Clankers and Slop
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
A beloved Rowan tree came down in the storm
Like much of Scotland, we lost power (and a beloved Rowan tree) over the weekend due to the impact of Storm Amy. Just under 24 hours without power meant a trip to the nearest town, ÂŁ27 spent charging up the car to turn it into a rolling power bank, and a Heath Robinson rigged Starlink Mini to maintain communication with my wife on her way back from Canada. While we waited the boys and I kicked around, read comics, made tea by heating water on the wood burner and were grateful the vacuum had a battery.
Starlink Mini FTW
With power restored, everything came back to life fairly happily, although I haven’t yet turned on the PS5, it gets super mad at you when you power it off like that. It really hates it, like Mr Resetti in Animal Crossing. The only other casualty was the smart home heating system we have which was also unhappy with the switch off and I couldn’t get to work again.
The accompanying app now features an LLM powered assistant to help you get things working again and although it was comfortably the most capable one of these I’ve ever interacted with, it still seemed very limited in what it could actually do and I maintain we’d all just be better off reading instructions and learning how things work so we can maintain them at the very least.
Casey Neistat calls it as he sees it
Related to this, Casey Neistat posted a new video this week about Sora and AI slop. I recently came across and have embraced the term “Clanker” to describe AI chat bots and based on what’s happening with Sora and in the Meta app I use to get images from my glasses which is also generating random AI junk to consume, I am pretty much ready to make hating AI my entire personality. I don’t know about you, but this feels to me like it’s a real moment. We stop this stuff now or it’s all over.
Up to now I’ve been more optimistic, generative fill, sped up workflows, speech to text are all good things and I could even see a positive outcome where human creativity started to be more highly valued. However, along with that we might also end up in a situation where human made things demand a premium so high that many folks can’t afford them or can’t afford to be an artist. A world where there’s a cheap Spotify tier that covers the endlessly generated music, with another that includes human artists that is much more expensive because we have to pay those people.
It would be devastating to culture but I could see it making sense in a boardroom somewhere where no one has watched or read any cautionary fiction that could be an allegory for the world we live in. It’s not a hugely optimistic note to end on but it’s what I’m wondering about right now. Let me know how you feel about the whole thing.
I’m going to stop typing now and make some printed images to send to my Grandma. Touch grass, everyone!