Joe Wilkins: McDonald’s Pulls Down AI-Generated Holiday Ad After Deluge of Mockery. The offensive ad is still available for viewing, and I am horrified to report that it is in fact on par with non-AI holiday marketing shlock. Every profession that feels collectively threatened by LLMs has spent decades undermining itself and is now reaping what it sowed, and yes I include many medical specialties here.
Sam Kriss for the NYT: Why Does A.I. Write Like … That? A brilliant essay with illustrations that would make me blow a fuse if I were to see them out in the wild. Kriss has a blog to which I am now subscribed and also seems to post on this new social network for writers called… Substack? And Curtis Yarvin plus the rationalist buffoons hate him? Worth following!
Christopher Butler: The Last Invention. “The real threat of AI as ’the last invention’ isn’t that it will actually end human innovation and put us all out to pasture in a withering culture of leisure, but that we’ll believe it will. That we’ll internalize the narrative of our own obsolescence and stop trying. That we’ll mistake the tool for the maker and forget that the heart that yearns past the boundary is what drives everything forward.”
Andrew Sharp: Netflix and the Flattening of Everything. I am not a fan of Netflix. In fact, I dread the moment when they gobble up the last thing, idea or person standing on their path to entertainment singularity. And yet I stay subscribed.
Taylor Jessen on Mastodon: Candidate for Post of the Year. The post in question is a screenshot from Bluesky which perfectly demonstrates end-stage enshittifaction of what used to be the capital-I Internet, but that is beside the point which is in fact funny and true.