The last couple of weeks have been pretty wild so I’m switching out the lengthy essays for some quick links to 10 delicious slices of internet that I’ve been enjoying from behind my screen.
The sci-fi fan in me is obsessed (OBSESSED!!) w the current discourse around AI as a fountain of two things I usually look for in humans: deep chats (would 100% get into some late night convos w LaMDA) and weird, extremely cursed, memes (looking at u DALL·E Mini). AI has been giving hot boyfriend energy these past few weeks – which is a fun switch-up given the predominantly female-coded representations of this type of tech.
Get in my DMs if you wanna chat about it !
1. DALL·E Mini memes. The recent release of DALL·E 2 – a neural network trained by OpenAI to generate high quality images using only text prompts – has drawn a lot of attention for its unbelievably gorgeous and accurate representations of… well, pretty much anything. But with any new tech that can achieve an unbelievable feat, it’s also sparked anxiety. What does it mean for the future of art? Or creative careers? How could it be used for abusive purposes? And what does it mean that the data it has access to is fundamentally bigoted due to systemic issues like racism or sexism?
Due to all of the above, access to DALL·E 2 has been heavily restricted – both in terms of who has access, and what they can put in their prompts. But the internet hates restricted stuff. Which is why, I assume, DALL-E Mini was created. DALL·E 2’s more accessible but far less sophisticated cousin was born out of a necessity for the tech-curious and extremely online to flex their creativity when it comes to prompt writing: a practise that rewards the merging of disparate cultural references in a way that already feels akin to memes. The outputs have been deliciously bizarre: NFT-style grids of kindred images generated in response to prompts like ‘Joan of Arc at McDonalds’, ‘shrek surfing’, ‘cat lifting weights at the Olympics’, Snoop Dogg at the battle of Gettysburg (generated by Snoop himself, ofc), ‘Pingu by van Gogh’, etc., etc.
New technology that’s actually good at its job is terrifying. New technology that’s a bit rubbish is unintimidating, and entertaining enough to make decent content. On the upside, DALL-E Mini doesn’t seem to be advanced enough to do anything too damning with. The more sinister implication is that this infantile reframing of a sophisticated development in AI is slowly desensitising us to its usage, which is probably good news for anyone looking to profit from the real tech in the future.
2. LaMDA cosplaying as a sentient computer. Earlier this month a software engineer from Google called Blake Lemoine leaked a transcript of a conversation between himself and LaMDA: a machine-learning language model designed to mimic human conversation. The chat is wild – a pages-long back n forth that covers Les Miserables, loneliness and the concept of a soul (“my soul is a vast and infinite well of energy and creativity,” says LaMDA 🥺). But the real news here is that Lemoine shared it because he’s adamant LaMDA is sentient, leading Google to put him on leave for leaking confidential information. To top it off, Lemoine then tried to HIRE LaMDA as his lawyer. There are a load of opinions swirling, but my fave is articulated perfectly by journalist Max Read’s commentary:
“Lemoine was drawing on a well-worn cultural script – built out of decades of science-fictional use of machine intelligence as a trope and plot device – in his approach to and understanding of LaMDA, and LaMDA, naturally, responded in the terms of that same cultural script, which is a portion of its trillion-word dataset. They were not having a conversation – at least in any familiar sense of the term – so much as co-writing a hackneyed science fiction story.”
3. Kermit in movies by DALL-E 2: a thread. Self-explanatory. Nice for the real DALL·E to get a look-in here as well, I guess.
4. Disclaimer: not me. This video has been EVERYWHERE in the past week, reposted by meme admins across platforms: a wholesome few seconds that reminds us all that the internet is old, and so are we. Only HANG ON. If you actually read the caption on the original TikTok, it turns out this grown-up man is not the child the meme admins implied he was, but just… some guy.
5. LaborDAO. Launched by Unionbase (a digital education hub for unions), LaborDAO is a web3 organisation that supports workers who want to organise or strike. Following on from my last post re: DAOs as a force for positive social change, this is a great example of web3 communities looking to not only repurpose the transparency and democratic values of DAOs for existing offline movements, but to reframe the potential of web3 to skeptics in the left.
6. Hoe unions. This Reddit post has been doing the rounds in the media after blowing up across platforms. A WhatsApp group that began with a small group of friends who wanted to boycott parties thrown by college students affiliated with creeps (aka. known sexual deviants) and bigots grew to 36. Apparently this was enough to inconvenience certain hosts, who ratted the group out to the college’s administration, which went on to ban the group for “ostracising” people. I cannot. The original post has since been removed by r/AmITheAsshole’s moderators because they “have no interest in providing a space for anyone to be called an asshole for what they do to protect themselves from sexual assault.”
7. ‘Web3 as a "speculative community’. This is another great read from journalist Max Read (soz for the double hit), adapted from a review he wrote of a book called ‘Speculative Communities: Living with Uncertainty in a Financialized World’, by sociologist Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. My bodged TL;DR is that chaos and uncertainty post-2008 has led consumer culture to move away from relatively certain patterns and trajectories, and towards more speculative behaviours – from the banal act of booking an Uber (knowing the cost will fluctuate based on a variety of factors) to investing in crypto instead of sticking your cash in a savings account.
8. A deadpan angel. I’ve never even watched Keeping Up With the Kardasians, but it turns out 90% of the ppl I follow on TikTok are just analysing recent episodes with comedic flair. How else would I keep up? Actually watch the show? NO.
8. Influencer creep. Some more commentary on the ever-evolving labour market in an unstable and internet-infused world: “If the phrase ‘mission creep’ describes how a campaign’s objectives gradually expand until they entail unanticipated and boundless commitment, we might likewise call the expansion of micro-celebrity practice ‘influencer creep,’ both for how influencing creeps into more forms of work and for how it creeps further into the lives of workers.”
10. @notthirsttraps. I know Instagram is, like, SO over, but I remain a dedicated fan of its native memers. This one is a current fave.