AI

Say please

I’m starting to think that the best way to conceptualize #AI isn’t as vast, potentially malicious, hyper-advanced systems, but as vast, potentially malicious, hyper-advanced systems that power the most gullible, bumbling assistant you’ve ever worked with.

Like the sort of eager-to-please person who would give hackers access because they asked nicely. Or the overzealous go-getter who deletes all your emails and then apologizes for it.

Both at #Meta, by the way. One gets the sense that that “move fast and break things” cultspeak has not scaled so well.

Your favorite movie is vertical now

A friend recently shared this video from Kendra Gaylord, describing how your favorite movie is vertical now, courtesy of #AI —and what is lost in the process:

In movies, every time something is filmed, it’s memorializing a lot: the actors, the location, the way we talk and write and joke. Even though it’s fiction, it’s still a document, and if you mess with that document too much, it doesn’t represent all of those things anymore.

One of the most perverse revelations here is that the AI-generated version felt more realistic to people simply by virtue of being vertical; the same aspect ratio in which we experience social media videos. Our window to reality is portrait-shaped.