wonder if the ease and rapidity with which "AI" can generate right-wing fantasy images and propaganda makes them more convincing for their consumers — as though one shouldn't have to use their own imagination to manifest the bigotry they insist on www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

LLMs mean that no one has to write anything they don't care about, but they also mean that "writing anything" will get equated with "not caring" for most people. (If you really cared, you would video yourself talking about it on your phone.)

not bad advice, but presumes that most people read and write to experience "charm, surprise, and strangeness" when the opposite may be the case www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the...

What does it mean to "optimize" for this condition — to train users to enjoy it? Why is it most profitable for companies to train us in wanting to pay attention as a way of avoiding rather than seeking meaning? www.noemamag.com/the-last-day...

seems indicative of how stagnant the ideas behind "AI" are that Baudrillard could write a critique of them in 1995 (The Perfect Crime) and none of it seems dated

And how does the machine know your intent, you might ask? Well by constant surveillance. Just kidding, the machine does not “know” your fucking “intent.”

algorithmic recommendation tries to make it impossible for us to escape our own predictability; continued interaction with these sorts of surveillance systems changes our relationship to our own capability to want things—makes it alien, fully externalized www.theguardian.com/media/2025/a...

about the commodification of "participation", making "communal vibe" into a set of signs and formal tropes so that listeners can enjoy "participation" by merely consuming and recognizing signs (as with most fashion trends)

seems like a distinction without a difference www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...

AI companies want us to think their products are like "The Entertainment" from Infinite Jest, capable of chatting us into terminal inertia nymag.com/intelligence...

what does "slop" (as a general phenomenon) serve as an advertisement for? it seems to impress on people not that "AI" is smart but that is "stupid" in all the ways already familiar from marketing

Great new entry into the annals of slop theory from @kneelingbus.bsky.social (for those still ok with reading ss links): kneelingbus.substack.com/p/slop-as-a-way-of-life Inspired me to note down my current working theory on the genesis of the slop era:

Did I once again smuggle post-structuralist theory into my internet jokes newsletter? 👁️🫦👁️ www.todayintabs.com/p/we-need-to...

9% seems really low actually www.teenvogue.com/story/teens-...

reminds me of people on livestreams who do whatever the commenters demand

"What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself." (from Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil)

from Baudrillard's "In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities" — similar stakes in culture moving from "posting" to "AI": the model speaks in place of "the masses"

"posting" could seem like it was a way for users to experience or express agency, but at the same time "participation" is typically an attempt to advertise one's conformity, normality

perhaps tech companies no longer coerce people to post publicly because overall surveillance has improved www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...

and at the same time, prompters get to be the master manipulators, goading the answers they want out of the "truthbot" and seeming to change what is true about the world

the "content" of reading and writing become the processes themselves: they become deliberate exercises to expand attention spans in the face of technologies designed to shorten them kevinmunger.substack.com/p/attention-...

"vibes" against AI make human capabilities into some mystical inexplicable magic, doomed to be undermined when inevitably the "vibes" no longer can tell what is "real" and what is "AI"

Consumer subjectivity is, at its heart, a mimetic process of desire that cloaks its actualization as one of unique, individual choice when, in fact, its end goal is to manufacture governable copies of the ideal capitalist subject. AI Chatbots turn mimetic desire into a frictionless experience.

Trusting another person is hard; you have to earn their trust in return—trusting a machine or a brand is one-sided and a form of delusion, a belief that it mirrors back effortlessly your desire to trust and be trusted

LLMs aren't subjects, but large socio-technical apparatuses, similar to factories, bureaucracies, or corporations, and our critique should not begin by comparing ourselves to them, but by asking what position they impose on us: How do these apparatuses model and interpellate subjectivity? 2/

the theory of "interpassivity" perhaps helps answer this question; despising the morons in the commercial allow you to use AI without despising yourself www.nytimes.com/2025/06/25/m...

very eager to read this

I'm going to be honest here, I think AI is going to do so much damage to the usable internet that even after it's inevitably crashes out, it's going to take years to disentangle from every space it's polluted, like digital asbestos it's gonna be time consuming effort and likely expensive venture.

"reading" seems like the wrong word for processes that exclude subjectivity or consciousness

the point of education should be to learn resistance strategies against authoritarianism, the point of AI is to make people stupid and compliant danmcquillan.org/cpct_seminar...

“Generative AI” ultimately generates illiteracy

Makes me think about what allows us to think we are seeking "real information" when we are systematically immersed in information designed to reinforce our biases, and/or trigger various emotional reactions

meshes with the primary function of "AI": to convince people not to trust themselves or their own experiences or capabilities, regardless of whether the technology works or not

that's a Numberwang

next-level cynicism is to express scorn at the idea of disobeying algorithmic predictions, basically of having subjectivity defector.com/toward-a-the...

As true of algorithmic social media as it is “sycophantic” AI

here are 3000 words about MrBeast thought robhorning.substack.com/p/bananas-ar...

if you start to think only metrics and data make things real, you need to put yourself under more and more intense surveillance to believe that you have a self that's real

shades of blue and purple haunt me www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSaH...

a reason for hope that "AI" intrinsically extinguishes the demand for what it can produce

LLMs also encourage people to think communication begins with a specific destination in mind that other people can be compelled to navigate to

maybe eventually "optimization" will be recognized as the opposite of intelligence www.theideasletter.org/essay/our-sp...

"To put it bluntly, do you own research is a little like sell your own labor power. It presents the powerlessness of isolation and alienation as the power of independence and autonomy" www.unemployednegativity.com/2025/05/do-y...

I went to Disney World robhorning.substack.com/p/a-great-bi...

AI is sold as a cool trick that can help you fool others into thinking you actually worked on something, but in effect distrust becomes more ubiquitous and "proof of work" becomes part of all work, making it all that more laborious and inefficient www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/s...

yes, never accept the "input" of someone who "loves" you; they might expect to be "loved" back and who needs that sort of burden

here is a Derridean analysis of the Heat Index supplement that no one was asking for robhorning.substack.com/p/that-dange...