You know, WSJ, that article would’ve been a hundred times more interesting had you asked power users, researchers, people actually at the bleeding edge that question instead of Tom who likes to admit he’s cutting corners for his daughter’s wedding speech.

I reject this entire line of reasoning. Two years after AOL hit the Internet was everywhere. It was a Tom Hanks movie five years after that. Four years after Facebook opened to the public we were watching a David Fincher hagiography. Two years after the alt. heirarchy in Usenet became populated... nobody cared because it was never adopted by normies.

The idea is that LLMs are going to change the fucking world. There are Superbowl commercials about how it's going to change the fucking world. The Techbros won't shut up about how it's going to change the fucking world. What's it being used for? Phoning in best man speeches.

I accidentally clicked on an AI-generated "Star Wars in '50s Cinemascope" clickbait video on Youtube. It was AI-generated dreck. Youtube served me up dozens more. Within a week, it was serving me videos about how to get lots of clicks for generating '50s Cinemascope AI-generated dreck. Your podcast - you said it "blew your mind." Would you recommend someone else listen to it? Or did it do a journeyman's job of summarizing text in such a way that you didn't have to read it?

mk linked to a video with wrong-digited shit just the other day but that's beside the point - okay, your tool now perfectly replicates the thing you asked for. Why did you ask for it? What are you looking to get out of it? I'm using it to generate bullshit memes less than I used to because they aren't funny anymore. Oh, but maybe it's because I'm no good at "prompt engineering."

Look.

That took a fuckton of compute 20 years ago. It took a lot of artists. It took a lot of technicians.

It's nothing compared to this:

The '97 version was getting play like, last year. The '24 version is going to be banished to hell on December 26 because it's soulless dreck. Why is it AI? Because the marketing department is currently so stupid they forgot New Coke.

Coca Cola has no shortage of money or talent at their disposal. But they're playing the "I guess we're doing AI now" thing. You yourself did the I played with it and I can conceive of a universe where it might be useful therefore it must be thing again and lemme tell ya -

no.

I’m curious whether your thoughts have changed about the longer term consequences of this - what does this look like in a decade to you?

I still say Microsoft is pushing as hard as they are so that they can grind Google's search results to dust.

I still say the CIA salted the field with Shrimp Jesus so that people generally distrust imagery of any kind.

I still say that people can discern truth from bullshit using whatever metric works in the moment, and it doesn't matter if that metric shifts.

I was right on the cusp of needing to learn a slide rule. I took the SATs twice, once without a calculator and once with. As a high school student I spent an annoying amount of time learning how to use trig tables. I was probably one of the last people to perform any editing on a Steenbeck. The recording studio I learned in had an analog 8-track and an ADAT and was super-excited to show us the future, an install of Digidesign Sound Tools running on a Mac Plus.

LLMs are a tool. That's it. The only question is what is the tool good for. And here we are, two years on, and we're still going "maybe it'll be useful someday."