Intelligent, actually
not everything's artificial
Listen: the line 2 by Frank Ocean, sort of
Heyyyy check out this leaked material from Frank Ocean OH WAIT it’s an AI-generated album that someone briefly passed off as Frank Ocean because the whole thing with AI is that it’s good at mimicking styles.
Welp. How about some Dolly instead.
It’s not the Borg we’re worried about
Almost as good as a leak: Ted Chiang outside the New Yorker paywall asking, “Will A.I. Become The New McKinsey?”
Chiang’s actual essay transcends this huge burn of a headline, if you can believe it, and it’s well timed, the week after Google fanned the flame and the internet became this:
So, the McKinsey bit: In their darkest light, consulting firms are known for executing on messy, human-collatoral-involving, bottom-line-enhancing things that corporations don’t want to take responsibility for. Guess what else is like that.
“Is there a way for A.I. to do something other than sharpen the knife blade of capitalism?” Chiang asks, noting, “Whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things; I’m criticizing the idea that people who have lots of money get to wield power over people who actually work… By building A.I. to do jobs previously performed by people, A.I. researchers are increasing the concentration of wealth to such extreme levels that the only way to avoid societal collapse is for the government to step in.” Scorched-earth UBI, you love to see it.
Actually intelligent
Tik Tok must be using plenty of A.I., but let’s take this moment to examine a moment of human ingenuity. Rumor has it that their parent company Byte Dance has a publishing project in the works — yes, book publishing — which could be one of their most interesting moves, maybe ever? See, one of the thriving corners of Tik Tok is #BookTok, which, with apologies to GoodReads, is *the* place online where people go to talk about what they’re reading. That means Tik Tok has a ton of data on what people read and how and why. So now when they start publishing their own books, they they can actually market them effectively, which no publishing company has been able to do since Amazon monopolized the book market and started hoarding all the sales data. Of course, this development would do nothing for traditional publishing houses and everything for Tik Tok, which would be both the publisher and the data engine. What do we have to do for a book business that’s not vertically integrated, sacrifice Sally Roony on an altar or something? We’ll do it!
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Lol the altar is just twitter.
Margot
$ = sponsored