Buoyed by the flood

I have a few links and thoughts I want to share, about both the internet and AI. The internet stuff fol­lows immediately; AI is further down.

Here is Rachel Binx, a bril­liant artist and cre­ative technologist, on the unbear­able same­ness of the modern web.

I love the spirit of Rachel’s Unicode Arrows, an addi­tion to the “quick lookup ref­er­ence page” genre … with merch 🤩

Here is a project very aligned with this newsletter:

(we)bsite is a living col­lec­tion of internet dreams from people like you, inhab­i­tants of the internet. It aims to create space to hold, show, and uplift everyday visions and hopes for the internet.

Here’s an inter­esting app called feeeed, beau­ti­fully pre­sented.

The app’s creator, Nate Parrott, writes:

More aspirationally, it’s an app that lets you “follow any­thing,” including data sources that are per­sonal to you, like your step count, weather, and any­thing you wish to remind your­self of from time to time.

The “any­thing” extends to arbi­trary por­tions of web pages, which you can clip and “follow” live — like magic peep­holes across the web. This fea­ture is built into the Arc web browser, too — Nate works at The Browser Company, so I sus­pect this is no coincidence — and, in both places, I find it very appealing and provocative. Transclusion-y, even!

You know … I con­tinue to think my web e-book template is pretty great 🤓

The spec­i­fi­ca­tions for RSS and Atom were “finished” in the mid-2000s. I believe there’s a great oppor­tu­nity now to crack them open again, even (or especially) in a bottom-up, unsanc­tioned way.

As an example, here’s Colin Walker’s pro­posal for a “now” name­space in RSS, building on the idea of the /now status page.

Even if Colin’s pro­posal here isn’t exactly the right next step, I believe the simple act of thinking about these trans­for­ma­tions and extensions — describing and pitching them — is extremely useful and pro­duc­tive. It’s good practice; a way of reviving atro­phied muscles.

*whispers* I think the cranky RSS spec-heads have all retired. Let’s mess around!

Here’s some­thing called a bridging system, intended to “increase mutual under­standing and trust across divides, cre­ating space for pro­duc­tive conflict, deliberation, or cooperation.” From the paper’s abstract:

We give exam­ples of bridging sys­tems across three domains: rec­om­mender sys­tems on social media, soft­ware for con­ducting civic forums, and human-facilitated group deliberation. We argue that these exam­ples can be more mean­ing­fully under­stood as processes for atten­tion-allocation (as opposed to “content distribution” or “amplification”), and develop a cor­re­sponding frame­work to explore similarities — and oppor­tu­ni­ties for bridging — across these seem­ingly dis­parate domains. We focus par­tic­u­larly on the poten­tial of bridging-based ranking to bring the ben­e­fits of offline bridging into spaces which are already gov­erned by algorithms.

This choice is easy

I never want to be too scold-y, but permit me one judgment:

Anyone who adds one of those email newsletter pop-ups to a web­site demeans them­selves and makes the world worse for everyone else.

People and orga­ni­za­tions add them because “they work”: a web­site with a pop-up recruits more email sub­scribers than one without. If I’m run­ning a web­site for, say, a non-profit devoted to nursing sick pen­guins, I will of course argue: “More sub­scribers means more donations … and think of the pen­guins!”

But the oper­ator of the web­site for swamp restora­tion says the same thing. And of the web­site selling custom-embroidered tea towels. Think of the embroiderers!

This is a col­lec­tive action problem. Any of these decisions, con­sid­ered separately, is rel­a­tively inoffensive … and those pen­guins ARE in rough shape … but all together, they pro­duce a web that is shock­ingly ugly and rude.

It runs deeper than that.

The philoso­pher Immanuel Kant rea­soned his way into a hot-rodded ver­sion of the Golden Rule: treat humans as ends unto them­selves, never means to an end.

The newsletter pop-up treats web­site vis­i­tors as means only — a face­less flow of inter­ac­tions to be optimized, rather than a parade of indi­vid­uals having real expe­ri­ences in the world.

No indi­vidual in his­tory ever said, “Wow, I’m glad this web­site blasted a newsletter pop-up in my face.” Certainly, no web designer ever said it, con­fronted with one. And yet: the pop-ups, they are blasted.

I am not insen­sate to the imper­a­tives of atten­tion and commerce. I’ve grown many email newslet­ters over the years, and I operate the e-commerce web­site for my small busi­ness. All of these things are material; directly and indirectly, they pay my bills.

Yet I’ve never blasted a newsletter pop-up, and I never will. Instead, I just make the newsletter easy to find 😇

So many choices — moral, economic, aesthetic — are vexing, ambiguous, legit­i­mately challenging. This choice is easy. The pop-up increases newsletter subscriptions, and even­tu­ally sales: so what? Let them go. Earn that atten­tion and busi­ness in better ways. Par­tic­i­pate in the pro­duc­tion of a shared space that is beau­tiful and respectful, rather than the opposite.

The AI stuff

ChatGPT is the product that launched a thou­sand essays! Good: because this is exactly what we ought to be writing about, and wor­rying about, and arguing about. The ter­rain of the fast-moving AI is aes­thet­i­cally rich, polit­i­cally fraught, eco­nom­i­cally consequential; the per­fect set­ting for wide-ranging discussion.

Frank Lantz is an impor­tant figure in the study and practice of video games, and also simply a great humanist. His newsletter on “games, philosophy, and art in the age of AI” is newly-launched, with a mag­netic energy:

I feel like I’ve been training my whole life for this moment.

Midway through the first edition, Frank lays out three strong con­vic­tions about art and AI; I found all three con­vincing and energizing.

There’s no better guide to AI in 2023 and beyond than Jack Clark, a long­time jour­nalist turned practitioner, first at OpenAI and now at Anthropic.

His weekly newsletter com­bines an insider’s view of recent advances with orig­inal sci-fi imaginings, which take the shape of tiny scin­til­lating scenarios; dreams, provocations, warnings.

Full-spectrum search vs. the sales associate

Here’s my humble addi­tion to the “wot I did with the AI” genre:

I was recently on the hunt for a tele­scope that would be good for planet-viewing. I have no interest in faint stars or “challenging” targets; I just want to peep Jupiter and see its big red eye staring back.

The Google search was a riot of images, prices, capabilities, availabilities. Was I snared briefly by some zomb­i­fied SEO content? Of course. Did I find my way to a few truly beau­tiful tele­scope reviews, pre­sented on old-growth, blue-link web pages? I sure did.

In the end, I made a great selection, one that I’m happy and excited about.

In parallel, I asked ChatGPT for rec­om­men­da­tions. Its reply was fluent and confident; it explained roughly what kind of tele­scope I ought to look for, then rec­om­mended three spe­cific models.

It was basi­cally like asking a sales as­so­ciate at a phys­ical shop.

That raises the question: do I rely on sales as­so­ciates at phys­ical shops? I absolutely do not! The very idea seems unhinged to me. What do you mean, you’re going to show me three alternatives? I want to see thirty!

You could argue that my brain has been broken by a decade of riotous googling. I guess it’s possible … but I don’t think so. I love embarking on these searches. I feel confident, capable, buoyed by the flood. If there ever really was a kind of “web surfing”, this is it.

For my part, I would not for­sake the power of full-spectrum, multi-tab search for an AI’s neat rec­om­men­da­tion, just as I would not for­sake it for a human’s neat rec­om­men­da­tion … 

 … not unless I really trusted that human: their exper­tise and independence. I’m thinking of those ter­rific tele­scope reviews I found, deeply nerdy, rich with context. What would it mean to trust a ChatGPT-alike in that way? It doesn’t feel possible, presently — in part because these sys­tems are so slippery, so malleable. They have fluency, but nothing that could be called integrity.

Every­thing changes, of course: and just as I learned to search, con­fi­dently and capably, over the past decade and more, I’ll learn to … do some­thing … with ChatGPT-alikes in the decade to come.

I just don’t think it will be “searching”.

Here is some com­pelling AI image generation: a bundle of false movie stills, The Lord of the Rings as if directed by John Boorman in 1981.

It’s inter­esting to observe, in YouTube’s tower of rec­om­men­da­tions, this sub-genre taking shape. Inter­esting also to note that these are not “videos” in any proper sense, just slideshows. So why are they posted here? For the rec­om­men­da­tion juice, of course!

A ground truth of the 21st century: if you want anyone to find it … put it on YouTube.

In mid-2022, I wrote

AI artists are genre artists, too. Our genre is: “I see what you did there.”

and these videos are exem­plars of that genre, for better and for worse.