I still need to do a whole post about ChatGPT. Check this out real quick.
This is grammatical and a comprehensible story. But here’s the question: how is this any different than if I asked it to generate a story where George W. Bush and the Little Mermaid fought the Wolfman? There’s zero indication that these characters are any different at all. But of course the whole fun of imagining Bruce Springsteen and Mufasa fighting Dracula is to imagine those specific characters fighting, to see some way in which their specific tendencies play out in an invented dramatic situation. And this is a much broader issue with ChatGPT for me: so much of what it produces is mechanically sound but totally generic. I ask it to do songs or poems in the style of X, for example, and it produces stuff that has none of the attributes we associate with X.
This Week’s Posts
Monday, January 2nd - Resilience, Another Thing We Can't Talk About
Culture war is quickly shutting the door on progressive endorsements of resilience, an essential quality we all need.
Tuesday, January 3rd - This is Why You Shouldn’t Humor WooWoo (subscriber only)
We can’t be constantly accepting and forgiving of mysticism in a world where people believe Tarot cards can help them solve a murder.
Friday, January 6th - Richard Linklater, Ranked (subscriber only)
I rank the films of Richard Linklater, one of my favorites.
And we continued our book club of Jesus’ Son.
From the Archives
Song of the Week
Non-Garbage Online Reading
This is a good meditation on Richard Rorty and the rise of Trumpism. (I still like Rorty for the record.)
Book Recommendation
Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011, Lizzy Goodman, 2017
There are times when what you want from nonfiction is to dive into a fat ass text that goes into unreasonable detail about a specific subject. This book certainly fits the bill. As the title suggests, Goodman exhaustively chronicles an entire decade of American indie music in its infancy. Oral histories are often compulsively readable, and this book is no exception, filled with outsize personalities and remarkable stories. This book serves (intentionally or not) as an obituary for what we might call the “hipster” era, and more, for the very concept of a scene - in the years since, the existence of scenes like that in 2000s NYC was seriously undercut by online life and the attendant diffusion of culture. You do have to have some underlying interest or affection for some of the bands involved, but I myself was always pretty tepid on most of these bands and still had fun.
NFL Picks of the Week
I took a week off for the holidays, and then you had the horrible Damar Hamlin situation, and I feel really off my game right now. Still, we must shuffle ahead. The San Francisco 49ers might be the best team in the league; they have playoff seeding to play for; the Arizona Cardinals are a bad team with a backup quarterback. And yet I’m picking the Arizona Cardinals +14 on the road. The 49ers are hugely talented and boast the league’s best defense, but they’re not an offensively explosive team, and I think Brock Purdy’s been overhyped. I can see them taking a 10-0 lead and then grinding out the rest of the game, letting Arizona keep it close while still winning comfortably.
Season record: 10-5-0
Comment of the Week
What’s even worse is when the astrology discourse intersects with feminism, i.e. men just love to discredit astrology because it’s a stereotypically feminine interest. I could think of nothing more sexist and condescending than proudly associating irrational and anti-scientific thought with women. - Alex
That’s it. See you next week.
I have a sinking feeling that ChatGPT and other emerging AI technologies are just good enough to revolutionize the world but not good enough to actually improve it.
Some friends of mine introduced me to a game, played using an AI chatbot, where you compete as factions trying to conquer Europe. The idea is for each turn you write the start of a story about how your side wins, then let the AI finish it and see if you gain or lose territory. The fun of the game (such as it is) is in laughing at how hilariously bizarre the AI's interpretations of your prompts become and trying desperately to steer it back on track. The sense one gets very quickly is that this is a powerful artificial mind that has no idea what you need nor any ability to reliably provide it.
I've come to believe that the Internet and social media are primarily tools for generating hopelessness. The cynicism and hostility of Twitter, the bizarre identity flailing of Gen Z, and the social and political dysfunction that Freddie often writes about all make sense to me when seen through that framework. It's the result of feeling that nobody is steering the ship, that there's nobody in charge who understands how to help. And AI, I fear, will be that on steroids. Imagine the future as some dumb TikTok challenge to set your eyebrows on fire, only it's automated and now your paycheck depends on it.
I'm not sure there's any reason to "work with" ChatGPT to get particular results, but if you do want characters it portrays to have their appropriate properties, my friend David discovered that it works best with fictional worlds that have spawned lots of fan-fiction, likely because it was trained on Internet texts and therefore has more of a "sense" (it has no sense) of characters who have been depicted in lots and lots of content. So e.g. Star Trek characters in prompted AI scripts often behave and speak recognizable like themselves, whereas it will fully shit the bed if we ask it to depict Mr. and Mrs. O'Brien from "Tree of Life" at a rave (or what-have-you).