All the links today are videos.  So, if you don’t like videos, you’re welcome to skip.

AI Slop World | Jack Saint (video, 28 min) – Jack Saint discusses the sort of AI trash that we love to mock, such as the recent incident where someone made a terrible Wonka-themed event, and advertised it with AI art.  I appreciate Jack’s more nuanced take here, because I think “haha AI bad” really misses a lot.  I mean, it is funny.  But this is basically some guy desperate for money doing something incompetent and scammy to make money.  This is a phenomenon that predates generative AI, and arguably could have been done better with stock art and plagiarism.  We should be asking if this is truly representative of what we fear to come out of AI, or if it’s just the easy target.

I’d like to talk about this more in the future, but something I’ve noticed, is that a lot of anti-AI discussion specifically targets generative AI as it is used in a creative mode, such as generating articles or visual art.  It’s also said that the big problem with AI is that it’s going to take our jobs.  I think people are missing that there’s a mismatch between these two points.  If generative AI does indeed replace a bunch of jobs across industries, you gotta realize that many of those jobs are not creative.  So you can mock AI art for being soulless and bad at drawing hands, but none of that is going to mean anything when LLMs are used to perform non-creative tasks with objectively measurable outcomes–and still replace jobs in the process.  So the mockery of AI art feels like uselessly grabbing at the ankles of a machine that actually runs on treads.

Our Car Was Stolen!? A video essay | The Leftist Cooks (video, 1:31 hours) – A kafkaesque anecdote interspersed with a discussion of the psychology of poverty.  For instance, people in poverty have stronger time discounting functions, meaning they’re more likely to prefer a marshmallow now than two marshmallows later.  But this is arguably entirely rational.

EDS & Why We Misunderstand Disability | Ponderful (video, 48 min) – Ponderful shares her story of how she lived with a serious disability (Ehlers Danlos Syndrome), but didn’t realize it for 30 years.  She faced a lot of difficulties, to be sure, but she systematically attributed them to being lazy, out of shape, etc.  A great example of hermeneutical injustice.

The Queer History of The Lord of the Rings | verilybitchie (video, 43 min) – Verity explains why we’re pretty sure Tolkien didn’t mean to put homoeroticism in The Lord of the Rings–but it’s still there anyways, and at least some of the people who have worked on adaptations have realized that.  They also argue that the story of Eowyn may have been inspired by an old fairytale about a girl who becomes a boy.

Monetization will ruin the internet (again) | Rosencreutz (video, 1:16 hours) – Rosencreutz covers several examples of monetization schemes, Youtube to an attempted competitor to Wikipedia based on cryptocurrency.  Although, I think the conclusion is way too positive on Twitter, praising characteristics of Twitter that are done better by, for example, RSS.  Why don’t people talk about RSS?  I was thinking about this video when I was writing about hobbyist blogging vs monetized blogging.