Elsewhat

The first time I heard about language-based AIs, I was sitting in a beautiful Montréal park, and friend of Elsewhat Sean started talking about what AI could do with language. This was years before GPT got its “chat” prefix and became the sensation it has since become. I remember being baffled by hearing about GPT could take long strings of text and near-instantly rewrite them in a different style, or summarized shorter, or expanded, or just write from scratch. I felt somewhat in awe of the description of this technology, which took a few more years to go mainstream, but the impression he gave was that this was going to have a big impact on society.

Sean was then, and continues to be, way in advance of other artists in his understanding, and use of AI. This novel, years and years in the making, is testament to that. It feels like it could not be timed any better—Right as people are discussing what AI will do to art, here comes a beautiful book about, and partially written by AI.

The book follows a successful poet in her mid-seventies, Marian Ffarmer, as she’s commissioned by a California big-tech company to collaboratively write a piece of poetry with the company’s cutting edge language-based AI, Charlotte. Marian is a beautifully rendered character, and her eccentric, mischievous manner makes her a perfect foil to the polished technocrats at the big California computer company.

This book is excellent, and a very timely contribution to the debate on how AI impacts art. The New York Times gave a glowing review, and I agree. This is a thoughtful work, which simultaneously looks back at the long life of an artist as she navigates a new technology, created in a few short years, which will forever change the craft she’s taken her lifetime to master.

It’s also, importantly, not a work that tries to predict the long arc of where the technology will go, or the possible impacts it might have on society. It’s foremost about the artist, and her act of using tech in creating something which was, until now, quintessentially human.

Buy the Book (Canada) →
Buy the Book (US) →

John Gruber of tech/Apple blog Daring Fireball has a nice rundown of Aptos, Microsoft’s upcoming default font for its Office apps.

What I find weird about the whole thing is that Microsoft still hasn’t really shown any of these new fonts. They’ve provided glimpses of them, but mostly at large display sizes, not text sizes, which is where they really matter in the context of Office documents. I’m not the only one to find this curious.

So I took matters into my own hands, and created rudimentary specimens for each of Microsoft’s five new typefaces

All are better than Arial. I don’t use office, but as Gruber says:

it’s impossible not to encounter documents created with Office, whether you personally use it or not. Thus, Microsoft’s typographic choices affect us all.

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Friend of Elsewhat Sean Michaels has a piece up in The New Yorker this week about the intersection of AI and the music industry. It touches on tech, music sharing, sampling, and lots more.

Meanwhile, the pace of A.I. research has recalled the work of West Yorkshire rhubarb farmers, whose stalks grow so fast that they can hear the sound of them stretching. Tools with names like So-Vits-SVC, which has been used to generate A.I. facsimiles of Drake’s, Eminem’s, and Jay-Z’s voices, are introducing a new set of challenges to an industry that has barely recovered from covid-era concert restrictions. Musical artists, confronted by Big Tech’s tempo, influence, and affluence, have shown an understandable willingness to line up behind Big Media. Given a very real fear that generative tools will further erode, or permanently cripple, the already precarious economics of artists’ lives, why not allow globe-straddling labels, studios, and publishers to stand on their behalf?

Read it here →

A recap of a chess game that used the most powerful chess engine available to always play the worst move it possibly could.

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Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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Via Podcast On the Media.