"authenticity" is built from feelings not facts, and facts don't "feel real" in and of themselves. (also, "authenticity" is always a construct and not empirically given) ijoc.org/index.php/ij...
LLMs turn our tendency to be considerate toward our interlocutors into a vulnerability rather than a strength; this makes for a more miserable world where we must be presumptively cruel and wary of anything that talks to us www.ft.com/content/bdb3...
reading reduced to "skill nostalgia" can become part of the political project of deliteracy; this is why "close reading" needs to be taught as a political practice rather than an exercise in aesthetic appreciation and self-soothing
Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 4w agoIt is something which is being done to us by a long, purposeful dismantling of institutions that support mass literacy. I have essay coming later this year, but basics are covered in this talk. Deliteracy is not symptom of algorithmic tech, the tech is being developed to assist deliteracy.
post-literacy fears can also be seen as "skill nostalgia" and mourning for the bourgeois public sphere; wouldn't be surprised to see tech ideologues argue both that (1) reading is reactionary and (2) reading is an ennobling hobby aeon.co/essays/the-r...
"prediction" markets incentivize profiteers to find weak spots in the fabric of reality and reweave it for easy money — a kind of reality arbitrage, at the expense of our collective faith in a shared world www.bloomberg.com/opinion/news...
One of the really difficult lessons of the last 100 years is that convenience - drawing on mass market capabilities to do things faster - is isolating and individualising. We become one in relation to the market rather than one in relation to other people. GenAI is the peak expression of that.
Anthony Moser@anthonymoser.com · last mo.strong parallels to how we were told to make individually responsible risk assessments around COVID at the same time any useful sources of information were systematically dismantled
"why is it pleasurable to know things?" comes to seem like a meaningless question when knowledge is reduced to information retrieval www.techpolicy.press/ais-catastro...
the "Eliza effect" is reminiscent of role-playing games— software providing a structure for an emotional attachment to a simulation, more or less for its own sake. LLMs/chatbots make more sense as gaming engines than as "intelligence"
Matt Pearce@mattdpearce.com · 2mo agoTIL people were getting duped by the humanness of chatbots as early as the 1960s. AI psychosis was old before it was new! We haven’t learned anything. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/what-we-ca...
Think “slop” is part of the long-standing project of producing consumers who can’t experience satisfaction—no contentment, just more content
Roland Meyer@bildoperationen.bsky.social · 2mo ago#Slop matters. But hardly for the reason this sloppy paper (which needed no less than nine authors) claims: «[P]eople want more content than humans can supply.» Really? No. Platforms want more content than humans can supply, and now machines can produce much more content than people actually want.
We often desire the symbol more than what it represents: people go into debt because a new car makes them feel like they’ve “made it.” Generated text is a symbol of text in this sense, a cognitive debt that allows people to “think they have thought” about it when they have moved away from thinking.
"AI" means no more good-faith assumptions of a writer's investment and attention on the basis of their text; it imposes a collective and metastasizing burden of paranoia on everyone mattdpearce.substack.com/p/ai-imposes...
getting other people to respect you as a "real person" doesn't take place at the level of a style transfer; it invariably involves reciprocal attention and moments of intersubjectivity kneelingbus.substack.com/p/lo-fi-beat...
The most important upcoming scholarly work on AI isn't going to be on how processes become automated, but how subjects (we) begin to lose autonomy, and reflect the regressions of automation in our habits and thought.
from John Abromeit's appendix to this collection of Kracauer's writings on propaganda—perhaps useful to understand AI (like local news and right-wing cable news) as an addictive form of terror meant to make cognitive surrender feel like winning cup.columbia.edu/book/selecte...
"artificial intelligence" is, by definition, the negation of human agency, connection, and community
👁️@nathanjurgenson.com · 3mo agolet's check in on the UpWorthy guy...oh, lol
from Sigfried Kracauer's "Totalitarian Propaganda": propaganda usually seen as being in service of some other aim, but ultimately it becomes an end in itself, a manifestation of power for its own sake
felt like this too neatly linked the feeling of fakeness to the recent pivot to short form video. all metricized and algorithmic media is deceptive. like, what's the "real" way to post content in a system that links attention to profit?
it makes more sense to me to say there is no such thing as a "real share" or a "real fan" than to complain about fake ones. who are these "real" people who supposedly are immune to marketing and uninterested in cultural participation? www.garbageday.email/p/everything...
another (and probably less useful) way of putting this is that slop marks the "real subsumption" of content to algorithmic platforms and the capital that organizes them
Roland Meyer@bildoperationen.bsky.social · 3mo agoSlop is what you get when the conditions of content distribution — the recommendation algorithms, reaction economies, and monetization schemes of social media — feed directly, continuously and automatically back into content production 2/
one of my recent newsletter posts has been turned into a proper article parole.cc/compendiums/...
Evidence as content
parole.cc
it's as though the main use case of "AI" in education is to propagate low-effort hoaxes that undermine the Enlightenment project altogether
Louise Amoore@amoorelouise.bsky.social · 3mo agoIf you are the editor of a journal and you have received a submission from me that looks a bit weird (weirder than usual) please assume it is a LLM-generated paper from a ghost author. This has happened four times in recent weeks. In each case it is possible to see how a genuine published paper 1/2
Suggests that generated video needs to be mixed with “real”video to thrive; its value is parasitic, dependent on undermining credibility of nongenerated material
Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 3mo agoRIP to Sora, OpenAI’s AI-generated social media network, which closed its doors today and loads this message when I open the app. Indeed, Sora cost OpenAI millions a day in its attempt to subsidize cheap AI video generation in a way that did not attract advertisers because it did not attract users.
clips are like AI summaries in that they seem to promise a way to master content overload, but achieve this by making people passive consumers of an ever more superficial stream of disconnected fragments
popularity of "clipping" suggests people like consuming highlights, even of (or mostly of) things they wouldn't care about in its full form www.garbageday.email/p/what-happe...
sounds a bit like Kittler's "discourse network": "the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and produce relevant data"
Dr Francis Young@drfrancisyoung.bsky.social · 4mo agoPerhaps the darkest argument I’ve heard in favour of writing with AI is that there’s no point writing without it; we’ll all be consuming so much AI-generated content unwittingly that it will re-programme our writing styles and thought patterns. Humans who write without AI will sound like AI anyway.
these sorts of fakes also shape expectations of what events should look like, and reinforce the expectation that all events should be reducible to images
Roland Meyer@bildoperationen.bsky.social · 4mo agoWe have seen this before, with the kidnapping of Maduro or the mass protests against ICE raids – fake images of real events. While these synthetic images fictionalize reality, they are not necessarily meant as disinformation. Rather, they both illustrate and cater to wide-spread expectations 1/
"vibe-living" is good Orwellian term for when people have been made too anxious to make any decisions for themselves about anything www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/o...
seems that "AI" makes "you can just do things" and "you can't do anything" into the same thing, as if they are supposed to be the same goal www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/m...
memes are like fashion trends that people "wear" in media by posting; decoding "what they mean" beyond that verges on folly, like asking what different skirt lengths "really mean"