I dreamed we were lined up to get vaccinated beside a long hedge in bloom. The hedge was full of hummingbirds flying from flower to flower. When it was my turn, the nurse gently caught one of the birds off the hedge, poked its tiny beak into my arm, then set it free.

Yup. Outsourcing your control and decision making to a Slop Slot Machine is why AI doesn’t make sense in the Arts. Whatever it spits out, you can’t explain why you “chose” that detail, because you didn’t choose anything.

Every company’s AI workflow rn be like 😭💀

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

Just saw this on Substack. The metaphor is spot on.

AI is popular because it gives dumb people the illusion they are smart and uncreative people the illusion they are artistic.

there was something beautiful about library checkout cards because you could literally see the history of human curiosity attached to a book. like a tiny ghost trail of strangers connected by the same story.

Until about three years ago, every song you've ever loved, every book you've ever devoured, every beautiful speech you've ever heard was written by a human. It's so sad what they've done to our sense of human capability x.com/SketchesbyBoze/status/…

A major reason that it didn’t make sense to use AI to write an essay about a substantive topic is that until you write the essay you don’t actually know what you want to say or what you think. You think you do, but it is the writing itself that actually gets the thinking done.

The greatest mistake of our society is to have equated wealth with wisdom.

I know many people my age who feel they have “wasted time” getting their humanities degree because their career is not directly related to it. A reminder that the notion that getting an education is only useful if it converts into profit is, in itself, a perverse capitalist idea.

A massive crowd assembled in La Paz’s working class twin city, El Alto, to demand Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz resign Indigenous-led demonstrations come as the Bolivian regime was caught preparing to launch a US-backed operation to kidnap Evo Morales with 2,000 troops & cops

It’s pretty wild to me that the ruling class wants to invest in artificial intelligence more aggressively than they’ve ever tried to invest in education, and actual human intelligence

The only revolutionary thing about AI is the backlash against it

The better AI writing gets, the less we'll want to read it. Life of Pi author Yann Martel explains why: 1) AI Inflation "Once you know it's AI, then suddenly it's like special effects in movies. I find my kids when they watch movies with special effects, they'll just shrug because we know a computer can generate anything. So a sort of inflation sets in where we're less impressed. Then you have a great actor who's just acting with no special effects and it's like, wow, that works. What really has an impact is the actor emoting the authenticity of that." 2) AI Aversion "I think publishers are going to start saying, 'hey, it cannot be beyond spell check and maybe minimal AI, but you cannot use AI.' I think readers will agree with that, and that the ones who cheat on that will be seen as cheaters. They're not going to get published, but even if they do, they won't be read. They're not going to win prizes, they're not going to win good reviews. It'll be pointed out that this is not the way to do it."

Describing things to a robot is not a skill. The idea that you'll get "left behind" because you know how to do your own thinking and problem solving is ludicrous.

Number of people who go bankrupt every year because of medical bills or illness-related work loss: 🇦🇺 0 🇨🇦 0 🇩🇰 0 🇫🇮 0 🇫🇷 0 🇩🇪 0 🇮🇸 0 🇮🇪 0 🇮🇹 0 🇯🇵 0 🇳🇱 0 🇳🇴 0 🇵🇹 0 🇪🇸 0 🇸🇪 0 🇬🇧 0 🇺🇸 530,000 There’s a lesson there.

Israel killed every single person in this photo in Lebanon. Every. Single. One. All journalists. Targeted and assassinated intentionally. For reporting the truth from the frontlines.

Fascinating new poll: Not only is Gen Z pessimistic, but nearly half wish they lived in the past -- specifically the 90s, before smartphones and social media. nbcnews.com/politics/politic…