I visited Alaska last year. Alaska had a similar vibe to New Zealand, especially outside the bubble of Auckland. Houses had mold creeping up the sides, and seeing a house half broken down next to a fancy new house wasn’t uncommon.

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

Everything’s The Velvet Underground. The lineage of all rock, including shimmerly jangle pop like R.E.M. or The Clean, can be traced back to The Velvet Underground. I put together this playlist chronologically following the path of influence from The VU down to modern artists like Mac Demarco and new artists making interesting jangly rock out of Chicago like Good Flying Birds and Sharp Pins.

Alex Ross has an excellent article about the influence of artists from New Zealand on much bigger bands like R.E.M.

AI is melting people’s brains and it makes the world a sadder place. I found an artist, Quinn, documenting his alternative photography processes who was also writing heartfelt and honest blog posts about his life. His recent work would be more of the same, right? He wouldn’t be publishing AI written slop, right?

It enacts the gravitational pull of the drive, the suffocation of the holding pattern, the way ideology fragments bodies even as it organizes them. The counterclockwise inward spiral isn’t a metaphor I chose to represent an idea, it’s a formal discovery that emerged through material engagement, and it carries meaning that exceeds paraphrase.

- Holding Pattern

This sounds like an overly verbose and pretentiously well-read undergrad read Quinn’s artist statement and rewrote it for us. We’d understand the art better if we got to read the prompts used to generate this text. If I was a better writer I could describe what’s distasteful about the writing style. But what I do know is that it puts distance between us and the author.

Every AI written post could’ve instead been genuine writing by the author. His older blog posts (see here) are well written. We get a peek inside, to learn about his art and the mind behind the work. I hope that anybody reading this doesn’t think I’m picking on Quinn (though I doubt he’d care very much what I think). I’m writing about this ¹ because it makes me sad to see good writers/artists depriving the world of the chance to engage with them.

How close are we to AI generating ads for each individual viewer? A Wells Fargo commercial voiced over by Owen Wilson (one of the two impressions I can do) talking about a person named Oliver (that’s me!) trying to save money by eating before a game (something I am in the habit of) made me worried we were already in a world of per-person unique ads. We’re not, but I think we’re close.

Qwen released a new text to speech model a few days ago. The speech it generates isn’t natural sounding, but it’s realistic enough in short clips e.g. saying your name to get your attention before playing the rest of the ad. The model is small enough to run on device, so the voice generation could be offloaded onto personal devices to avoid data center costs (it’d be sad if on device ad generation is the real use case of all the AI-acceleration hardware on phones today).

Being targeted by advertising is not a good feeling, but we’ve all become used to it. We think nothing of being served ads for a skin care product we googled a week ago. I think it’s less likely that we’ll accept per-person targeting bleeding into the content of the ad. That’s a bit too creepy. But the past 30 years have shown that we trade privacy for convenience.