Ignore the Glitches and Regenerate Content

A little note about AI, thinking in process.

We’re trying to calm ourselves down, frantically looking for the safe harbor. AI can’t do judgment, taste or meaning - sure, sure - and as I try to formulate it to myself, to find some peace there, peace doesn’t arrive. Keep going: embodiment, principal-ship, cultural argument - something AI doesn’t carry. YET.

Is any of it AI-safe? Uff, I doubt it. Looks like for the foreseeable future, staying on tip-toes is the move.

That said, a couple of thoughts feel sticky:

First, a mental image of what AI knowledge is: a latent space of words, where a thought travels as a vector. Creativity inside that space looks like combining parts that weren’t supposed to be combined, that is the part where we know that we don’t know. But what about that stuff that we don’t know that we don’t know? Take AI slop, it didn’t exist in the latent space before; we generated it, and now it occupies its own little corner of the culture. So how do we get out of that space, how do we bring something genuinely new into it? The simplest answer is to just keep living.

Second, let’s frame, simplistically, the arrival of photography as one of the pushes that opened the door to abstract art. AI obsoletes old ways of knowledge work in a similar way. So what new forms of “abstract” thought become possible once the burden of realistic synthesis is lifted? We don’t know yet, we’re trying to figure it out, kind of exciting.

So in conclusion: keep on living and don’t cling to the old. Stay calm and carry on, the other way.

Bonus: the old poster as AI video slop (clean version)