M3gan in M4rkers

I’m not overly excited about the movie, but I like the design of the tie to suggest wiring. It didn’t occur to me until I was doing the caption that I could have tried to make it in the style of an AC villager.

Merengue in markers

photoshop

AI Fearmongering

I am surrounded by local news this week. Awash in it. Unable to beat back against the shores or however that goes. I’ve learned that gas prices have decreased recently but that some experts agree prices may go up at some point in the next five months, but it’s too soon to say really and we’ll check in on the story as it develops at 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11 tonight.

Also, I’m pretty surprised that there’s such a push to make people worried that AI chatbots are going to make work, school, and society obsolete. As someone who has played with them for a long time, including on this site, I think they’re interesting, and it’s fun to see new bots with new triggers and behaviors, but somehow they still feel the same underneath.

I have this idea that most of the time when someone proclaims a new movie to be the best or worst thing ever made, they probably just don’t watch that many movies. They don’t have a lot to compare it to. With the AI-generated items, they’re just not used to looking at that kind of thing. All of those images of people with weird hands and dozens of fingers? And the way certain bots somehow look ugly in the same way? The writing is like that too.

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Kids using AI to get out of writing school essays are going to make a new kind of Prisoner’s Dilemma. Maybe if only one of them does it, it might be hard to spot. If the teacher is in a rush. And doesn’t notice how totally different the student sounds all of a sudden.

Not to say that you can’t do entertaining things with a bot:

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I mean, I think it’s funny to teach a bot to constantly mention that it went to Harvard while you talk to it, but it’s like playing one of those games with a branching narrative where you have a delightful and personalized experience and enjoy it so much you decide to play again, only to discover you weren’t really making that many choices.

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You know, having heard fifteen more local news updates about the scary AI, maybe it’s the local news writers who are right to be worried about bots taking their jobs.

Being They

There's this lesson that I theoretically learned in high school, that maybe a lot of young creating people learn. It happens when they try to connect with relatives by showing off something they have made. The thing that they made might be a video, and the video might be selected because it contains some tricky bit of movie magic, the kind that serious young editors tell themselves is designed to never be noticed (if it's any good). But still, they of course hope that it will be noticed, and appreciated for its cleverness.

It won't be. That’s nobody’s fault. The relative is probably somewhere between well-meaning and not-too-interested, and hasn’t taken the young person’s film theory course or read their book of Walter Murch interviews. They have a mortgage to worry about.

And so— this is the lesson-y part— the only feedback these well-meaning relations have available for a young filmmaker is to point out whether they appeared onscreen, and for how long.

“No, I’m not in it,” the young person says, “I built the sets and drove the car and took care of the dog between takes and made the explosions when the aliens open the ship and I guess I was an extra in one scene where—”

“Oh really? So you are in it! Tell me what time in the movie so I can skip to it!” A few words on how smart "They" were to include the creative young niece or what fools "They" are to have not shown the creative young grandson on screen longer.

All to say, I walked right into it again. Years later, and I’ve never figured out how to explain the accomplishment on display is being "They."