Oh hello there, it's been a while. Once again when the world is chaos I end up not writing anything because I'm so busy making notes of things I want to write about and the backlog keeps getting longer because there's a new thing every 5 minutes and I can't keep up. I've noted this in the past and often tried to find a way around it but at this point I think I just need to give up. Similar to the old email-bankruptcy thing, I just need to accept that I'll never be the most up to date commentary on anything and will always miss something and that's OK. I don't know when I convinced myself that anything I write needs to be the definitive take on something, but I'm reminding myself that I don't have to get everything right the first time or cover every single thing, and just talking about some things is better than not talking about anything. Caveat emptor.

Once again US politicians are dropping bombs to draw attention away from something else, anyone as old as I am has seen this play out several times now so... sucks, but also same as it ever was. This time I've been enjoying the Thiss_Youu account on X highlighting all the accounts that days/weeks/months ago were insisting Trump would never and are now celebrating it like it was always the plan. The hypocrisy isn't new, it's just much easier to track now.

Speaking of social media, just about every social media feed I look at (which I'm desperately trying to minimize these days) has been talking about this MIT study on brain activity while using LLMs like ChatGPT for writing. Most coverage leads with "MIT study shows using AI makes you dumber" and thats followed by tons of people patting themselves on the back for assuming that was the case or citing some earlier snide/sarcastic comment they made. The irony of course is that's not what they study showed, and the authors explicitly asked that media not frame their work in a way that suggests that's what they found. Of course, the people writing about it apparently didn't read that far.

The actual take away from the admittedly very limited study isn't "don't use AI" it's "use AI better." A similar misunderstanding would be a click bait headline claiming electric screwdrivers are causing muscle atrophy and damning humanity to having puny forearms. You have to consider the goal, and the context. If your goal is massive buff forearms and your primary routine for that is spending hours cranking a manual screwdriver then yes an electric screwdriver might screw that up for you. If however your goal is to build some furniture then perhaps the electric screwdriver is a much more efficient option then doing it all by hand, giving you more time to actually enjoy the furniture you've just built, or go do something else entirely. I could spend 4 more paragraphs picking apart all the misrepresentations and explaining it but then I'd be playing the role of the LLMs in this paper and doing it all for you. lol.

Conversely I really enjoyed this Artnet piece which, in addition to advising people to trust the artists and let them use whatever tools they want however they want, takes the opportunity to consider the (often promised with new technology) potential that AI actually does start doing all the busywork and suddenly humans have 40% more leisure time to fill - what might they do with their days? Perhaps, in that future, people decide to spend more time in art museums. It's a stretch, but if you are in the museum attending or operating world one worth considering. How should you prepare for more people spending more time looking at art? I'm not an evangelist or some true believer singing the praises of AI every chance I get, but I do get sick of the non-stop doomer takes so it's cool to see people considering other futures.

In another interesting twist, for a growing group of people ChatGPT is becoming their religion. I'm not talking about evangelists or true believers singing the praises of AI at every chance they get, but people who actually believe they have "awakened" their AIs who are now fully sentient beings communicating with them, or that some supernatural all powerful being or alien intelligence is using AI to reach out and talk to them specifically. Some of this is influencer engagement farming, some is cargo cult opportunistic exploitation, and some of it is full on devout cyber spiritualism. While you could say that's crazy, and you might be right, and that's something you could even say about most other religions too, there's a ray of sunshine to be found here too. Consider this post by Alexis and how some of this can be emotionally powerful and healing, on a wholly different level.

I have a tendency of defaulting to "I know how to do this with the tools I have so don't need to learn the new thing" and have to force myself to sometimes try new stuff. In my younger years I prided myself on living on the bleeding edge but as I got older I realized how much time I was spending trying to figure out why the new thing was broken or why some bug was preventing me from doing the thing I needed and took comfort in reliability. But that's also complacent and dusty, so I have to push myself out of the comfort zone sometimes. A while back I did that when I moved from Chrome to Arc for my daily browsing needs. It was new and different and scary and now I love it. So it's with somewhat similar trepidation that I've just started playing with Dia, the new AI-baked-in-browser from the same people. I haven't fully switched but I'm curious and poking around the corners. There's also Genspark which you have to pay to use so I haven't yet, but in the same way we moved from bookmarks and webrings to search and recommendations I can see a shift in browsing to letting AI drive a lot of it and I want to at least understand how that's playing out.

While there's no shortage of predictions about what happens next with AI, I prefer my predictions to come the old fashioned way - from 20 year old Japanese manga. In 1999's "The Future I Saw" Ryo Tatsuki "predicted" the Fukushima earthquake in March 2011 and the somewhat recently released (2021) updated version follows that up with an even bigger quake in... July 2025. Of course I'll be in Tokyo next week, so if ship pops off I'll at least have a first hand account for you.

Speaking of storytelling, I loved every second of this video of Wes Anderson talking about each one of his films.

Speaking of art, my friend Beauty was in Basel last week for the fairs and wrote up some of her thoughts after visiting galleries and exhibitions and curators all day long. She's been leading the charge to rebrand "digital art" to "In Silico" which is a much more thoughtful and appropriate way of classifying work that just as powerful and important but often gets brushed aside because someone used a mouse and keyboard rather than a paintbrush and canvas. Long time photographers will understand that pain when clients and collectors initially treated digital photography as somehow lesser than film photography, even if the behind the camera skill and intention was the same. Some legit ignoring the message because of the medium shit going on here, so it's great when respected collectors can take a moment to look at a bigger picture. I feel like this new interview with Grant Yun gets into some of that as well, if not directly, by talking about his "vectorized reality." Back to Beauty's essay, this part towards the end jumped out at me, she writes:

"We still see collectors and galleries dismiss blockchain authentication as speculative whilst
eagerly discussing their latest acquisitions of 1970s computer graphics. The contradiction
feels surreal. They're investing in early computational works whilst treating contemporary
silicon-based creativity as somehow less legitimate."

Reading that, I'm reminded of Bob Nickas writing for ARTnews in 2015 about Basquiat. In that piece he talks about how many contemporary art museums still don't own works by Basquiat because they passed on them in the 80's thinking they were too expensive (sometimes by only a few hundred dollars) and feel like they missed their chance as they are now all going for millions, well out of their acquisition budgets. It's interesting to try and look 40 years into the future and think about what works that are accessible today are going to be long out of reach then, and why they might be overlooked today.

Speaking of overlooking things, I'm not skipping international drama and US politics intentionally, I just feel overwhelmed by it and have already had some conversations in The Crowd Telegram group so don't really want to recap it all because, as I noted at the very beginning the backlog and overflow is real. Though I also know writing about things can be therapeutic so maybe I'll just buckle down and vomit some mind rant up and try to cover all the bases. We'll see. I can already imagine the flood of "I always like your takes but you are so wrong about..." emails I'll be getting. Woooo!

Hope you are well.

-s

PS. Mostly off X (no longer verified, unfollowing everyone soon), still sort of on IG, and trying to be on BS more but also very much mid website revamp and revision and ideally will be writing more and scrolling less in the coming months.