https://www.todayintabs.com/p/who-goes-ai
taking shots at the gray lady:
You might think Mr. R not so different, superficially, from Ms. L. He’s also a long-tenured technology columnist at a respected mainstream publication. And yet he has eagerly, even gleefully, turned flack for the machines. He has delegated much of his professional life to them as well, and seems proud of it:
Most recently, [Mr. R] tells me, he created a team of Claude agents to help edit his book, led by a “Master Editor” agent. Other sub-agents are in charge of things like fact-checking, making sure the book matches his writing style, and offering positive and negative feedback.
And why not? Mr. R is not known or valued for his elegance of expression. He has, at best, a “writing style,” and not one that can’t easily be duplicated by a large language model. Checking facts? Assessing his work’s strengths and weaknesses? More bathwater to be tossed out of this increasingly baby-less tub. So what explains Mr. R, who “expects AI models to get better than him at everything eventually?” Why does he go AI when Ms. L never would?
Mr. R’s secret is that his work is not primarily artistic or informative—it is functional. He serves a purpose for the industry he covers. Mr. R’s job is to absorb the tech industry’s self-mythologizing, and then believe in it even harder than the industry itself does. He serves as a kind of plausibility ratchet. His byline and employer legitimize a level of credulousness that would otherwise be laughable, and thereby allow tech PR to seem relatively restrained. Mr. R has no problem going AI because he himself has been a small cog in a big ugly machine for a long time.
spoiler
It’s Kevin Roose
Went to the campus screening of Ghost in the Machine today, many familiar names; I did not know going in that hometown hero Shazeda had so many lines (are they called lines in a documentary?). I can recommend it, especially for a more gen-ed / undergrad audience; the director seems supportive of educational use and reuse and it is structured in a dozen or so bite sized chapters.
Haven’t seen the AI apocalypse optimist one to compare against, would probably rather spend my money on Mario tbh.
But also it made me realize it’s not a “California” ideology anymore, she never calls it that, like it’s gone so mainstream and so widespread, you can’t even get through the sneer club bingo list in a 2 hour movie. Gates, Musk, Andreesen, Zuck, Altman, no Peter Theil !? As a statistician, Galton, Pearson (Karl only), Spearman, no Fisher !?
Non-zero overlap with the lore dump episode of Lain and the Epstein files, though:
spoiler
Douglas Ruskoff, but, sadly, not the dolphin guy