, NFTs. But the list is endless: so-called “4th generation languages”, “rational rose”, the CueCat, basically anything that ever got put on the cover of Wired.
My go-to example is usually bittorrent, which seemed really exciting at first, but turned out to only be good at acquiring TV shows that hadn’t aired in the US yet. (As they say, “If you want to know how to use bittorrent, ask a Doctor Who fan.”)
And now generative AI.
There’s that scene at the end of Fargo, where Frances McDormand is scolding The Shoveler for “all this for such a tiny amount of money”, and thats how I keep thinking about the AI grift carnival. So much stupid collateral damage we’re gonna be cleaning up for years, and it’s not like any of them are going to get Fuck You(tm) rich. No one is buying an island or founding a university here, this is all so some tech bros can buy the deluxe package on their next SUV. At least crypto got some people rich, and was just those dorks milking each other; here we all gotta deal with the pollution.
But this feels weirdly personal in a way the dunning-krugerrands were not. How on earth did we end up in a place where we automated art, but not making fast food, or some other minimum wage, minimum respect job?
For a while I thought this was something along one of the asides in David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, where people with meaningless jobs hate it when other people have meaningful ones. The phenomenon of “If we have to work crappy jobs, we want to pull everyone down to our level, not pull everyone up”. See also: “waffle house workers shouldn’t make 25 bucks an hour”, “state workers should have to work like a dog for that pension”, etc.
But no, these are not people with “bullshit jobs”, these are upper-middle class, incredibly comfortable tech bros pulling down a half a million dollars a year. They just don’t believe creativity is real.
But because all that apparently isn’t fulfilling enough, they make up ghost stories about how their stochastic parrots are going to come alive and conquer the world, how we have to build good ones to fight the bad ones, but they can’t be stopped because it’s inevitable. Breathless article after article about whistleblowers worried about how dangerous it all is.
Just the self-declared best minds of our generation failing the mirror test over and over again.
This is usually where someone says something about how this isn’t a problem and we can all learn to be “prompt engineers”, or “advisors”. The people trying to become a prompt advisor are the same sort who would be proud they convinced Immortan Joe to strap them to the back of the car instead of the front.
This isn’t about computers, or technology, or “the future”, or the inevitability of change, or the march or progress. This is about what we value as a culture. What do we want?
“Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
At the start of the year, the dominant narrative was that AI was inevitable, this was how things are going, get on board or get left behind.
Thats… not quite how the year went?
AI was a centerpiece in both Hollywood strikes, and both the Writers and Actors basically ran the table, getting everything they asked for, and enshrining a set of protections from AI into a contract for the first time. Excuse me, not protection from AI, but protection from the sort of empty suits that would use it to undercut working writers and performers.
Publisher after publisher has been updating their guidelines to forbid AI art. A remarkable number of other places that support artists instituted guidlines to ban or curtail AI. Even Kickstarter, which plunged into the blockchain with both feet, seemed to have learned their lesson and rolled out some pretty stringent rules.
Oh! And there’s some actual high-powered lawsuits bearing down on the industry, not to mention investigations of, shall we say, “unsavory” material in the training sets?
The initial shine seems to be off, where last year was all about sharing goofy AI-generated garbage, there’s been a real shift in the air as everyone gets tired of it and starts pointing out that it sucks, actually. And that the people still boosting it all seem to have some kind of scam going. Oh, and in a lot of cases, it’s literally the same people who were hyping blockchain a year or two ago, and who seem to have found a new use for their warehouses full of GPUs.
One of the more heartening and interesting developments this year was the (long overdue) start of a re-evaluation of the Luddites. Despite the popular stereotype, they weren’t anti-technology, but anti-technology-being-used-to-disenfrancise-workers. This seems to be the year a lot of people sat up and said “hey, me too!”
AI isn’t the only reason “hot labor summer” rolled into “eternal labor september”, but it’s pretty high on the list.
Theres an argument thats sometimes made that we don’t have any way as a society to throw away a technology that already exists, but that’s not true. You can’t buy gasoline with lead in it, or hairspray with CFCs, and my late lamented McDLT vanished along with the Styrofoam that kept the hot side hot and the cold side cold.
And yes, asbestos made a bunch of people a lot of money and was very good at being children’s pyjamas that didn’t catch fire, as long as that child didn’t need to breathe as an adult.
But, we've never done that for software.
Back around the turn of the century, there was some argument around if cryptography software should be classified as a munition. The Feds wanted stronger export controls, and there was a contingent of technologists who thought, basically, “Hey, it might be neat if our compiler had first and second amendment protection”. Obviously, that didn’t happen. “You can’t regulate math! It’s free expression!”
I don’t have a fully developed argument on this, but I’ve never been able to shake the feeling like that was a mistake, that we all got conned while we thought we were winning.
Maybe some precedent for heavily “regulating math” would be really useful right about now.
Maybe we need to start making some.
There’s a persistant belief in computer science since computers were invented that brains are a really fancy powerful computer and if we can just figure out how to program them, intelligent robots are right around the corner.
Theres an analogy that floats around that says if the human mind is a bird, then AI will be a plane, flying, but very different application of the same principals.
The human mind is not a computer.
At best, AI is a paper airplane. Sometimes a very fancy one! With nice paper and stickers and tricky folds! Byt the key is that a hand has to throw it.
The act of a person looking at bunch of art and trying to build their own skills is fundamentally different than a software pattern recognition algorithm drawing a picture from pieces of other ones.
Anyone who claims otherwise has no concept of creativity other than as an abstract concept. The creative impulse is fundamental to the human condition. Everyone has it. In some people it’s repressed, or withered, or undeveloped, but it’s always there.
Back in the early days of the pandemic, people posted all these stories about the “crazy stuff they were making!” It wasn’t crazy, that was just the urge to create, it’s always there, and capitalism finally got quiet enough that you could hear it.
“Making Art” is what humans do. The rest of society is there so we stay alive long enough to do so. It’s not the part we need to automate away so we can spend more time delivering value to the shareholders.
AI isn’t going to turn into skynet and take over the world. There won’t be killer robots coming for your life, or your job, or your kids.
However, the sort of soulless goons who thought it was a good idea to computer automate “writing poetry” before “fixing plumbing” are absolutely coming to take away your job, turn you into a gig worker, replace whoever they can with a chatbot, keep all the money for themselves.
I can’t think of anything more profoundly evil than trying to automate creativity and leaving humans to do the grunt manual labor.
Fuck those people. And fuck everyone who ever enabled them.
Two things that are always true
I don’t have any particular insight into the weekend’s OpenAI shenanigans, other than to note two things I have observed to be universally true in our industry:
- If you and your boss don’t get along, it doesn’t matter what your job is, one of you is going to have to go. CEOs frequently forget that the board is actually their boss? (I’ve personally had two different CEOs of places I worked step on this rake and end up spending more time with their families.)
- If you have something that Microsoft wants, they will move instantly to exploit any opportunity to get their hands on it. (Doesn’t matter if they’re friendly now, and maybe an investor.)
You call it the “AI Nexus”, we call it the “Torment Pin”
There’s a class of nerd who, when looking at a potential concept, can’t tell the difference between “actually cool” and “only seemed cool because it was in something I read/saw when I was 14.”
Fundamentally, this is where the Torment Nexus joke comes from. This is why Zuckerberg burned zillions of dollars trying to build “The Metaverse” from Snow Crash, having never noticed that 1) the main character of the book is one of the architects of the metaverse and it left him broke, and 2) the metaverse gets hijacked to deliver a deadly mind virus to everyone in in, both of which are just a little too close to home here.
Normally, this is where I would say this is what you git after two or three decades of emphasizing STEM education over the humanites, but it’s not just that. When you’re fourteen, you're supposed to only engage on the surfaces aesthetic level. The problem is when those teenagers grow up and never think about why those things seemed cool. Not just about what the authors were trying to say, but a failure to consider that maybe consider that it seemed so cool because it was a narrative accelerant, a shortcut to get the story to the next dramatic point.
Anyway, Humane announced their AI Pin.
And, look, it’s the TNG com-badge + the Enterprise computer. And that’s cool, I guess, but totally fails to engage (pun intended) with the reason that the com-badge seems so cool is that it’s a storytelling device, a piece of narrative accelerant.
My initial reaction, giving the number of former Apple employees at the company, is that this whole product is blatantly something that Tim Apple rejected, so they took their pitch deck and started their own damn company, you’ll be sorry, etc.
I don’t understand who this product is for. And it’s not that I don’t get it, it’s just that it seems to start from a premise I don’t buy. There’s a core worldview here that isn’t totally expressed, but that seems to extend from a position that people like to talk more than they like to look at things, and I disagree. Sure, there’s a privacy angle to needing to talk out loud to get things done, but I think that’s a sideshow. Like the Apple Cyber Goggles, it’s a new way to be alone. As far as I’m concerned, any device that you can’t use to look at menu together , or show other people memes, or pictures of your kids is a non-starter. There’s a weird moral angle to the design, where Humane seems to think that all the things I just listed are things we shouldn’t be doing, that they’re here to rescue us from our terrible fate of being able to read articles saved for later while in the hospital waiting room. The marketing got right up to the line of saying that reading text messages from your kids on the go was going to give you hairy palms, and I don’t think thats going to go over as well as they think. More than anything, it reminded me of those weird Reagan-era anti-drug campaigns that totally failed to engage or notice why people were doing drugs? Just Say No to… sending pictures of the kids to my mom?
It also suffers the guessing when you can ask fallacy. It has a camera, and can take pictures of things you ask it to, but doesn’t have a viewfinder? Instead of letting you take the picture, it tries to figure it out on its own? Again, the reason that the images they look at in Star Trek are so nice to look at is they were built by an entire professional art department, and not by a stack of if-statements running in the com-badge.
And speaking of that “AI” “agent”, we’re at a weird phase of the current AI grift carnival, where the people who are bought in to the concept have rebuilt their personality around being a true believer, and are still so taken with the fact that “my com-badge talked to me!” that they ship a marketing video full of AI hallucinations & errors and don’t notice. This has been a constant thing since LLMs burst into the scene last year; why do the people showing them off ask questions they don’t know the answers to, and then don’t fact-check? Because they’re AI True Believers, and getting Any Answer from the robot is more important than whether it’s true.
I don’t know if voice agents and “VUIs” are going to emerge as a significant new interaction paradigm or not, but I know a successful one won’t come from a company that builds their marketing around an incorrect series of AI answers they don’t bother to fact check. You can’t build a successful anything if you’re too blinded by what you want to build to see what you actually built.
I’d keep going, but Charlie Stross already made all these points better than I did, about why using science fiction as a source of ideas is a bad idea, and why tech bros keep doing it anyway: We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
Did you ever wonder why the 21st century feels like we're living in a bad cyberpunk novel from the 1980s?
It's because these guys read those cyberpunk novels and mistook a dystopia for a road map. They're rich enough to bend reality to reflect their desires. But we're not futurists, we're entertainers! We like to spin yarns about the Torment Nexus because it's a cool setting for a noir detective story, not because we think Mark Zuckerberg or Andreesen Horowitz should actually pump several billion dollars into creating it.
It’s really good! You should go read it, I’ll meet you under the horizontal line:
—
And this is something of a topic shift, but in a stray zing Stross manges to nail why I can’t stand WIRED magazine:
American SF from the 1950s to the 1990s contains all the raw ingredients of what has been identified as the Californian ideology (evangelized through the de-facto house magazine, WIRED). It's rooted in uncritical technological boosterism and the desire to get rich quick. Libertarianism and it's even more obnoxious sibling Objectivism provide a fig-leaf of philosophical legitimacy for cutting social programs and advocating the most ruthless variety of dog-eat-dog politics. Longtermism advocates overlooking the homeless person on the sidewalk in front of you in favour of maximizing good outcomes from charitable giving in the far future. And it gels neatly with the Extropian and Transhumanist agendas of colonizing space, achieving immortality, abolishing death, and bringing about the resurrection (without reference to god). These are all far more fun to contemplate than near-term environmental collapse and starving poor people. Finally, there's accelerationism: the right wing's version of Trotskyism, the idea that we need to bring on a cultural crisis as fast as possible in order to tear down the old and build a new post-apocalyptic future. (Tommasso Marinetti and Nick Land are separated by a century and a paradigm shift in the definition of technological progress they're obsessed with, but hold the existing world in a similar degree of contempt.)
And yeah, that’s what always turned me off from WIRED, the attitude that any technology was axiomatically a Good Thing, and any “short term” social disruption, injustice, climate disasters, or general inequality were uncouth to mention because the future where the sorts of people who read WIRED were all going to become fabulously wealthy and go to space was so inevitable that they were absolved of any responsibility for the consequences of their creations. Anyone asking questions, or objecting to being laid off, or suggesting regulations, or bringing up social obligations, or even just asking for benefits as a gig worker, were all just standing in the way of Progress! Progress towards the glorious future on the Martian colonies! Where they’ll get to leave “those people” behind.
While wearing “AI Pins”.
Don’t guess when you can ask
I upgraded my iPhone recently, which always means a settling in period of figuring out how best to customize this combination of hardware and operating system.
The iPhone has this theoretically-cool feature where it will charge the phone to “almost full” overnight, and then at the last possible second, charge it all the way to 100%. Supposedly, this keeps the battery healthy longer, as sitting on power at full charge is stressful on the battery. And sure, I’ll buy that.
But the problem is that there’s no way to tell it when you need the phone to be full! Instead, it does a bunch of computer super-science to figure out your schedule and do all this automatically and in the background. When it works, you never notice.
When it works.
The problem, which should be obvious, is what happens when you don’t get up at the same time every day? And here, I’m using “get up” as a shorthand for “need the phone at full.” My schedule isn’t totally consistant; on a regular but hard-to-predict basis I need to be fully operational an hour or two earlier than “normal”. And then, I’ve recently had a change in schedule where “normal” has rolled back by an hour. (On top of DST ending, etc.)
And so my phone is never full when I pull it off the nightstand. The proposed solution is to hit the button to tell it to charge to full. But that takes time, time I don’t have because I’m on an early day. Plus, I just had it plugged in for eight hours! Why do I need to wait another half of one?
But most maddeningly, I knew I had to get moving earlier the night before! And there was no way to tell the phone this! I mean, I’ll even ignore the fact that there should be an API that my sleep tracker app can use to tell the battery charger what time the alarm is set for. All I want is a thing where I can say “gotta be ready by 7 tomorrow, chief.” Or even, “always be ready by 7, and most days that’ll mean an extra hour or two of full battery burn, that’s okay, no worries.”
But instead of that one UI element, we have an entire house of algorithmic cards trying to guess what I already know. And this is such a common failure mode for software product design—so fearful of asking the user for something that we build a Rube Goldberg machine that makes the whole thing useless.
My last phone (or two) I finally had to turn it off completely and just let it charge “normally” overnight. But I think every phone upgrade I’ve ever done has been precipitated by the battery giving out. If you tell me a feature gets me more battery life, I’m in! I’m motivated to make that work. But here I am, having to charge up my phone over lunch because it didn’t start full, about to do that again.
All because someone decided they could get a computer to guess something the user already knew. Apps are not slight of hand magicians, trying to guess my card. It’s okay! You can just ask.
Don’t guess when you can ask.
The last “new” “Beatles” song
It was pretty good! Better than I expected!
It’s solidly a “late, later period” Beatles song; It sounds like one of those tracks you didn’t remember was on Let it Be or Magical Mystery Tour. But on the other hand, it’s been stuck in my head all evening, so that puts it well ahead of half a dozen other Beatles songs I could mention?
There’s been plenty of commentary around if that’s really John Lennon or if they used “the AI” to clone his voice; and guys—it’s clearly his voice lifted off the 70s-era tape, because if it was clone they’d have done a better song.
More than anyone, though, I can really hear George Harrison’s style in the composition, which hit me harder than I was expecting. I guess they really did take a swing at it in the 90s!
And I’ll just note that there’s some… subtext to Lennon making a demo with those lyrics for McCartney, and move on. All that said, my reaction to this is to be terribly wistful for how close we were to living in a world where The Beatles were the biggest band of the 80s.
“Deserve Better” how, exactly?
Humane, the secretive tech startup full of interesting ex-Apple people has started pulling the curtain back on whatever it is they’ve been building. The rumor mill has always swirled around them, they’re supposedly building some flavor of “AI-powered” wearable that’s intended as the next jump after smartphones. Gruber at DaringFireball has a nice writeup on the latest reveals at https://daringfireball.net/2023/04/if_you_come_at_the_king.
And good luck to them! The tech industry can always use more big swings instead of another VC-funded arbitrage/gig-economy middle-man app, and they’re certainly staffed with folks that would have a take on “here’s what I’d do next time.”
Gruber also links to this tweet from Chaudhri, Humane’s co-founder: https://twitter.com/imranchaudhri/status/1624041258778763265. To save you a click, Chaudhri retweets another tweet that has side-by-side pictures of the NBA game where LeBron James broke the scoring record and the 1998 game-winning shot by Michael Jordan. The key difference being, of course, that in the newer shot everyone in the stands has their phone out taking a picture, and in the older shot there are no cameras of any kind. And Chaudhri captions this with “we all deserve better.”.
And this is just the strangest possible take. There are plenty of critiques of both smart phones and the way society has reorganized around then, but “everyone always has a professional grade camera on them” is as close to an unambiguous net positive as has emerged from the post–iPhone world.
Deserve better, in what way, exactly?
If everyone was checking work email and missing the shot, that’d be one thing. But we all deserve better than… democratizing pro-grade photography? What?
As techno-cultural critiques go, “People shouldn’t take photos of places they go,” is somewhere between Grandpa Simpson yelling at clouds and just flatly declaring smart phones to be a moral evil, with a vague whiff of “leave the art of photography to your betters.”
Normally, this is the kind of shitposting on twitter you’re roll your eyes and ignore, but this is they guy who founded a company to take a swing at smartphones, so his thoughts on how they fit into the world presumably heavily influence what they’re building?
And weirdly, all this has made me more interested in what they’re building? Because any attempt to build “the thing that comes after the iPhone” would by definition need to start with a critique of what the iPhone and other smartphones do and do not do well. A list of problems to solve, things to get right this time. And never in a million years would it have occurred to me that “people like to take pictures of where they are” is a problem that needed solving.
Q1 2023 Links Clearinghouse
Wherein I go through the tabs I’ve left open on my iPhone over the last couple of months.
After Dark Sky shut down, I kicked myself for not taking more screenshots of the App’s gorgeous and thoughtful UI and data visualizations. Fortunatly, someone else thought ahead beter than I did:
https://nightingaledvs.com/dark-sky-weather-data-viz/
Why yes, is IS a dating sim that does your Taxes! “Suitable for singles without dependents”. Incredible.
“The stupidity of AI.” Finally starting to see some blowback on all the VC-fueled AI hype.
“Who Is Still Inside the Metaverse? Searching for friends in Mark Zuckerberg’s deserted fantasyland.” Came for the Metaverse shade, stayed for the subtle implications that American suburban life is probably worse.
The thing i am struck by the most from the current “tech stuff”; zuck’s metaverse, everything out of open ai, musk’s twitter, “ai” “art”, etc, etc, is how _artless_ it all is. Just devoid of any sort of taste or creativity, overcooked fast food pretending to be a meal. Plus for that kind of money any of them could have improved the world so much they’d get a holiday named after them, but no.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-zuckerberg-metaverse-meta-horizon-worlds.html
Back in the runup to Star Trek Beyond, Darrich Franich wrote a series at Entertainment Weekly covering all the Trek movies. Probably the best writing on those movies I’ve ever read, the best one might the piece on Insurrection, a very, very silly movie that doesn’t know it:
https://ew.com/article/2016/06/24/star-trek-insurrection-age-hollywood/
Recently discovered this clip of two icons of my childhood colliding: Isaac Asimov on the original (daytime) Letterman show?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=365kJOsFd3w
Finally, XKCD’s Randal Munroe’s grandfathers series of “Disfrustrating Puzzles”: