Connecting with other writers expands your audience, but low read through rates indicate structural flaws like those that lead to the rapid unscheduled disassembly of a rocket booster. Articles with fewer fatal errors leak attention on their way to zero complete reads and never leave the launch pad. The hierophants of digital publishing also remind us that, despite our personal histories, we’re just not that interesting. ‘Write for your audience, not for yourself.’
In college, he took a writing seminar with Maya Angelou. She had a bemused appreciation for advertising because it provided those pursuing the craft an opportunity to flex their poetic muscles on behalf of brands. He took her to mean that remuneration for the writer or artist was an inexorable conundrum. Advertising offered the clever scribe (and psychological visualist) the ability to earn a living by interpreting and exploiting consumer zeitgeist. He was not such a scribe, but rather one who preferred ambiguity. Unknowing was tantamount to meditation.
He referenced “The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff in a comment about an article outlining the downsides of technological advancement. The article’s author asked him to reach out on WhatsApp. An invitation followed to join a smaller, select group of writers who would serve as a critical support group. He was intrigued because he often sought readers to provide feedback on the material he eked out in nonfiction point of view pieces and satirical commentaries. His interlocutor asked him to provide biographical data … for what purpose it was not immediately clear. The prospect of identity theft hovered.
The voice grew tetchy on whatsapp and point blank asked “let me know if I should continue bothering you.” He said “pause.” A few days later, he received a prompt to sign up to the messaging service telegram and reach out to a community administrator. He had heard about telegram … largely as an offshoot of the Snowden, Manning, Assange WikiLeaks saga that pulled back the curtain on the butcher shop of statecraft. Our self-righteous hypocrisy gets in the way of National self interest. The white haired information terrorist (or, the latest recipient of the Ellsberg award) who holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in England for years now resides at Belmarsh under threat of extradition to the US. Edward Snowden is a Russian Citizen, and Chelsea Manning emerged from the chrysalis of the disclosure enigma to have her sentence commuted by then President Obama. It was that telegram — the one that is used to keep private what eventually becomes public.
His place in the dispossession cycle was endemic. Bankruptcy loomed in the current year, employment rejections were in the hundreds, resumes were not making it past the AI driven profilers. ‘What the hell,’ he thought. The community administrator wrote back about the group of writers with whom he could share drafts, gather constructive criticism and refine his stories for better on-line views. Pointers from other successful on-line writers film-stripped through his head: ‘write what other people want to read,’ ‘write an intro that hooks people,’ ‘write simple, clear and direct prose without fancy words or arcane sentence constructions.’ No dilettante’s philosophy or meandering self assessments. Recondite subjects make it harder to grasp the message through the noise. But he loved noise — the jumbled signals and inscrutable messages. He had once written a song on the guitar called ‘Holy Bells’ that took inspiration from the infernal sound of casino slot machines for the chord structure. Nothing in the natural world sounded like that — cascading tones of an ephemeral eternal reward that spoke through diabolical delusion. It would be hard for him to stay away from the recondite, littoral, evanescent and chthonic — he even loved those words.
Concluding the community manager’s description of the writer’s sub-group came the clincher — the fee to join. Key money for access. It had the whiff of a small ponzi scheme within a paid subscription writers platform. Quid pro quo, pay to play, shell out a few bucks to get access to the group for the chance to stop churning out ignorable, ill-crafted missives that bored readers.
His initial circumspection about paying for group access dissipated with the realization of how endangered a writer’s remuneration is. Many subscribers and contributors to this site are professional writers looking to augment their day jobs. A good side hustle can be transformative especially since the value proposition for publications employing writers is diminishing due to shrinking ad sales and that high functioning new hire from Open AI.
AI-based technologies are laying waste to the publishing industry. The Arena Group, which licenses ‘Sports Illustrated’ for publication is about to layoff all ‘guild workers’ after missing a 3.75 million dollar debt payment to the licensor, Authentic Brands Group; Bild, the German Tabloid owned by Axel Springer, will replace approximately 100 human editorial roles with AI based software; one third of the LA Times staff has been laid off; Morgan Stanley is trimming its Wealth-Management division by the hundreds.
This is an odd economy: interest rate hikes meant to cool the stimulus driven economy without tipping the US into recession have been successful. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have engineered the tradeoff of interest rate hikes and holds without crimping GDP output — all hail the soft landing. Commercial real estate vacancies and their loan guarantors, regional banks, consumer debt and a Federal deficit approaching 6% of GDP are emerging threats coming into an election year. What the seemingly healthy GDP numbers don’t show is an edge phenomenon of AI applications replacing workers with increasing speed and frequency. Q1 staff reductions have been announced at Alphabet, Amazon, Blackrock, Citigroup, Discord, Duolingo, Ebay, Macys, Microsoft, Rent the Runway, Salesforce, SI, Unity, Universal Music Group, Wayfair, UPS and Xerox.
The layoffs are partially the result of continued post-covid right sizing, but some of the shrinkage is the result of firms investing in AI applications that reduce head counts and increase remaining worker productivity. Bard and GPT-4 can make cogent text based summaries, arguments, articles and even legal briefs. Just edit to taste, inject on-the-record quotes, fact check and up it goes. Next up for the LLMs to learn will be tone of voice — an ancillary function approximating literary style. Within reach are the signature features of acerbic Hitchens, wry Updike, observational James, crusty Krauthammer, exasperated Friedman, righteous Klein, humanist Kristoff, told you so Noonan, counterpunching Peterson, or lonely Brooks. LLMs can stir up new, original stories in facsimiles of their voices like cocktails at the browser bar for next to nothing. Robotics in manufacturing will make the UAW’s recent victories less than Pyrrhic — they’ll be inconsequential. Human Resources departments will be infiltrated by python self-coding personality sifter sorters; accounting firms will be reduced to programmers inputting the latest IRS metrics; medical imaging will be automated to reduce the number of human inputs required to generate baseline diagnostics. Near earth conflict might take place via land based robots and aerial drones using swarm simulations to determine how to take out an aircraft carrier simply by overwhelming its defenses. As Ackerman and Stavardis write in the WSJ
The future of warfare won’t be decided by weapons systems but by systems of weapons, and those systems will cost less.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/drone-swarms-are-about-to-change-the-balance-of-military-power-e091aa6f
What used to look like murmurations of starlings will become swarms of drones filling the battle space. Managing the telemetry of thousand(s) in the swarm as well as the density and direction of the attack could (only) be managed by AI. Huxley’s Brave New World epitomized people who learned to love their servitude in a quasi-totalitarian technocratic state. Here we are.
Tech and software companies are the first adopters of productivity enhancing technology. Ostensibly meritocratic and attuned to their stock prices, these ‘flatter is better’ industries don’t take long to question why they’re paying human beings who get sick, prefer hybrid work and might not be that into it when AI can do it. At Davos, the founder of DeepMind said:
“I think in the long term — over many decades — we have to think very hard about how we integrate these tools because, left completely to the market…these are fundamentally labor replacing tools.”
Mr. Suleyman may be purposefully softening the speed of the transformation by putting the time frame in decades — it’s happening fast. OpenAI just launched Sora, a program enabled by massive GPU arrays generating cinema quality videos from text prompts in seconds. Back in Ludditeville where practitioners of the written word are akin to those who ‘ply the distaff,’ (i.e. members of a dying religion) the market for journalism and literature is suffering from not only machine generated content but a schism in the facts governing the present and the past — never mind the future. Facts are fungible. Outrage trends. For every insightful article by Scott Galloway (a personal favorite), there are tens of thousands of missives looking for readership. Medium subscribers willingly pay for the privilege of being ignored. It’s a dysphoric corollary to the European Data Protection Act’s tenant upholding an individual’s “right to be forgotten.” It’s like saying ‘stop profiling me, but please look at my work product.’ Users of google search are quite happy to provide Mountain View some data exhaust for participation in their information pyramid.
It’s not just the written word: we are beyond the apotheosis of the image as a medium of cultural permanence and saliency. What current images will be collected, curated and exhibited like Steiglitz, Adams and Daguerre, etc. when AI can render anything and stock houses provide a range of imagery that suits almost every commercial, industrial and editorial need?
Seeing a great image used to be like catching sight of an apex predator hauling off a fish or four legged dinner. Now, images are like ants near a garbage can: visible everywhere when looking for nothing in particular. Deep fakes of celebrities, politicians and anonymous targets of malintent add a disquieting layer of uncontrollability for those whose image is commodified. Runway, midjourney and dallE utilize the entire history of the visual language from the caves at Lascaux to the Hubble Telescope as a library to generate nearest neighbor imagery. Despite litigation by stock image houses, artists’ estates, celebrities and authors against AI companies, technology doesn’t care about appropriation — humans do.
Yuval Noah Harari’s speculation that AGI will treat humans like we currently treat pets has yet to be borne out, but it feels right. We buy health insurance, gourmet food plans, airline tickets and psychologists for them. We medicate them, do radical invasive surgeries on them, cryogenically preserve them and celebrate them. We trust them more than we do members of our own species because they represent a connection beyond the language of symbols and meaning into the world of subliminality and intuition, gesture and olfaction, loyalty and obeisance. Designing empathy and altruism into AGI are well worth it if Harari’s intuition is correct.
Music is a strange and wonderful thing. Other than food, friendship and sex, it’s probably the most personal thing we cultivate on a physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual level. Music comes to us through performative authorship — scores or traditional arrangements recreated in myriad ways. Derivative authorship is the new territory AI generated music now explores. The computer can sample beats, write a symphony, add Bob Dylan’s vocals to King Oliver’s jazz, conjure Billie Eilish doing “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotten, render Taylor Swift singing a La Scala-Verdi Opera or Post Malone as a countertenor, fashion Allison Kraus rapping, Freddy Mercury accompanying a Steven Reich vesper, etc. Google‘s Deep Mind offshoot, Lyria, is a synthetic music modeling application. Recombining musical signatures, structures and styles comes down to prompts and narratives. Who controls the narratives? Those licensed to use the technology that references copyrighted material including their own?
Lyria has the ability to access almost every sound ever made. Software will always be liable for copyright infringement based on some antecedent sample. While it’s possible to create synthetic music, only litigation will resolve whether humans can forge a shared revenue stream with technologists. Copyright infringement cases involving Marvin Gaye’s Estate — “Got to Give It Up” vs Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines and “Let’s Get it On” vs. Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” — indicate how future cases might play out. Thicke lost because the jury decided that his sound-alike sounded like the reference. Sheeran won by arguing that four common notes in a chord progression a step up from Gaye’s version don’t constitute a rip off. If you’re an aspiring songwriter, avoid Marvin Gaye’s ear worms.
The technologist’s defense in cross examination in a ‘sound alike’ case would likely be hamstrung by the lack of an empathy inducing person the jury could identify as the songwriter because it’s some thing, a program. How will technologists overcome the presumption of appropriation that humans have regarding computer generated material? Of course it’s copied — it can’t make stuff up. Deep Mind’s Lyria can take the attributes of an artist’s work — instrumentation, arrangements, lyrics, vocals — and mold them with another artist or producer’s work. It’s the musical equivalent of CRISPR gene splicing technology. Universal Music Group and YouTube (along with Deep Mind/Lyria within the Google ecosystem) continue to tinker with this to ensure Universal (and other publishers) maintain control over the revenue streams from publishing & master sync rights. That’s the driver in the current kerfuffle between Universal and TikTok.
The idea of personhood is under threat due to AI’s ability (with human prompts) to generate deep fake still and motion imagery. The recently settled SAG strike sought to establish guardrails for the use of AI relating to actors’ likenesses, voices and personalities. In spite of the protections for the ‘real things’ codified by the agreement, A-List celebrities, athletes and musicians are investing in the ownership of their own personas as the industry moves toward synthetic filmmaking. CAA (Creative Artists Agency) struck a deal with the nascent body, voice and character cataloging companies Metaphysic AI and Soul Machines to make avatars of select clients. The process enables the client / celebrity to own their data (digitally watermarked) preventing unauthorized use. They can be in two places at once — on set somewhere and in virtual production somewhere else — and they (or their estates) can make money from their likeness posthumously. Most importantly, the authorized avatar short circuits attempts at unauthorized use of their likeness.
The prospect for abuse in politics is tantalizing given the current incumbent’s challenges. Biden could cut ads with his avatar masking his faltering speech and projecting more physical vigor. It’s not just the President’s handlers who may be thinking about the benefits of regressive preservation. LLM-based AI can build a topology of responses and actions from every recorded piece of material that person has done throughout their lifetime — spokespersons, politicians, actors, musicians, religious figures, etc. Scott Pelley of 60 Minutes could interview a 38 year old Jack Nicklaus when the Golden Bear is actually 84. There may be cracks in verisimilitude, but for actors, musicians, athletes and anyone who has a digital record in motion, stills and voice, there will be the potential (if not the need) to build a credible real-time avatar. Why does a President need to be human? Would we submit to digital rationality or decry its decisions as an abrogation of human agency?
Do you get queasy peering over the edge at AI’s potentialities and inevitabilities? Most prognostications will be irrelevant by next year (if not next week) because the models and applications are evolving so quickly (c.f. Sora — OpenAI’s cinema quality text prompt to video generating platform launched by OpenAI on February 15). We barely understand the knock on effects. Prose can be auto generated. This article could be stripped of asides and stylistic filigrees. Photography has entered its archeological phase like classical music. Where are the next group of fashion standouts to pick up the mantles from Ritts, Avedon, Miesel, Von Unwerth and Knight? Who has moved editorial photography forward beyond W. Eugene Smith, Cartier-Bresson or Sebastian Salgado? Will the museum-going public be content visiting re-contextualized curations of photographic work by Cindy Sherman, Jan Saudek, Richard Prince, Mapplethorpe and Gregory Crewdson? Music is almost a recombinant technology, and there’s a nascent imperative to patent one’s human likeness to prevent ‘hacktors’ making us do stuff or visit places that we categorically didn’t. We’re pacing around the cul-de-sac of eschatology — a place when linear and organic ways of life are fracturing under the emergent force of the synthetic and programmatic. Forget time as a contextual driver. A new form of consciousness is self-actualizing.
Pessimism is an age-old defense against inexorable change. Maya Angelou wrote about it in a collection aphorisms published in 1993:
“Whining is not only graceless, but can be dangerous. It can alert a brute that a victim is in the neighborhood (M. Angelou, Complaining, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, p. 87).”
Characterizing emergent Artificial General Intelligence as a ‘brute’ is an understatement — the leading edge of change is veritably the god in the machine. Abetting this race to AGI is the competitive nature of the world’s powers. Legislative or regulatory slow downs only give our adversaries a competitive advantage. Legislators ballyhoo about guard rails and the evils of social media, but they’re fairly powerless distractions. Do they really wants to pump the brakes? America innovates, Europe regulates and China duplicates. President Xi wants to change that, but Europe is content to stifle innovation through regulation. The brute thrives on unbridled experimentation. The go fast, break stuff and apologize later ethos is an essential feature of iterative dynamism for future products and applications.
Let us consider a thought from Epicurus to distract us for a moment from LLMs, AGI and the need to rekindle political discussion of a guaranteed minimum income.
“We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink.”
Sentience, sustenance, sensuality, sexuality and friendship — these organic domains are beyond the reach of chipped existence. True, there will be Only Fans pages featuring avatars generating cash for their programmers, and my therapist might in fact already be the latest Samantha software release from the movie, “Her.” But AI cannot enjoy the burgundy I tasted last night with a friend. It had a ringing fruit quality, plush the palate, with a core of sinewy structure hinting at dried mushroom and oak carrying the finish long past the swallow.
