Category Archives: technology

The Internet of Fake

Blogger Kev Quirk shares an email he got from his son’s school:

In hard-copy or online school publications which are widely available, we will no longer use images in which our students can easily be identified.

To allow us to continue to give a visual flavour of school life, we may use AI-generated illustrative images featuring entirely fictional people. These images will not depict real students and are intended only to represent the type of activities, subjects and experiences available at[school name].

On the one hand, this seems like a good idea, protecting the privacy of the students in an age when anyone can do anything with any photo.

On the other hand, it’s an example of a problem that’s been around for at least ten years and is just going to get worse. We’ve told ourselves and our kids that “you can’t trust the internet” and “online is not real life.” The rise of generative AI underscores the truth of those statements.

But also note that the school will be using these fake images in “hard-copy” publications as well. Those mid-century media theorists that warned us about the dangers of photography, mechanical reproduction, and all the rest were right. Maybe AI will finally teach us the lesson.

Bonkers

Craig Mod:

I’ve always been opinionated about how software should work. Mainly, it should be fast. The bounds of it should be “knowable.” The contract you have with it should be “sane” (i.e., you just own it).

The rest of Craig’s post is about how he used Claude Code to fulfill his wildest software dreams. (In his own words, he’s gone “software bonkers.”)

I’m not going to lie, the tools he made sound pretty cool. But…

Are the bounds of Claude Code knowable? Is the contract you have with it “sane?” Do you just own it?

In some ways, these are genuine questions. I don’t know much about Claude Code. Maybe it isn’t just another product that will twine itself around your digital life. Maybe its omnipotence is beneficial and it really can help you make fast, sane, knowable tools. If so, cool. But I remain skeptical.

Revolutions Don’t Need Ad Campaigns

AI companies are pouring money into advertising. Either they are nervous about the market and want to create a need where none exists or they are nervous about their product and want to bluff their way to success.

If AI was as revolutionary as everyone claims, it wouldn’t need an ad campaign.

See also this story in the Economist about advertising in ChatGPT (paywalled) and Freddie deBoer’s essay about the actual technological impact of the digital revolution (spoiler: not much).

(both links via Alan Jacobs)

A New Addiction

There’s a lot that’s chilling about this post on AI by Matthew Milliner, but this quote in particular stuck out to me:

Recently I had a three-hour conversation with a woman on a plane who was struggling with a family issue, and we actually got somewhere. She thanked me for the time, confessing she had almost gone to AI the night before.

I don’t know whether those are Milliner’s words or the woman’s. Regardless, they are the words of an addict.

“I almost went to the bottle.”

“I almost went to porn.”

“I almost lit a cigarette.”

You Can See the Problem

When my soon-to-be brother-in-law first visited our new flat last year, he asked me about the kind of roller shutters we had installed, if they were electrically operated and if I could activate them remotely. I told him that the real estate developer had stuck to manual levers to keep the cost down as much as possible, but we could, if we wanted, easily add a little motor on the side.

But I told him that I preferred this manual system anyway. If one day I can’t open or close the shutters, I will know where the problem comes from: a mechanical issue with the roller.

Nicolas Magand

An upcoming issue of Good Work is focused on “Machines,” and it strikes me that the ability to see the mechanics involved is part of a machine’s appeal. Modern devices—especially “smart” devices—tend to hide the machinery, either by design or because they’re so complex, which makes them impossible to tinker with. And, as Matthew Crawford taught us in Shop Class as Soul Craft, tinkering with stuff is a human instinct. “We want to feel that our world is intelligible,” he says, “so we can be responsible for it.”

In books and movies from the twentieth century, people are always fixing stuff themselves—cars, toasters, space ships. Fifty years later, when tech has crept into even more aspects of our lives, tinkering, let alone fixing, feels almost impossible. You can’t see the problem, so you can’t understand the problem, so you don’t feel responsible for the problem. But lack of responsibility is uncomfortable. We want to feel responsible. Responsibility is good for us.

(In his post, Nicolas also links to a post called “My Coffee Maker Just Makes Coffee” by Bradley Taunt. Also worth a skim.)

Smart Poison

There are a lot of reasons to say no when your pre-teen asks for a smartphone. One of the most obvious reasons is that smartphones give you unfiltered and unlimited access to entertainment, which isn’t a good thing for anyone, least of all teenagers. It’s like carrying around a TV and video game console in your pocket. (I mean, that’s exactly what it is.)

Almost more detrimental than constant entertainment is social media. (I’d throw texting in there, too.) Jean Twenge has been studying teen mental health for ten years now and documented some disturbing trends in her book iGen. Her hypothesis was that the spike in teenage depression was caused by smartphones and social media. Not everyone was convinced, and a lot of other explanations were proposed. In this recent newsletter, Twenge looks at thirteen alternative explanations for “the high levels of distress among teens,” including the economy, COVID, school shootings, and climate change. It should come as no surprise that she has good reasons for dismissing all of them.

Blog Museum

This reminds me of an idea I’d still like to see put into practice: a service that pulls posts from old blogs and collects them into a daily digest. I love reading blogs, especially old ones. Scrolling through a bunch of posts from the same author, sometimes written over the course of years, is like reading their journal. It gives you a picture of that writer’s personality and the ideas they’ve wrestled with over the years. It would be exciting to be reminded every so often that such an archive exists.