Have you had good weeks? I suppose the answer to that will depend on how much Shell stock you all own – LOL! – but I sincerely hope that regardless of your portfolio performance – LOL! – you’re all feeling relatively content and not too burnt out from another week of staggering cognitive dissonance (my personal favourite this week was English football’s continued ability to spend more than every single other league in Europe, combined, whilst the actual English economy continues to limp emphysemically towards what we’re continually assured are the bright lights of ‘eventual recovery’ but which, let’s be honest, is as likely to be ‘the glow emitted by the bonfire of what remains of our hopes and dreams for the future’).
Anyway, I have a lunch to get to and probably ought to wear something other than my Curios pants if I want to avoid the unpleasant stares and increasingly-anxious tannoy announcements – I hope you are all doing WONDERFULLY and that this week’s collection of, er, ‘things on the internet’ manages to distract you momentarily from all the other stuff.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and YOU are special to me in ways you can only dream of (but would probably prefer not to).
By Paul Davis
WE START THE WEEK IN REASONABLY UPBEAT FASHION, COURTESY OF THIS MIX OF FUNKY HOUSE BY DOC MARTIN!
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.1:
- Watch Me Forever: Apologies for the fact that we once again start with AI-related stuff, but I PROMISE that this is more interesting than ‘you can use the machines to write copy for the About Us page of your incredibly boring website’. Watch Me Forever is a quite astonishing thing – an infinite, machine-generated TV channel which broadcasts nothing but its own, AI-generated episodes of Seinfeld. This is quite remarkable – the scripts are generated on the fly by GPT-3, they’re then fed to a text-to-speech generator and audio is generated, and then this is all automatically fed to a visualiser which creates the graphics and generates the camera angles, scene changes, cuts…On the one hand, this is objectively dreadful as entertainment; the scripts make no sense, the acting is wooden, everything looks as though it’s being rendered by the same software that was used to create Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’ music video in the early 80s (here’s a link in case you’re a child and that reference means nothing to you)…and yet, as I sit here typing this at 708am GMT on a Friday, there are nearly 10,000 people concurrently watching this Twitch stream. Whilst I don’t think the people responsible for churning our the hand-crafted nuggets of televisual gold that characterise this GOLDEN AGE of episodic scripted entertainments need worry quite yet (although as I write this, AI Kramer just made an actual joke about Italian coffee machines making drinks that taste of Marinara sauce, so actually…), this feels very much like a glimpse into a future. Not just the utopian (is it utopian? Not so sure) vision of an era in which we can have newly-minted, high-quality entertainments generated on demand, but, more prosaically (and also, significantly more imminently) this sort of setup is going to be absolutely rinsed by the same people who flooded YouTube with all the algorithm-pleasing garbage CGI videos aimed at children in the early-10s. Train GPT on the entire canon of Peppa Pig and capture an entire generation of young eyeballs with your infinite stream of highly-monetisable knockoffs – it’s the future! Honestly, this really does feel like tomorrow having arrived a bit early (if, admittedly, in still-embryonic form).
- Uncreative: I did wonder about this one… Uncreative was a smart little bit of attention-grabbing by DDB, which rather captured the imagination of certain advermarketingpr circles this week – the URL now takes you to a ‘hey, we fooled you!’ splash, but previously was a faux landing page for a new ‘entirely automated’ creative agency which was promising to REVOLUTIONISE AND DISRUPT creative services by, er, undercutting everyone else by using AI tools to come up with ideas. The nice gimmick was that they were promising to offer FREE CREATIVE while they got on their feet – you could enter an email address (DATACAPTURE!) and give a few details about the client you needed ideas for, and what you needed them to achieve, and then a few minutes later you got emailed a PDF with some potential creative solutions based on your brief. So obviously what this actually was was a promo for DDB and their innovative approach to working with AI – well done them! As I said, smart bait-and-switch – but it was also, I think, an interesting case study of Where We Are with this stuff. I had a play, and the things I got sent back were, broadly, rubbish – generic and lacking in detail or spark. Thing is, though, I’ve spent enough time in agency ‘brainstorms’ – and lots of you probably have too – and I know that most of what comes out of them is also broadly rubbish. What DDB proved with this is that a) they are good at promoting themselves, well done them; and b) AI won’t come up with any tactics that are actually good, but it will happily come up with thousands that are just as mediocre as those dreamt up by the 15 people in their mid-20s currently having a painfully-unfocused conversation about ‘maybe we could do some influencer activations?’ in your second-largest meeting room.
- BibleGPT: Do you ever think that you’d be a better person if you were able to consult a biblical scholar on every aspect of your life and behaviour? Well thanks to the magic (not magic ffs!) of GPT, now a more spiritually-coherent existence is within your grasp! BibleGPT is a small webproject which lets you ask any question you like and receive an answer based on either the King James of World English bibles – you get a bit prose relating to your question along with a couple of quotations to provide you with Godly succour as you seek to navigate a path through the sinners and the temptations. I confess to being a Catholic in only the very loosest of ways (my relationship with the Church suffered irrevocable damage when I wasn’t allowed ‘Pontius’ as a confirmation name – embarrassingly this is a true story), and as such I can’t vouch for the godliness or otherwise of the answers or whether you can guarantee yourself entry to heaven simply by consulting this app every time you have a decision to make – that said, I have so far asked it whether I should eat fish today given it’s a Friday (it correctly confirmed that there is no Biblical stipulation to do so) and whether I should (respectfully) go to a strip club (it suggested in reasonably strong terms that I should not) and, based on these answers, I feel reasonably comfortable entrusting your afterlife and general moral guidance to this bit of code. Oh, and it’s available in Spanish too, just in case you have a God-fearing abuela who’d enjoy the chance to interrogate the scriptures on the fly.
- GPT Hamlet: This is here more as a quick ‘look what you can do!’-type example rather than anything fully-formed to play with, but it’s interesting to note that when Ethan Mollick asked ChatGPT to code and script him an interactive fiction game in Twine it was able to do so with reasonable success. This is very simple, fine, but again it’s impressive less because of the final output and more because of the way the software can instantaneously spin up workable frameworks for things that you can then experiment with to your heart’s content.
- CatGPT: I think you can probably guess the joke here, but this made me laugh and it may briefly distract you from whatever real-life horror is currently gnawing at your psychic ankles (so to speak).
- Smooth Talker: I continue to be amazed at the fact that noone’s commissioned a ‘why the immediate future of dating apps is an AI-assisted hellscape where you will no longer be able to assume that the person you’re messaging isn’t outsourcing the tedious business of actually talking to you to a not-particularly-sophisticated machine’ piece yet, but in my continued, futile attempts to nudge the commissioning editors of the world’s press (ALL of whom obviously read Curios, ahem) I present to you yet another service which promises to use GPT to improve your ability to chirpse strangers via text. Put in some salient point from your target’s bio, select how ‘smooth’ you want your approach to be, press a button and BOOM! You will be the grateful recipient of some…well, based on my brief experiment, some truly mediocre attempts at starting a conversation. Between this, and the terrifying extent to which teenage boys appear to be horny for the toothy AI monstrosities, I do wonder whether this tech is over the next few years going to prove the final nail in the coffin of the ability of teenage boys to relate to and engage with…well, with anyone tbh.
- Stelfie: You might have seen these doing the rounds over the past few weeks – the person behind the Stelfie project (I’m going to take a wild guess and suggest that they’re called ‘Stefano’ or something similar) has found a certain area of latent space in (what I think is) Stable Diffusion that is letting him produce some rather excellent images, imagining what it might have looked like had he (or the avatar he has created to represent him) been present at various points in history with a mobile phone, and what his selfies (SELFIE/STELFIE! DO YOU SEE?!?!) might have looked like. So, we have ‘bloke in Ancient Rome taking a selfie’, bloke taking selfies with Darwin and Einstein, bloke taking a selfie at the building of the pyramids…you get the idea. This is where the most fun/interesting AI image stuff lives at the moment, if you ask me – people finding particular visual areas that interest them and then going deep within those to see what they can make/find. I do find it fascinating to wonder about the extent to which these sorts of very distinct visual styles are going to become protectable, though – might it be possible for an individual or organisation to stake a claim to a specific area of visual latent space? Does that question even make sense? Am I hopelessly out of my depth? All excellent questions.
- Infinicity: Much like the first link in this section, this feels like a window on a coming future that’s not quite finished cooking yet. Infinicity is a research project and paper which is aiming to create generative cityscapes, from maps to 3d models to ACTUAL NAVIGABLE 3D ENVIRONMENTS, all automatically – this is obviously all INCREDIBLY complicated and maths-y and, frankly, beyond my comprehension, but the website does an excellent job of explaining what’s going on (well, if you exclude all the really hard bits that I don’t understand) and, most excitingly, shows you all sorts of videos and examples of what the generated cities look like and how you can move through them, and, look, they look awful, muddy and indistinct and oddly-reminiscent of a very particular era of videogame graphics circe 1998, but, equally, this is practically witchcraft and I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how amazing the potential of this stuff is, from gaming to architecture to scenarioplanning…dizzying, honestly.
- Another Tutorial On How To Make Talking Avatars Using AI: I actually played around with the steps outlined in this Twitter thread for a few hours this week, and it’s remarkable how ‘easy’ it all is – I mean, look, the stuff I created was…significantly less shiny than the examples in these videos, but the process described here does actually work, and those of you with more patience and a greater fundamental desire to create an AI-generated talking head might find this useful. Again, if nothing else this demonstrates how simple it is to create (for example, off the top of my head) a character to front all of your corporate training videos (God, what a soulcrushingly dull example, sorry).
- Ocean Art Underwater Photography Contest 2022: OH MY GOD THE MYSTERIES OF THE DEEP ARE AMAZING! I feel slightly conflicted about these images – on the one hand, they are amazing and astonishing and crikey the sea is a remarkable place; on the other, they are…unsettling, on occasion, and do rather reinforce my fairly deeply-held conviction that the sea is a terrifying place that we should perhaps not explore too much more thoroughly lest we finally awaken the kraken. I mean, just look at the image entitled “A Male Weedy Seadragon Carries Pink Eggs On Its Tail” and then try telling me that that creature isn’t Not Of This Planet (also, parenthetically, ‘weedy seadragon’ is SUCH a brilliantly-sh1t name for a seabeast).
- Dear Gillian: This is a super-interesting project that any female readers of Curios might want to get involved with – particularly those who remember the Nancy Friday books, which, for the unaware, were a series of explorations of human sexuality written from the 1970s, based on anonymous interviews with hundreds of people (initially women, but latterly also men) about their sexual fantasies. If you’ve never had the chance to check them out, I cannot recommend them highly enough – partly because of the fact that human sexuality is ENDLESSLY fascinating, and partly because, let’s be honest, it’s just some absolutely excellent smut (though, er, it’s probably worth pointing out that the original books were VERY explicit and you might feel a bit funny about visiting a zoo for a while afterwards). Anyway, 50 years on from the original book on female fantasies, a new project is seeking to ask similar questions of a more modern audience – the name, ‘Dear Gillian’, is because it’s being fronted up by Gillian Anderson, under whose name the resulting collection will be published by Bloomsbury – and so clicking the link will take you to a form where you can submit your own (entirely anonymous) sexual fantasy for potential inclusion. If nothing else I will be hugely-interested to see to what extent technology and the web bleed into these more modern fantasies – or, indeed, the extent to which they don’t.
- Groundhog Day: While obviously we’re all away of Punxatawny Phil, until I found this site I had no idea that there were in fact a host of OTHER weather-predicting rodents scattered across NOrth America and Canada, each of whom have also laid down their prognostication as to whether or not Winter is finally going to fcuk off. Sadly it turns out that the majority of the weathergophers have decided that we’re in for another six weeks of cold and misery, but at the very least you can explore this website and learn more about the various meteorological seers (including the fact that the one from Pennsylvania is, inexplicably, called ‘Poor Richie’, which has made me feel unaccountably sorry for the miserable, cold little fcuker).
- Valentine’s Day Cards: These aren’t particularly exciting or ‘webby’, but, equally, I laughed more than I expected to when presented with the option to send my girlfriend an e-card which reads, for no reason that I can seem to find, ‘Robert’. These are personalisable should you desire, but, honestly, I think the options they offer as defaults are pretty strong too, and I would personally be charmed to get a card whose cover read “you absolute mess”.
LET’S GO BACK TO THE LATE-90s NOW WITH THIS SUPERB DJ KRUSH MIX!
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD ABOUT THE TWITTER API THING AND ALL THE BRILLIANT, CREATIVE AND FUN THINGS THAT THAT FCUKING MAN IS ABOUT TO KILL, PT.2:
- The Sindhu Sesh Remix Competition: One of the nicest musical finds of last year was my discovery of the Sindhu Sesh musical universe (I like to imagine it like Marvel, but a bit more ‘provincial pub, scampi basket and cheap cocaine hoofed in an outside lavatory’ than ‘multibillion dollar interconnected film franchise behemoth), as evidenced by Pete and Bas, whose single ‘Mr Worldwide’ I featured here last Summer. Anway, there’s now a competition running to find the best remix featuring Pete and Bas’s unique vocal stylings – if you’re any sort of musician. I can’t encourage you strongly enough to download the vocal tracks and go WILD – the winning entry will be featured on their next single and will get all the kudos you’d expect for adding some terrifying 180bpm beats to their already slightly fighty vocals.
- Calligrapher: A little AI handwriting tool, which I don’t think serves any purpose at all beyond the aesthetic – what’s hugely impressive about this (to my ignorant mind, at least) is that it really is generating the writing on the fly each time. In an era in which it’s hard not to obsess about our imminent obsolescence in the face of increased machine competence, it’s good to know that their handwriting’s fcuking terrible too.
- The Official UFO App: Or, to give it its official title, ‘Enigma Labs’ – either way, if you’ve been waiting for a way to tell the world about all the times the silver, saucer-eyed aliens have seen fit to choose YOU for a probing then this is very much the app for you. Admittedly it’s not fully launched yet, but there’s an iOS beta that you can sign up for (I like the fact that they are prioritising iPhone users, as though aliens are design status slags and have a preference for showing themselves to people who worship at the churches of Ive and Jobs) and the app will eventually provide anyone worldwide with the opportunity to upload details of alien sightings along with supporting evidence, which will then be analysed by the app’s ML code to determine whether or not it’s a real sighting or a hoax (should…should we be asking questions as to how they’re benchmarking that?). “Enigma is the most trusted, frictionless place to report a sighting and the largest queryable UAP database in the world. Our platform continues to run machine learning on over 270k citizen and military reports across every country, awarding every sighting an anomaly score based on multivariate models. We are building tools for everyone to deconflict sightings with identifiable variables , glean insights, and connect to other people with similar sighting stories.” I am almost tempted to get an iPhone, just to access the incredible community I can already tell will coalesce around this.
- Housr: This is a smart idea – Housr is an app which is seeking to DISRUPT (yes, I know, but bear with me) the student rental housing market, making it simpler for landlords to list properties for students to rent, and for students to find suitable housing, and housemates, and deal with deposits and contracts and all the tedious and frankly complicated stuff that Iargely ignored (which is perhaps why my second year of university saw me living in a flat that might charitably have been disguised as ‘squalid’, and with a sofa which gave my friend Paul what looked suspiciously like chemical burns). This, honestly, strikes me as an uncomplicatedly smart business concept – it’s currently only running in Manchester, I think, but will expand over the coming year.
- A Man Sitting On A Couch Looking At Something: I LOVE THIS. Another wonderful webartprojectthing via Naive Weekly (there are a few in here this week, and this is your semi-regular reminder to sign up if you’re into this sort of thing), this is by Fred Wordie who, for a week last year, set up a camera pointing at his sofa and got software to surveil him via said camera, with the machine seeking to interpret his movements and positions into recognisable actions. The resulting site is a strange, dissociated selection of what the machine ‘saw’ each time it ‘looked’ – a man sitting on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa, a man lying on a sofa with a bottle in his mouth…this shouldn’t be as affecting as it is, and yet the dissociated fragments of life that pop out here and the ambiguity in how one might interpret the rather bald descriptions, make this something really rather wonderful and unsettling. If nothing else, there’s definitely an ad campaign in the broad theme of this (apologies to Fred if this sullies the otherwise pure nature of your art! Sorry man!).
- The Doorstep: Also via Naive comes this lovely, small web project – a digital shoe rack, where Azlen Elsa is inviting people to submit photos of their shoes for inclusion. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT?? Unless, of course, Azlen has an unannounced shoe fetish, but let’s presume that that’s not the case here.
- Catch Cameras: Via Dan – thanks Dan! – comes this site, selling cameras, which briefly transported me back to a simpler time a decade or so ago when ‘The Hipster’ was still a thing. Catch is selling small film cameras – with real film! Actual, physical film! That you need to get developed! – which are beautifully-designed (if you think that the absolute apogee of compact camera design was the 1970s) and to me feel oddly reminiscent of the Olden Days when Instagram’s logo was still designed to look like a physical photography device, and Hipstagram was still a thing…anyway, this is basically charging you £60 for a nice-looking point-and-shoot film device, but if you’ve decided that 2023 is the year you get more ‘mindful’ about your photography practice then a) fcuk off and don’t come back; b) this may tick a box or two. There is something particularly funny about how the shop page features actual instructions on how to go about getting the film processed, to the point that they actually feel the need to write ‘Google ‘film development’’ (and by ‘funny’ I mean ‘horribly, cruelly ageing’).
- FatMap: I have never been skiing. Or snowboarding. Or snowshoeing, or wingsuitgliding, or ice-climbing, or any mountainous pursuits, really. In part because skiing was always a bit pricey, a bit because I am almost certain to return with fewer functioning knees than is ordinarily considered ideal. If you, though, are more Snow Brave than I am and don’t mind either the cold or the possibility of spending several months in traction as doctors attempt to reconstruct the shredded remnants of your cruciate and meniscus, then you might enjoy FatMap, which, seemingly, is like Strava but for mountainous sports (on reflection, if you’re into this sort of stuff then you quite possibly know about this anyway, but fcukit) and which contains all sorts of interesting information about slopes and gradients and snowfall, as well as allowing you to conduct a silent vendetta against all those people who are better at falling down the side of a mountain than you are (it’s just gravity ffs, stop showing off).
- Seeing Theory: This is a really great piece of interactive explanation from Brown University in the US – it’s an explanation of probability and statistics that is delivered with such wonderful visual and interactive flair that even someone as fundamentally incapable of grasping numerical concepts as I am can emerge with a half-coherent explanation as to how some of this stuff works (ok, quarter-coherent). There’s nothing in here that’s particularly new on its own, but it’s just a superb example of how to use coding and interactivity to help introduce and explain complex concepts; it does feel like brands and businesses, particularly ones in complicated industries, don’t really have any excuse for not using more tools like this in their communications.
- All The Superbowl Ads: It’s nearly that time of the year again, when two teams of pituitary meatheads spend four hours hitting each other while several hundred million spectators continue working on their long-term ‘Mission Diabetes’ project – oh, and a bunch of people in advermarketingpr spend far too much time analysing the adverts. This is YouTube’s SUPERBOWL AD CENTRE, which you might want to bookmark should you decide you want to have an opinion on who ‘won’ the ad breaks this year. FWIW (and I have only bothered to watch a handful) I get a rather weird feeling from Snap’s promo, like it’s been dropped in here via a timewarp from the past, when we all thought more positively about the digital future and ‘AR donuts’ felt like a fun toy rather than something to gaze at hungrily.
- Lighthouse Friends: I confess that in the early weeks of this year I have been feeling somewhat…unmoored, and I have found myself wishing on occasion that I felt strongly or passionately enough about…well, about anything, really, to want to devote myself to it with wholehearted abandon. Basically I want to feel about…well, anything really, the same way that the person behind this website feels about the lighthouses of North America. THEY HAVE VISITED ALL OF THEM (well the ones in the US at least) and taken pictures! You can read their notes on EVERY SINGLE ONE! Just imagine caring so much about something that you’re motivated to embark upon a project so wonderfully, perfectly pointless/meaningful (delete per your perspective) as this! Anyway, lighthouses! Do…do I need therapy?
- Illustrated People: This is not only a great photoproject but an ad campaign waiting to happen, and given this is apparently 10 years old I’m slightly amazed that it hasn’t been used already. Thomas Mailaender used a UV lamp to ‘burn’ temporary images onto his subject’s skin, photographing the impressions before they faded, creating permanent mementos of the vanishingly ephemeral – honestly, if you’re after some creative inspiration for any campaigns relating to summer holidays and the like, this feels PERFECT.
- Growing: This is just GLORIOUS – Growing is a digital poem, created by Olly Bromham, which creates a cascade of words across your browser window, each linking to a Wikipedia entry; I have no idea at all how the program is choosing the vocabulary, but the words chosen are FABULOUS, all crunchy and chewy and delightful to speak aloud, and their procession across the page creates a deliciously sonorous composition which doesn’t make any sense at all but which creates a sort of…texture, if that makes sense, that I find almost perfectly-pleasing. Also, it has just taught me that picrocarmine means “A stain made from picric acid and indigo carmine”, which is just lovely.
- Squeaky Clean Toys: Can I have a quick show of hands, please – how many of you would buy a, er, ‘pre-loved’ sextoy? Well, thankfully I can’t see any of you and so have no idea which of you are more…relaxed than others when it comes to dildosharing, but presuming that at least one of you put your hand up then YOU’RE WELCOME! In fairness, these people do give the impression that they know what they’re doing – they clearly state that most toys can’t in fact be recycled, and they have lots of information about porous vs non-porous materials, and there are obvious environmental benefits to handing down your Bad Dragon from generation to generation rather than simply leaving future humans with the puzzle of the Anthropocene Dildolayer to unravel – but, equally, WHO WANTS A PRE-LOVED SEXTOY?!?! Anyway, er, this exists.
- Back Scratching Simulator: It’s not, fine, a HUGELY accurate simulation of scratching someone’s back, but it IS a fun little game which caused my brain to ache in pleasing and unusual ways. How quickly can you press the right key combinations and get that itch scratched?
- Gaming Like It’s 1927; Last up in the ‘miscellaneous links’ section, a wonderful collection of small games, all created as part of the recent ‘Gaming Like It’s 1927’ GameJam, which saw designers invited to come up with quick-and-dirty game prototypes (some digital, some not) based on works from 1927 which have recently entered the public domain in the US. So there’s a Tempest clone taking visual inspiration from the works of Salvador Dali, another which takes place in a feline-themed version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, one based on the writings of AA Milne…I’ve only tried a handful of the 20 games linked to from here, and they’re very much on the ‘unpolished and experimental’ end of the spectrum, but there’s some brilliant creativity on display here throughout.
By Steve Seeley
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY EMPTY ONCE AGAIN!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Jonathan Hoefler: Another to file under ‘finding a promising area of latent space and just digging right into it’, Jonathan Hoelfer’s Insta feed shares images of imaginary gadgets and devices dreamt up by AI, all of which have a sort-of pleasingly baroque aesthetic to them, as though Steampunk managed to magically get less irritating.
- Adam Cole: Cole is an artist working with digital media and AI, and I came across him because of his work Kiss/Crash; his Insta feed is a pleasingly-unsettling parade of odd machine imaginings, which if you like the same sort of stuff I do you will probably enjoy quite a lot.
LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!
- MetaTrends: I imagine you’ve all long since done your trend predictions for the year and are now already engaged in scrying for next year’s imaginary futures – whilst I used to regularly point and laugh and mock these sorts of things (and, honestly, still do in the main), there was a point about 8 years ago when Grey included ‘New Witches’ as one of their trends for the coming year and I thought this so ridiculous, so utterly emblematic of the madness of agency planners and their desperate need to OWN THE ZEITGEIST, that I made fun of it mercilessly (to the point of doing so in actual print somewhere) only to find that they were absolutely fcuking right, and that the occult did indeed come back in a massive way throughout the late-2010s, driven, as they rightly predicted, by teenage girls. Which is basically a long-winded way of reminding you that you should never listen to me about ANYTHING (unless you’re paying me money, at which point all my opinions become SOLID GOLD), but also of introducing this rather useful (if, equally, VERY SILLY) piece by Matt Klein where he extracts the META-TRENDS from 50 agency trend docs and isolates the 16 broad areas of consensus. Your mileage here will vary depending, frankly, on how much of your professional life you need to spend having conversations about things like ‘the biggest colourways influencing GenAlpha soft drink consumption habits’, but I like the way that these are presented (the pithy ‘what is this, how is it expressed, how does this drive tension, how might you get involved’ format is smart) and, whilst this is all obviously b0llocks, so is your job and so you might as well play along.
- Unequality: I thought this was a really interesting essay by James Plunkett – the final in a series of three, written in partnership with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in which he explores the concept of ‘unequality’, as distinct from ‘inequality’. Plunkett defines ‘unequality’ thusly: “the distribution of income growth has gone from an upward slope to a hockey stick laid on the ground. And so unequality looks distributionally nothing like the unfair and scarred yet dynamic economy of Thatcher — the economy that made New Labour strike its famous compromise with the rich.All of which nearly rounds out our view of unequality; as well as being divided and spatial, it’s exclusive, elitist, and stagnant. But unequality also has one other essential feature: it’s stunningly homogenous. And this final characteristic feeds back into and amplifies the others.”; oddly, reading this it felt like the best evocation of the vague feeling of ‘everything is just a little bit…off’ feeling I’ve had since returning to London last year, perhaps best evoked by this line: “how does unequality feel? The answer is that it feels like we exist in two distinct countries, side by side. These cleavages are partly a question of money, but they go deeper than that. In a technological revolution like the one we’re living through now, the distinction between the vanguard economy and the laggard economy isn’t just a distinction of rich versus poor, or of high-paid versus low-paid jobs; it’s a distinction of the new versus the old — a difference not of quantity but of kind.” I thought this was excellent.
- Who Owns AI?: This is a really good overview of the commercial state of the AI market, and why it’s hard to pick a ‘winner’ from the current crop of players – and why it’s equally hard at present to see anyone carving out any sort of meaningful competitive advantage in the ‘creating layers between AI and product’ space, mainly because, as the article’s authors point out, there are no ‘moats’ – everyone playing in this space has access to the same tech, more or less, all the image stuff is using the same baseline training data, as is the text stuff, and it’s hard to see where marginal advantage happens at this stage. Business-y, as you might expect, but it feels like solid sectoral analysis.
- How Medium Is Dealing With AI: ‘How we’re going to deal with AI and what are our policies around its use?’ is a question that should be occupying more businesses than I believe is probably currently the case – some, of course, moreso than others. Which is why it was pleasing to read this piece by Scott Lamb of Medium, outlining the publishing platform’s current policy on copy generated by or in conjunction with text-generating AIs – the quick overview is ‘you have to disclose if what you are publishing is wholly or partly AI-generated, and if we suspect you are not disclosing this we reserve the right to remove said copy’. What’s good about this, in my opinion at least, is that it’s clear, it’s user-focused, it reflects concerns expressed by the community of writers using the platform, and it acknowledges the need for fluid policy development and revision as the technology and people’s expectations change. Ok, fine, it’s not SUPER-thrilling as a piece of prose but sometimes (ok, rarely) ‘useful’ trumps ‘fun’.
- Using AI To Boost Creativity: More from Ethan Mollick here (who you really should follow if you’re interested in the ‘how’ of ‘using AI for professional reasons), who is pleasingly positive about the scope for Chat-GPT in particular – in this article he runs through some simple ways in which you can use the interface to help you generate and refine ideas, many of which will be of interest to all you poor advermarketingprdrones out there – I particularly enjoyed the ‘generating names for new products or businesses’ example. Again, I think it’s important to be realistic about this stuff – none of what it generates is going to win you a Lion right now, but that’s absolutely fine because neither is most of the rest of the work that you or anyone else does, most of which is involved in creating content noone will ever read for companies and products 99.9999999% of the world’s population has never heard of. I’m going to throw it out there – I don’t think writing p1ss-poor ‘thought leadership’ content for morons to ‘Like’ on LinkedIn is not a category of work we should be particularly concerned with keeping for ourselves.
- Drawing Comics With GPT: One of my favourite things of 2010, and one of the web projects that first inspired me to start writing Curios, oddly enough, was early webcomic sensation AxeCop, where artist Ethan Nicoll took notes from the mad stories his little brother Malachai would make up when playing and then illustrated them to professional standard – honestly, the original strips were some of the funniest things I had ever read (and, checking back, they still are – honestly, just read this, it is fcuking PERFECT). I was reminded of that when reading this piece about an artist experimenting with getting ChatGPT to write single-panel newspaper comics; there’s a certain weird, blank surreality to some of the creations that vaguely remind me of the unhinged parade of non sequiturs that is ‘talking to an under-10’.
- Bubble City: As Twitter continues its slow process of disintegration – turns out that sacking huge swathes of the staff DOES have a material effect on platform functioning and stability! – so the general chuntering about ‘what next?’ continues. I found this white paper – which is by Monica Anderson from October last year – about their vision for a different platform for text-based conversations, called ‘Bubble City’, genuinely fascinating. This is all theory, but as a set of principles and ideals around which to organise a potential new network it strikes me as, broadly, pretty smart (although I think Monica and I have slightly different approaches to legality and content moderation – hers is…pretty loose!: “to the extent permitted by law, there should be no censorship of posted messages. You can use the system for illegal purposes by for instance posting about drugs for sale and people wanting to buy those drugs would be able to find those messages. And so would the police. Without paying a penny”). Worth reading, in part if you’re interested in social platforms and how they function, but also more generally as an example of how to set out this sort of thing in a really clear and cogent manner.
- We’ve Lost The Plot: I think this is a really interesting article that completely misunderstands and misuses the term ‘metaverse’ (insofar as it means anything anyway) and by so doing rather undermines its otherwise-good central argument; the piece is basically about how everything is now entertainment here in the great ludic paradise that is 2023(!), and that by extension we are becoming conditioned to narrativise events in a way that isn’t necessarily healthy or positive – whether that’s the desire to see everything via the lens of entertainments, or the increasing degree to which we are all trained to perceive of ourselves as principal protagonists in a tightly-scripted modern drama (comedy/tragedy – delete per your own personal flavour of narcissism). All of which feels true and sounds interesting, but which is then slightly ruined (to my mind, at least) by the author’s slightly hamfisted attempts to make this OF THE NOW by linking it to the broad concept of the metaverse which, honestly, no. Still, ignore that part of it and this is an interesting read – see this passage, which if you remove the nonsensical pre-colon opening is actually…true? “Life in the metaverse brings an aching contradiction: We have never been able to share so much of ourselves. And, as study after study has shown, we have never felt more alone. Fictions, at their best, expand our ability to understand the world through other people’s eyes. But fiction can flatten, too. Recall how many Americans, in the grim depths of the pandemic, refused to understand the wearing of masks as anything but “virtue signaling”—the performance of a political view, rather than a genuine public-health measure. Note how many pundits have dismissed well-documented tragedies—children massacred at school, families separated by a callous state—as the work of “crisis actors.” In a functioning society, “I’m a real person” goes without saying. In ours, it is a desperate plea.”
- My Year as a Hot Girl For Hire: Or, “what it’s like working for OnlyFans, being one of the people who acts as the interface between performer and fans” – to which the answer, in case you hadn’t guessed, is ‘sad and grubby and empty in ways you probably didn’t automatically consider when you read the headline’.
- The Rise of the ‘Dupe’: Or ‘how having knockoff gear used to be considered socially ruinous when I was a child, but is now apparently totally fine’ – which, honestly, is a good thing! This Buzzfeed piece looks at how there is a growing cachet associated with being able to find items that mimic the designer aesthetic for a non-designer budget – there’s something interesting in what this means for the status of the logo, and indeed whether this is something that will be reversed when (lol if?) the current economic horrorshow rights itself somewhat.
- Amazon Is Getting Worse: Timely given the less-than-stellar results just published, this is a decent companion piece to last week’s essay by Doctorow on digital ‘ensh1ttification’ which looks at the specific ways in which Amazon has managed to ‘ensh1ttify’ itself over the past decade or so (at least from the point of view of customers and many vendors), and what the strategy behind that might be. This is a good-if-infuriating article that does nothing to disabuse me of my firmly-held opinion that, of all the horrid companies (outside of the ones that, you know, make machines of death). Amazon is by quite a long distance the most frightening.
- Blackpilled Swag: There’s a part of me that read this article and thought it was written specifically to make people like me twitch with discomfort as they attempted to parse the language; still, if you can get around the…somewhat idiosyncratic Blackbird Spyplane house style, this is a really good read on the weird world of ‘blackpilled swag’ – more prosaically, branded merch from companies whose impact on the planet, society and our species as a whole might best be described as ‘not wholly positive’. This is interesting not just from a trends and fashion point of view, but also as a general barometer of modern nihilism – actually, there’s an idea, why don’t we replace the (increasingly meaningless and irrelevant) Doomsday Clock with a better indicator, one that tracks our growing lack of interest and engagement in the fact that we’re all careening hellwards in the handcart. Maybe we could use emoji. Oh, by the way, the Shell sweatshirt pictured in here absolutely SLAPS and would be quite the power garment to sport this weekend should you have access to one.
- Nine Ways of Looking at a Pint of Guinness: Apologies if you’re paywalled out of this but, well, I did tell you to sub to Vittles – this is a WONDERFUL piece of writing, about Guinness and pubs and the pour and what makes a ‘good pint’, and about homesickness and identity, and I enjoyed reading it so much that it was almost enough to make me abandon my lifelong hatred of any fcuker who orders a round composed entirely of Guinness when ahead of me in the queue at the bar.
- Chatting With Uri Gellar: Did you know that there was a particular Pokemon, called Kadabra in the West, which was removed from the deck as a result of a complaint by Uri Gellar? No, neither did I, but that and SO MUCH MORE Gellar-related trivia lies just a click away, and I promise you that it is worth every second of your time. This is from gaming website Kotaku, but is frankly far less about the Pokemon question (the card is being reinstated in a new edition, hence the interview) and far more about the author’s long-standing dislike of Gellar slowly-but-inevitably being worn away by the insane force of the man’s personality – I promise you that whatever you may think about Uri Gellar (“SPOON BOTHERER”, most probably) you will come away from this article having warmed to him considerably.
- The Violin Doctor: A profile of one John Becker, a Chicago resident and one of the world’s premier experts in the repair and restoration of Stradivarius violins – I was mesmerised by this, in that very particular way that sometimes happens when reading a detailed and intimate description of someone or something preternaturally skilled; honestly, this might be the quietest (I know, but you’ll see what I mean) and most relaxing thing I read all week.
- In Battersea: Owen Hatherley writes in the London Review of Books about the Nine Elms development around Battersea Power Station, and the particular, peculiar oddness of the area which has now reached some sort of developmental milestone (despite not being in any meaningful sense ‘finished’). This is only really of particular interest if you know London (and, frankly, the specific area in question), but it’s a lovely and angry piece of writing that skewers much about what feels wrong about yet another glass-and-steel-and-chrome forest being erected in an area that wasn’t necessarily crying out for one. “If ever a project has demonstrated the futility of conservation divorced from any concern with planning or social good, this is it. Yes, the original fabric of the building has been restored and ingeniously faked, but to what end? Who wants this Tate Modern for philistines, this Senate House for illiterates, this Berghain for people who can’t dance?” Well, yes, quite.
- Yes Chef: Cookery and drudgery and repetition and routine and meditation, and why doing the same thing over and over again is, occasionally, worthwhile and necessary. “Repeating something is often an act that keeps one foot in the past and one in the present. Maybe that’s why chefs can repeat the same jokes over and over again. Though the days are long days, the work painful, the same jokes help us remember when we laughed out loud the first time. But to repeat something the right way is to give up on the past and to think only of being fully present now, in every new day and moment, toward an authentic future.” As someone who’s been repeating this same Friday routine for..too long, I can only agree.
- Holiday in Antarctica: Finally in this week’s longreads, this is a beautiful, funny and genuinely romantic account of Roxane Gay and her wife Debbie Millman took a cruise to Antarctica – Gay writes the prose, while Millman intersperses illustrations and short captioned notes, and it’s so lovely to read something that works as a shared account of common experience; it is honestly not possible to read this and not feel a little warmer and happier at the end, I promise. Plus, it contains some EXCELLENT photographs of massive lumps of ice, should you fancy seeing some before they all melt.
By Michael Sowa
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: