Sludgefeast
What AI can't write | Sentient content | *The* Crypto story
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week’s relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
What AI Can't Write:
We often read to learn. But we also read for reassurance that we’re not alone. That we’re not broken, not bad people, not hopeless. We want to know other people have felt those dark, terrifying feelings we hesitate to name because it might stop anyone from ever loving us again. We want to feel what others have felt. Can a computer reassure you you’re not alone?
Nat Eliason—Infinite Play | 8 minutes
Sludgefeast:
As the ratio of content to human eyeballs grows, the likelihood that a given unit of the former will be seen by the latter diminishes, but fortunately, computers are part of the audience now. Content has become sentient and now consumes itself. Of AI’s myriad applications, creative production has become the most visible, the best showcase for AI’s recent progress [..] to higher-order tasks like crafting plausible narrative arcs, imitating specific aesthetic styles, and producing animation.
Drew Austin—Kneeling Bus | 4 minutes
The Crypto Story:
In a sense it’s a dumb time to be talking about crypto, because the lines went down. But really it’s a good time to be talking about crypto. There’s a pause; there’s some repose. Whatever is left in crypto is not just speculation and get-rich-quick schemes. We can think about what crypto means—divorced, a little bit, from the lines going up.
Matt Levine—Bloomberg | 200 minutes
🎧 Listening
Forget Everything You know About Brand Purpose:
The one key question is: who can I help people become? It's a completely different way of looking at leadership; it's not about the brand looking at itself as the change agent, but it's really the brand believing in each and everyone as the agent of change. This is where real change happens [..], and that's the change that needs to happen.
Thomas Kolster—What Next | 26 minutes
New Institutions in the Network Age:
What is happening with blockchain technology and crypto: we now have the ability to move capital at the speed of the Internet. I think we're going to develop over time-it's not there yet-tools to improve coordination. I think you're going start to see more and more organisations that are effectively viral in nature: they grow at the speed of the Internet, and they fade at the speed of the Internet, and maybe some stick around like a meme.
Aaron Wright—Assembly 2022 | 44 minutes
Creative Doing:
It's really difficult to be bad at stuff on social, especially if your personality might be a little more sensitive or a little more empathetic [..] "Well, I don't want them to think of me as this amateur artist or this hack writer. So I'm not going to show my work. I'm just going to do it by myself in Google Docs." And unfortunately, that often gets in the way of improvement and of basically the momentum and excitement of people supporting you.
Herbert Lui—Infinite Loops | 76 minutes
📬 Suggestions?
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