What do Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, Kris Jenner’s facelift, Martha Stewart’s cloned dogs, and Jurassic World: Rebirth have in common? Patrick R. Crowley, who draws on these cultural events and more for a provocative essay on whether our “pursuit of realism . . . is offering a set of diminishing returns” in the era of AI slop. Read this one slowly, and prepare yourself to open some tabs, so you can take optimal pleasure in the range of Crowley’s mind.
HEADING SOUTH on the 101 through downtown San Francisco, drivers are bombarded by a series of billboards for tech companies filled with contemptuously inscrutable slogans like “Got GPU?” or “Don’t SOC-block your best engineer.” Most of them advertise corporate products like “agentive AI workflows” that have in turn spawned a new cottage industry for the detection or discernment of AI-generated content. One of these, which for several years now has shown various iterations of hot dogs juxtaposed with dachshunds dressed up as hot dogs, had a refreshingly lucid, if dystopian, tagline for its content moderation services (for platforms, not users): “Can’t tell what’s real? We can help.” If only it were that easy.
More picks on generative AI
What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either
“Researchers at the company are trying to understand their A.I. system’s mind—examining its neurons, running it through psychology experiments, and putting it on the therapy couch.”
Wildlife Attacks and Strange Animal Behavior—Fake Images Spark Conservation Concerns
“AI-generated images pose a direct threat to conservation efforts by distorting public perceptions of wildlife.”
Deepfaking Orson Welles’s Mangled Masterpiece
“Will an A.I. restoration of ‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ right a historic wrong or desecrate a classic?”
