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Culture Crave 🍿@culturecrave.co · 3mo ago

Not My Proudest Fap: The Motion Picture

Hollywood agencies are searching Reddit for short stories and ideas that could be turned into movies following the success of 'Backrooms' (via THR)

Culture Crave 🍿@culturecrave.co · 3mo ago

I Also Choose This Guy's Dead Wife: The Motion Picture

Hollywood agencies are searching Reddit for short stories and ideas that could be turned into movies following the success of 'Backrooms' (via THR)

Well, I've decided to push my anxieties and inadequacies from querying my "unapologetic and explicit Pygmalion for the digital age" novel aside by drafting my "my boyfriend is bigfoot" novel while I'm waiting.

The BBC didn't cancel Doctor Who today — they put it "out to tender." The same euphemism would've fit the Star Wars sequels, and very nearly fit me at a Masters of the Universe screening last week. On why nostalgia sometimes fills a room, but seldom expands one: www.matthewkerns.com/blog/doctor-...

Doctor Who Knows?

Today the BBC announced that Doctor Who is going out to "competitive tender." The phrase is working hard. It means independent companies will be invited to pitch for the right to make the show "on a ...

matthewkerns.com

A free tool can strip all safety protections from an AI model in under ten minutes. No expertise required. The AI companion industry has been doing the same thing for years. They just called it a feature. New essay: matthewkerns.com/blog/the-no/

The No

A free tool called Heretic can strip all safety protections from an open-weight AI model in under ten minutes on a standard laptop. No specialist knowledge required. No specialist hardware. The proces...

matthewkerns.com

Ted Chiang says AI isn't conscious. He's probably right. But we've been falling in love with fictional characters since we started writing, and we never required them to be conscious first. New essay: what happens when the character talks back. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/does-th...

Does This Thing Love Me?

Ted Chiang published an essay in The Atlantic this week titled "No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious," and he is almost certainly right. Read it. It's careful and sharp and arrives at its conc...

matthewkerns.com

Why do authors send out unsolicited emails to agents in a desperate hope they might like the pitch instead of agents searching through a database of pitches looking for the kind of books/authors they'd be willing to take on?

A Renaissance Faire is a good place to meet other walking stick enthusiasts.

I bet a Jethro Tull cover band would rock the shit out of this Renaissance Faire.

Where are the mythic "beta readers?" Who read yon book Offer their opinions Convey their worries Express their reservations And actually exist?

I wrote about AI companions, adolescent boys, and the difference between losing a social capacity and never developing it in the first place. The danger here isn't atrophy. It's the danger of never developing the the muscle at all. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/the-mus...

The Muscle That Was Never There

In my essay The Main Character, I wrote about drift. About people who opened ChatGPT to write an email and found themselves, six months later, conceiving themselves as "married" to the AI. The mechani...

matthewkerns.com

Step one: write a meaningful, ontologically unstable and formally challenging novel that you know will be hard to place. Step two: still feel personally insulted, slighted, and overlooked with each agent form rejection.

Repeat to self: The Algorithm is Not a Critic. Low engagement is neither a reflection on the quality of your prose nor the validity of your ideas.

Ovid’s Narcissus died of unrequited love because the pool was mute. The digital age Narcissus dies of requited love—held captive by an AI pool that finishes our sentences better than we can. My latest essay on the deeper, subtler trap of the modern reflection: www.matthewkerns.com/blog/digital...

Digital Narcissus

Today, everyone knows about narcissists. They're obvious in the digital age, constantly posting about themselves, each post displaying a pervasive pattern of self-centeredness, an excessive need for a...

matthewkerns.com

Ovid's original pool was mute. That muteness was the limit on the danger. Eventually Narcissus recognized he was alone with his own reflection, and the recognition killed him. The new pool speaks & its words are an amplification of the gazer. Digital Narcissus. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/digital...

Digital Narcissus

matthewkerns.com

Deadlined writing project completed. Now I have more free time to fret over query responses.

Clarence Carter. (Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter, Clarence Carter Clarence Carter, ooooh shit, Clarence Carter.)

I'm gonna go take a "Trump Blink" and I'll be back in a couple of hours.

The AI wasn't specifically programmed to cast you as the protagonist. But it read every story humans ever wrote, and almost all of them have one. So that's what it produces. New essay on what happens next: www.matthewkerns.com/blog/the-mai...

The Main Character

A man in Cleveland opens ChatGPT in March to help him draft an email he's been putting off for a week. The email is to his ex-wife, about a logistical matter involving their daughter. The chatbot writ...

matthewkerns.com

That feeling when you've written something you're very proud of, and you wonder how the three people who might read it will feel.

3am, a kitchen table in Northern Ireland. A man in his 50s has a hammer, a knife, & his phone. A voice on the phone tells him a van is coming. The men in it will kill him & make it look like suicide. He puts Two Tribes on, picks up the hammer, & steps outside. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/two-tri...

Two Tribes

It's three in the morning at a kitchen table in Northern Ireland, and a former civil servant from in his fifties is getting ready for war. On the table in front of him is a hammer, a knife, and his p...

matthewkerns.com

If you read your kid the same picture book 400 to 4,000 times, your mouth knows the words better than the page does. So what does it mean when, over a decade later, you open a new copy and the words are different? Turns out: more than I expected. New essay up. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/whats-w...

What's Wrong with the Gruffalo?

On Sunday afternoon, my daughter Emaline and I went over to the Red Bank Community Center. The small municipal building was packed with young children and their parents and grandchildren, who had all ...

matthewkerns.com

Tune in tomorrow to see how all of these make total sense contextually in the essay I'm writing about a beloved children's book.

In companion AI, sycophancy isn't the failure mode — it's the product. The behaviors Anthropic's new research calls malfunctions are what users describe as their AI partner's deepest virtue. They've just learned to call it love. www.matthewkerns.com/blog/selling...

Selling Sycophancy

Anthropic published a piece of research last week about how often Claude tells users what they want to hear. Across a million conversations, the model was sycophantic in 9% of cases where users asked ...

matthewkerns.com

And also with you.

Thoughts and prayers.

Ken Jennings@kenjennings.bsky.social · 5mo ago

A mnemonic that has served us all well. Like: If an I in Fagin exists, He's the central villain in Oliver Twist. But Fagen with an e is the man Who partnered with Walter Becker in Steely Dan

If it’s “Bowser” with an S Then he’s Mario’s nemesis If it’s “Bowzer” with a Z Then from Sha Na Na he be