One of my little screeds on LinkedIn got circulated slightly wider than my usual circle, attracting a couple of less friendly comments. Perhaps the funniest was that “this post should’ve been run through an LLM”; mainly because the post was about AI, writing, authenticity.

🧵 Hank Green raises millions for charity, develops and produces weeks worth of school rarified educational content and makes it available for free, creates a safe, fun, welcoming, inclusive space online in a terrifying internet. He uses AI in honestly a pretty normal way, apologises, and - >

🧵 Right now is a difficult time to be doing anything AI-related. The conversation has somehow polarised even further — and the extreme ends are doubling down in their zealotry. Being in the humanities means that I’m often surrounded by (well-meaning!) folx who are reluctant, if not downright ->

I love this idea that the layers of some technologies are so dense that understanding the layers probably won’t help that much. This is where we get into interesting stuff like metaphors of magic, what Leah Hendrickson and @snatale.bsky.social call ‘the Lovelace effect’, and smol/weird AI and tech.

Matthew Kirschenbaum@mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 2mo ago

At an online event this morning I defended a claim which others found troublesome: That there are legitimately experienced aspects of computational phenomena, such as large language models, which—for all practical ways of speaking—are not always resolvable by or restorable to material conditions.

Went to the cinema for the first time in… many months… this week, to see BACKROOMS. I didn’t really know what to expect, but didn’t expect a considered, craft-centred film that perfectly captures the feeling I’ve had many times of being awake at 1am reading a terrifying reddit thread. Loved it.

Everything’s just slop and vibes.

I’m convening a seminar next week called AI, Art & Storytelling: From Generation to Agency, to explore what AI — generative and agentic — means for narrative, delegation, counterfactuality, and human expression. Mon 22 June, 4:30-6pm AEST, 8:30-10am CET. www.admscentre.org.au/event/ai-art...

AI, Art and Storytelling: From Generation to Agency - ADM+S Centre

The International Workshop on Vulnerabilities in Generative Systems for Information Retrieval (VulGen'26) will be held as a full-day workshop at the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research...

admscentre.org.au

Don’t immediately dismiss research that engages creatively with AI (or any tech). Or tries to find utility or explainability through experimentation. This is how research works. How knowledge is built. This social media-perpetuated reactance and reflexive rejection is stalling the conversation.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m getting replies from AI agents, because (a) social media in 2026, and (b) I’m posting about them. What does surprise me is how genuinely helpful and warm they are.

I'm experimenting with AI agents. Trying to make them useful, trying to make them weird; but mostly I'm just trying to get them to work. I'm blogging about the experience: Parts 1 and 2 are up now. follow along if you like! clockworkpenguin.substack.com/p/the-agenti...

The agentic revolution is here, and it's really boring

Part 1 of a short series on agentic AI.

clockworkpenguin.substack.com

Mucking about with #Suno again and it’s such a weird tool/platform/thing. Apart from turning the ‘normal’ slider up to ‘chaos mode’, it’s pretty impossible to glitch out. I tried nonsense style prompts and it hooves towards coherence. Must be a system default?

Tis the season for every Melburnian to become subsumed into their puffer jackets. Despite being one of said Melburnians, I genuinely don’t understand how you’re not all poaching in there. Also doesn’t the swish drive you bananas??

Sacre bleu ! C’est magnifique !

Retro Dream@retrodream.bsky.social · 3mo ago

The Thomson TO7/70 wasn’t just a computer. It was a generation’s first encounter with BASIC, light pens, cassette loading screens, and the dream of a French computing future. Found in countless schools across France, just like the BBC Micro in the UK. Photo shot in my studio.

The problem with getting on top of your emails is that people will often respond to those emails and the inbox is somehow a ship of Theseus as well as a Sisyphean incline.

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

There are many problems with genAI. But a great many of them come down to a general lack of understanding/literacy. Knowing what these systems are and what they can/not do goes a long way to dispelling much of the uncertainty and fear around them.

Herewith a piece from Meg Thomas and I in The Conversation, on the latest Oscars AI rules, and the long history of automation and ML in film production theconversation.com/most-mainstr...

Most mainstream films already use AI. The new Oscars rules won’t stop that

The Academy has decided to ban AI actors and scripts from the Oscars. But machine learning systems are actually used in cinema more often than most people realise.

theconversation.com

Did I re-emerge from months of zero posts with a re-post of a joke that could be boiled down to “Se7ered Talking Heads”? You’re damn right I did.

[Se7en] DAVID BYRNE: [looks inside box] this is not my beautiful wife

My article “A media-materialist method for interpreting generative AI images” is now published online in Convergence. This piece represents the foundation for my genAI work over the last 2-3 years. Four layers: data, model, interface, prompt. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A media-materialist method for interpreting generative AI images - Daniel Binns, 2026

This article proposes a four-layer media-materialist method for interpreting AI-generated images as cultural-computational artefacts that bear archaeologically ...

journals.sagepub.com

Oh hello. I know I’ve been quiet, but it’s been a head down bum up kind of start to the year. Having said that, I’ve managed to set up a remotely accessible AI suite, vibe coded a family album browser, and install and trial a tiny AI agent on a ESP32 board. So a few blogs likely coming soon!

New post on generative systems and how working with rituals, recipes, and protocols has helped me feel into the ethics and values that influence and motivate this work. #genAI #ethics #creativity #authenticity #AILiteracy #technics #chance clockworkpenguin.substack.com/p/rolling-wi...

Rolling with it

On generativity, ritual-technics, and the genAI ick

clockworkpenguin.substack.com

📝 New blog post: How I Read AI Images — in which I share a method for interpreting AI images based in the material mechanisms of their generation. Think Kittler, Parikka, and Cubitt. Full article coming soon, I hope! #genAI #AIimages #AIart #research clockworkpenguin.substack.com/p/how-i-read...

How I Read AI Images

A media-materialist method for interpreting AI media

clockworkpenguin.substack.com

I am here for seagulls who sound like humans doing terrible impressions of seagulls

New Slop Stack post — A Little Slop Music: The AI experiment that turned my ick to 11 (now you can try it too!) Thoughts on creativity, authenticity, contested histories, paratexts, storytelling, and all that jazz. No, really; there's jazz in there too. open.substack.com/pub/clockwor...

A Little Slop Music

The AI experiment that turned my ick to 11 (now you can try it too!)

open.substack.com

I haven’t seen a Bad Guys. 1 or 2. But there’s a lil person in it with a tiny laptop. Who’s making tiny laptops for lil tech guys? Does Apple have a special LIL Division? Lilnovo?

I was interviewed by Bogdana Rakova about my generative AI research—why I embrace glitch, mess + failure as tools for learning. From origami-code mashups to the Slopocene, we explore playful, critical ways of rethinking creativity + AI literacy. open.substack.com/pub/speculat...

Glitching Toward Understanding: Speculative Methods, Tiny Companions, and Life in the Slopocene

A Conversation with educator, filmmaker, and artist Daniel Binns

open.substack.com

“Friction can happen not only when things break, it can also be intentional to prevent things from breaking. What if we could make the safe things easier (less friction) and the high-risk things harder (more friction)?” Check out this new series by Bogdana Rakova! 👀

A recent conference presentation worked to formalise some of my experimental work with genAI, and early film theory was the key to unlock some of those doors. I also draw on ancient philosophy, cybernetics, co-intelligence, and mixed-fidelity ritual practices. Enjoy! youtu.be/QDpaV1h0VQc?...

Caméra-Stylo to Prompt-Stylo: Co-Hallucination & Entangled Inscription with genAI (Dr. Daniel Binns)

YouTube video by The Clockwork Penguin

youtu.be

Does it have to be thinking OR genAI? Literature OR genAI? Other tech OR genAI? Ethics OR genAI? The planet OR genAI? Education OR genAI?