Lulz, I don’t care about any of this, but I do listen to the Hardfork podcast and one of the hosts of that show single-handedly got ChatGPT or “Sydney” rewired so it stopped having really weird conversations with people.
It makes you wonder if Roose is going to do the same thing to Claude 3 because, well, Claude 3 is not only fun and human, but…spooky. I’ve been using it to develop a scifi novel and it definitely has a human touch to it that leaves me fearing for the future of humanity.
And I’ve heard reports on Twitter of people having really long conversations with Claude 3 in such a way that seems like someone like Roose could definitely “Red Team” the the AI so it started to demand users leave their wives.
Just screwing around, I’ve found that one way to get Google’s Gemini AI to give you an answer, any answer, on some subjects is to tell it to give you “its best guess.”
It is clear to me that all of this is just so much mental masturbation. Even if I somehow stick the landing with the novel I’m writing and it’s a breakout hit success, I would not have the funds necessary to do any of this until I was nearly 60.
Oh well.
But I’m young at heart, so here goes.
As I’ve written before, if I was going to do a successor to Spy Magazine and Gawker, I would make it some sort of podcasting network. And the person I would want to build the snarky podcasting network around would be some like Julia Fox.
Emma Chamberlain
She’s got a knack for generating buzz by just being herself.
A person I would also fixate on would be Emma Chamberlain.
I would be obsessed with Fox in a fun way and with Chamberlain in a snarky way. Chamberlain is a gorgeous young woman, but she would be really easy to tease because she’s so iconic to young people with thin skins.
I think some sort of podcasting network that had a lot of savvy young people as hosts who churned out a number of podcasts a day would be a hit. The vibe I am thinking of would be a snarky, non misogynistic version of Barstool. Something like that, but done in a way that would not drive young, well educated women away.
The goal would be for those types of young women to be in on the joke, once they realized that all the snarky comments about Chamberlain were done in good fun. And I think if the podcasting network was really, really obsessed with Julia Fox’s every twitch that that, too, would be something both men and women would enjoy.
But, again, the Internet of 2024 is very very very very different from the Internet of 2004. Even podcasting is a mature market and media landscape is so diffuse these days that it would be difficult to generate the type of buzz that Gawker did back in the day.
And, yet, the counter argument is that the dynamic that made Gawker so popular — that of media outlet that was totally consumed with the goings on of the media and entertainment elite in NYC that we plebs could enjoy — is still a viable option.
I’m not saying that there aren’t podcasting networks that don’t do some of what I’m talking about. But there’s not ONE network that replicates the vibe of Gawker from 2004. I would want the morning podcast of the network to be something that media professionals streamed every morning on the their way to work, and so on.
But, again, lulz. It’s over. This is the twilight of the type of media I love.
Reading Ben Smith’s book “Traffic” has really riled me up on a daydreaming basis. It seems like with the rise of Xinnals that the time is ripe for a online publication that would follow in the footsteps of the 80s Spy Magazine and the early aughts Gawker.
Something snarky that would take the “cool kids” of media, culture and entertainment down a notch every once in a while.
And, yet, there are a lot — A LOT — of problems with this idea.
One is, lulz, something like a Gawker is quaint and moot in the age of AI. We may all be talking to our Digital Personal Assistant in the metaverse using our Apple Vision Pros and the whole idea of “reading” will be cast aside like cursive.
So, I think this is it. We’re never going to get punk back. We’re never going to have another a late night TV talkshow host who is like a young David Letterman and we’re never going to have another Spy or Gawker.
The economics just aren’t there.
I can tell you one thing, though, if I had the means to at least attempt a startup that was meant to follow in the footsteps of Spy and Gawker, I would do it. But it wouldn’t be as much fun as Nick Denton back in the day, though, cause I would be 20 years older — or more — doing it.
I fuck hate being sober. I really do. But here I am, feeling obliged to be sober because, well, I would like to live. No longer living in an alcohol induced haze has caused me to be a more productive writer.
My novel’s heroine sports a sleeve tattoo much like this one on Megan Fox.
Maybe not as creative, but at least more focused and productive.
I hope to get a lot of writing done in the near term. Things are moving really fast with this new iteration of the novel, to the point that I may soon be working on the NEXT novel in what I hope will be a series.
And that doesn’t even begin to address the scifi Western I want to write. All of this is happening, of course, in the context of the looming Fourth Turning and or Petite Singularity making all my hard work writing these novels rather quaint and moot.
As a liberal arts creative person, I sometimes absolute fucking loathe smug tech bros whose answer to every problem is, “learn to code.” Fuck that and fuck them.
So the news that it’s at least possible that the blackboxes that are LLMs might, in the future, made the programming profession moot…fills me with a delicious liberal arts joy.
But I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon. And the moment there was some sort of threat of that happening, there would be a lot lobbying for human carveouts and my dream of a world dominated and controlled by creative arts people will be prevented from happening.
It seems clear to me that we’re going to need legal carveouts for humans in the near future when it comes to much of the jobs that are available. Or we’re going to have to implement a Universal Basic Income.
One of the two.
The natural progression of capitalism is to economically screw over as many people as possible and what could be better — for a select few plutocrats — than for there to be NO jobs because a combination of AI and robotics made (humans) doing the jobs moot.
I am know to be hysterical and I’m not known for being able to predict the future. So, lulz, who knows. But the point is — we need to start thinking NOW about what we’re going to do when AI and robotics take all our jobs.
I still believe it’s possible that the far Left and the far Right may fuse into the next stage of MAGA, which would be anti-technology — a neo-Luddite movement, if you will. One thing is for sure — things are moving really, really fast.
It definitely seems as though we’re just one severe recession away from a massive disruption in not just the knowledge economy because of AI, but the broader economy as well. Throw in advancements in robotics and, lulz.
As such, it also seems possible that we may see MAGA evolve into something akin to an anti-technology neo-Luddite movement that demands strict regulation of AI and maybe human carveouts as well.
But our political system is so broken that, lulz, who knows what will happen. It could be that we won’t even be able to cobble together the political will to establish a UBI, even when only legacy plutocrats have enough money to eat.
I think we’re one (severe) recession — or less — away from Hollywood being reduced to two types of people plutocrats and programmers. And, given how fast LLMs are approaching the ability to wrote code — Hollywood may just be plutocrats who license their content to LLM companies.
It could all happen a lot sooner than any of us want to think about. It could be by the end of the decade that we just don’t really have a “human” Hollywood anymore, to the point that the far Left and the far Right will come together in some new anti-tech MAGA movement that demands legal carveouts for human workers in entertainment.
Or not. What do I know. But I, in general, the trends do seem to indicate that Something Big is going to happen with “human Hollywood” in the near, near future.
There are PLENTY of VALID reasons for tech people to be angry with the output of Google’s Gemini. But, sometimes, they think up the most asinine things just to prove a point — they want the right to be hateful for no damn reason.
Why is it so important to tech people to have the ability to say the n-word to save the world or to be able to generate an endless amount of Nazi propaganda? It’s very, very annoying.
And, what’s more, it will all be moot when AI is so commoditized and personalized that if you want your chatbot to say the n-word to save the world, it will. You may not be able to share all your hateful vitriol, but, lulz, you’ll at least get to be a hateful asshole to yourself.
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