Week 24.23

• A tough and tiring week under dispiriting circumstances. But in the grand scheme of things, the worry is optional and the problems are irrelevant. So I remind myself!
• It’s Thursday night as I write some of this in advance and we fly for Melbourne tomorrow night. I am ungraciously unpacked, a rarity. I’m hoping to fit everything into a single cabin bag for the first time. I’m traveling light. No cameras, no gear, and no plans to bring any shopping home. The mission seems to be merely spending a week on another continent. Okay maybe I’ll bring my Switch.
• At work, I started doing team updates as a newsletter. I ask everyone to send me what they’ve been up to, and they’re free to write a few lines or a bullet list. I chuck all of it into ChatGPT using a fairly specific prompt, and out pops an entertaining roundup of the week that reads like a news radio show.
• It strikes me that I could easily do the same for these weeknotes right here, except for the times I go off and end up writing 1,000 words on something (which is quite often). I hope the act of a human spending their valuable human life minutes every week to write these updates by hand makes them more valuable than if I just ask an AI to elaborate. Lord knows the quality is close.
• I came across this story about the potential for AI models to collapse as they’re trained on increasingly reflexive information generated by AIs, decaying like analog copies of a tape. This is of course what we’ve been wondering about: can AI keep learning to create new things in the absence of new original inputs from humans?
• And it might be inevitable, because there’s as yet no way to separate content that’s AI generated, and it’s going to be invisibly and thoroughly mixed into every pool of data. Even Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workers are using ChatGPT to do their work, which is explicitly meant to be human work. It’ll be interesting if years from now we look back at this moment in time when it looked like AI was going to take over everything but then suddenly fell apart and became unviable like seedlings in poisoned soil. Like HG Wells’ invaders succumbing to the common cold.
• It took awhile but I finished reading Matt Alt’s Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World. My Goodreads count for the year so far is a pitiful TWO. Anyway the book is enjoyable and well done. It promised previously untold stories about the invention of karaoke, the Walkman, the Game Boy, and others, which I doubted heading in — don’t we all know these stories? Would there really be anything new here? But I definitely learnt some new details here, and Alt does a great job of stitching it all together into a decade-spanning thesis about innovation, globalization, and the power of culture.
• In Melbourne now after a couple of nights of bad sleep, after a miserable red eye flight where I got maybe an hour of sleep, after staying awake most of Saturday. Finally rested on Sunday. Listening to Apple Music’s excellent playlist of songs produced by MIKE DEAN. Looking forward to a chill week of Nintendo, coffee, reading, a visit to my favorite museum of screen culture, and no expectations of doing much more.
• Amongst last week’s music releases, I missed a new album from Bob Dylan. And from Ben Folds. If I’m out to shift blame, it’s more like Apple Music neglected to inform me about them. The algorithms could use some work.

I started generating Midjourney images for a conceptual series and am in the process of curating the collection. Maybe I’ll put it up in a separate post at some point next week. It’s called Strange Beach, and I’m shooting for “wrong”, trying to prompt my way to pictures that are subtly unsettling or unhinged, yet set on a sunny Hawaiian beach. Some not so subtly.