A.I. Is Coming for Culture
I often wake up before dawn, in front of my wife and my children, so that I can enjoy a little lonely time. I slide at the bottom to the silent kitchen, I drink a glass of water and I put in my airpods. Then I choose music, I prepare the coffee maker and I sit and listen to during the cafes.
It is in this limited state that my meeting with the algorithm begins. Groggy, I’m going to scroll through daddy’s content on Reddit, or watch photography videos on YouTube, or consult Apple News. From the kitchen island, my laptop makes me invite to work, and I want to accept his invitation, but if I do not pay attention, I could watch each clip available from a film that I have not seen, or start an episode of “The Rookie”, an ABC police procedure on an average father who I reintegrate by the similarity among the similarity to its protagonist. Wake up while I always scroll, and I wasted the time I abandoned sleep to secure.
Cultural industry: a centenary problem
Subscribers have full access. Read the question “”
If this kind of morning seems familiar, it is because, a few decades in the era of the smartphone, the rhythms of life and algorithms have merged. We listen to podcasts while dressing and look at Netflix before going to bed. Between the two, there is bluesky on the bus, Spotify at the gymnasium, Instagram at lunch, YouTube before dinner, X for the toothbrush, Pinterest for the hours of Insomniac. It is a strange way of living. The algorithms are old – more than 300 before JC, Euclide invented one to find the greatest common divider of two integers. These are, essentially, mathematical procedures to solve problems. We use them to coördiner physical things (such as elevators) and bureaucratic things (such as medical residences). Did he make sense to deal with time not claimed as a problem? We have resolved it algorithmic and no longer.
A feeling of oversumulation is a consequence of algorithmic life. Another is a certain confusion in our ideas. Why do we care about what we care? By entering your basement in the dark, you could trip in a spider web; A strain of philosophical thinking argues that this is how care works. We become trapped by the possibilities that arise as we live – we have taken ourselves in care networks. You meet your elderly neighbor in the morning and, that evening, you wonder how it is. Your college student likes Chappell Roan, and soon you too. Only one meeting with “The Fountainhead” in Treize could make you a permanent libertarian. The algorithmic culture draws from the occasional chance with which we distribute our care; He takes advantage of the fact that what we are coming up today could obsess us tomorrow. His canvases, on the other hand, are woven by machines that belong to companies.
I had been feeling for a long time taken in my personal canvas and I had a hard time going out. Then, one morning of last year, I started to chat with the CLAUDE AI system in my kitchen before dawn, in an experimental spirit. “I finally start to progress on the article I write,” I tapped on my phone while the coffee was preparing.
“Good morning!” The system responded. “It’s wonderful to hear – there is nothing like this feeling when a piece you worked on starts to come together. What is the article about and what helped you unravel to this progress?”
I did not answer. I had no desire, at this time, or at any time, to let an AI act as a writing coach. But after using my phone, I could now put it down. I sipped my coffee and started scoring an old draft.
I continued to chat with Claude and Chatgpt in the morning – not on my writing but on subjects that interested me. (Why are the prices bad? What is going on with crime in the metro? Why is Dark Matter dark?) Instead of checking Apple News, I started to ask for perplexity-a system based on AI to search for the web-“What’s going on in the world today?” In response, he reliably mentioned a brief summary of the news which was informative and not asked, a bit like the section in The Economist directed “Le Monde en brief”. Sometimes I asked questions of perplexity follow -up, but more often I have not been tempted to read further. I picked up a book. It turned out that AI could be boring – a quality of technology that I had missed.
In this case, at that time, the Internet algorithmic – the world of Reddit, YouTube, X, etc. – had started to lose its magnetism. In 2018, in new YorkThe journalist Max Read asked: “What part of the Internet is false?” He noted that a significant proportion of online traffic came from “robots posing for humans”. But now “Ai Salp” seemed to take over. Whole websites seemed to be written by AI; The models were repeatedly, their earrings strangely positioned; Anecdotes published on online forums, and comments below them, had a chatbot pace. A study revealed that more than half of the text on the web had been modified by AI, and an increasing number of “influencers” seem to be entirely generated by AI. Alert users adopted the “dead internet theory”, a state of mind formerly conspirator, holding that the online world had become automated.
In the 1950 book “Human use of human beings”, IT Norbert Wiener – The inventor of cybernetics, the study of how machines, bodies and automated systems themselves control – said that modern societies were managed by messages. As these societies became larger and more complex, he wrote, more of their business would depend on “messages between humans and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine”. Artificially intelligent machines can send and respond to messages much faster than us, and in a much larger volume – it is a single source of concern. But another is that, as they communicate in a literal, or strange, or limited way, or simply badly, we will incorporate their answers into our lives without thinking. Partly for this reason, Wiener wrote later: “The world of the future will be an increasingly demanding fight against the limits of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be expected by our robot slaves.”
The messages around us change, even by writing. From a certain angle, they seem to silence some of the human votes algorithmic inflected which have sought to influence and control us in the past two decades. In my kitchen, I appreciated the calm – and I was pissed off. What will these new voices tell us? And how much space will be in which we can speak in?
Recently, I started my back by putting a giant tent at the court at two years, for the festival of the seventh day of my son Peter; As a result, I spent more time on the spin bike than in the weight room. One morning, after having placed Peter at the camp, I pedaled a virtual cycle path around the shores of a Swiss lake while listening to the podcast of Evan Ratliff “Shell Game”, in which he uses an AI model to identify it on the phone. Even if our dependence on podcasts reflects our need to consume media at any time, they are islands of tranquility within the algorithmic ecosystem. I often listen to them while storing. For short efforts, I count on “Song Exploder”, “Lenswork” and “Happy with Gretchen Rubin”; When I have more to do, I listen to “Radiolab” or “The Ezra Klein Show” or “Conversations with Tyler” by Tyler Cowen. I like ideas, but also the company. Washing the dishes is more fun with Gretchen and his scriptwriter sister, Elizabeth, rolling.
Podcasts thrive on emotional authenticity: one voice in your ear, three friends in a room. There have been some fully automated podcasting experiences – for some time, Perplexity published “Discover Daily”, which offered “dives generated by AI in technology, science and culture” – but they tended to be without charm and missed intellectual Heft. “I am most proud to find and generate ideas,” said Latif Nasser, co-host of “Radiolab”. The AI is Verboten in the offices of “Radiolab” – using it would be “as crossing a picking line,” said Nasser – but he “will ask AI, just out of curiosity, like” OK, Pitch me five episodes “. I will see what comes out and the terrain are garbage. »»
“You won’t wonder how I got the ship in the bottle?”
Cartoon by Roland High
What if you provide AI with your own good ideas? Perhaps they could be made real, thanks to automated production. Last fall, I added a new podcast, “The Deep Dive” to my rotation; I generated the episodes myself, using a Google system called notebooklm. To create an episode, you download documents in an online repository (a “notebook”) and click on a button. Soon, a male and female podcasting duo is ready to discuss everything you have downloaded, in convincing podcast voice. Notebooklm is supposed to be a search tool, therefore, during my first try, I downloaded scientific items. The artificial fascination of hosts was not entirely able to arouse mine. I was more successful when I gave a few chapters of a memory that I write; It was fun to listen to the “ideas” of the hosts and to initially gratify to hear them respond positively. But I really struck the Sweet Spot when I tried to create podcasts based on articles that I had written a long time ago, and to a certainly forgotten.
“This is a huge question – she cuts her heart,” said one of the hosts, discussing a test that I had published several years ago.
