Sorry, I’m gonna rant for a second or two. This will be cathartic for me, and it’s cool if you want to skip to the “New Work!” section.

I’m surprised that it’s taken the third installment of this newsletter for me to say this, but here goes: I FUCKING HATE AI.

It was pretty benign when it started, I guess. I remember seeing DALL-E generated images on Twitter¹ of then-British prime minister Boris Johnson underwater in a fishing net, looking like something out of Portishead’s “Only You” video. The shit these things produced were hella primitive, and even then, I had no inclination toward using it for anything. It seemed frivolous to me. It still feels that way.
But then…

The resulting images started to “improve.”
Said images appeared on Instagram and Facebook.
Then on album covers and posters.

All of this despite having six fingers on each hand.

And at some point, we were made aware of the environmental impact behind generative AI and the fact that the images were built from stolen work.

Fast forward to this day and age, and GenAI bullshit is everywhere, from restaurant menus to student planners to viral videos of reporters getting slapped. The people behind these things will tell you that AI is just a tool and you need to make it work for you.

Some of these assholes might even be friends of yours.

You need new friends, if that’s the case.

Facebook has become my default spot for complaining about generative AI. Probably because that’s where I’ve seen the worst of it, be it from local venues advertising shows I’ll never fucking go to, or people I went to high school with jumping on the latest GenAI trend — often feeding pictures of their got-damn faces to the identity theft machine to spit out an image of them as a Ghibli character or mullet-coifed individual in eighties garb.²

Apparently, I’m the one who needs new friends.

New Work!

I’ve decided to dedicate the rest of the year to self-initiated work, partially because of the idea indexing method I was introduced to a few months ago, and mentioned in my first newsletter.

I’m attempting to streamline my creativity and make work that I really wanna make. Props must be given to Kate Smith for sharing her idea-keeping method on the Creative Slash Podcast. It lit a fire under my ass.

I also want to get hired via the work I really wanna make. The first idea checked off was this…

My health is no one’s business but that of my family and my doctor, but one thing I hate is medical stigma. I felt the need to give my meds a shoutout. In the end, I can’t be ashamed about something that keeps me alive and mentally well-adjusted.

There’s something else I wanna talk about and display, but I haven’t received the go-ahead to do so yet.

I unintentionally lied when I said these newsletters wouldn’t be long.
Sorry. 👉🏾👈🏾

Maybe I’ll have some records and books to talk about next time.
Peace. And thank you.

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