Re: Stewart Brand’s new campaign for maintenance, I’d like to add my own — somewhat neglected recently — project on Invitation and Repair.
WSJ:
Your turn, ChatGPT. According to the OpenAI app, Claude is “an earnest grade student who will not take a position. If you ask Claude, ‘Is this policy good,’ it replies: ‘It can be understood as operating within a broader ethical framework that may, depending on one’s normative commitment.’ By the time Claude finishes clearing its throat, the Roman Empire has fallen again.”
Gemini doesn’t get off any easier. ChatGPT calls it a “corporate intern with a search bar. It doesn’t write essays. It produces deliverables. If Claude is anxious to be ethical, Gemini is anxious to be useful to a product manager.”
Sneering at other writers? Can’t get any more human than that.
The newest issue of Comment, on the need for renewal of our institutions, has a number of smart and provocative pieces. Anne Snyder has done such a great job as editor of that journal.
What is it that MrBeast, as a “creator,” is “creating”? The obvious answer would be “content.” Content, after all, is what we talk about when we talk about digital media. It’s certainly what MrBeast talks about. But the more I think about online programming, the more I’m convinced that content isn’t what matters. What matters is form. Digital media aspires to, and often achieves, a state of contentlessness. Spend some time on MrBeast’s channel, or scroll down your Instagram feed or your X feed or your Apple News feed, or swipe through your For You page on TikTok. What you’re seeing is the repetition of a pattern, a pattern that has been statistically determined to have the highest odds of holding your attention. What fills the pattern at any given instant—what we call content—is fungible and disposable. It’s not important. It’s the pattern, the form the content fits and replicates, that’s important.
Thus: “AI-generated slop marks the triumph of machine formalism.”
Finished reading: Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner, a powerful book that will make you despair of humanity. Representative passage:
“You’re from the Park Service, aren’t you?” Mulholland demanded more than asked.
“Yes, I am,” said Albright. “Why do you ask?”
“Why?” Mulholland said archly. “Why? I’ll tell you why. You have a beautiful park up north. A majestic park. Yosemite Park, it’s called. You’ve been there, have you?” Albright said he had. He was the park’s superintendent. “Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d do with your park. Do you want to know what I would do?”
Albright said he did.
“Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste!”
📚
Here’s my first post as a contributing writer for The Dispatch: an essay on how the rise of AI has changed my teaching.
Timothy Lee, whose newsletter is consistently the best guide to developments in AI: “I’ve read all of this information carefully, and it sure looks to me like OpenAI gave the Pentagon what it wanted and undercut Anthropic in the process. The contractual language shared by OpenAI does not appear to meaningfully restrict the government’s ability to spy on Americans or build fully autonomous weapons.” Unsurprising.