Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1436
Zizians, Mirar, Nick Cave and Kanye, Edith's hilarious newsletter, the best throat lozenges, a lotta moaning about AI
Good morning. Sorry I’m late. Late start school day, had Jane till 9. Also I am very sick. I am basically sleeping all the time. 10, 12 hours a day, it is not enough. I took a four hour nap yesterday, was up for five hours, slept for ten, been up for 2 and I am ready to go back to sleep. But I can’t. Because I have to go to the doctor. Because I probably have strep. School sucks, Van Halen was right.
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Stopped by the pharmacy and bought the most pain-killery throat medicines I can buy. Most of them are just homeopathic or menthol. It’s weird how America is 100% for drugging itself all the time as much as possible, except when it comes to sore throats. There were only two products there with the benzos: Cepocol extra strength lozenges, but those are cherry, yuck. And Vicks Vapo Cool Sore Throat. But only the spray. The exact same product name, in lozenge form, does not have the Benzocaine. WTF. I bought both. I like lozenges better but I hate fruity cough drops, too syrupy. I want the medicinal burn and freeze. And holy shit is this VapoCool spray intense. Just what I was looking for. Sweet, sweet numbing relief.
We are liastening to some orchestral noise metal, Mirar, and their album Ascension. It is early days but so far it reminds me of late-period Skinny Puppy without the samples, and I am enjoying that.
Topic round up today.
Zizians! A cult that’s been around for years and killed a couple people and seems to be some SF Rationality-pilled transgendered murder cult. Here for it. Turns out they were hiding about a mile from here for a while. There was a big raid in a neighborhood nearby a couple weeks ago and the FBI wouldn’t say what they were here for. But it turned out to be Zizians. What fun. I had not heard of these people. BUT ALSO, it turns out that the ringleader, Ziz, she went to University of Alaska Fairbanks! So, Fairbanks, NC, SF and they shot a border patrol officer in Vermont, which is close enough to MA, right? I think they are following me around. Anyway, Ziz got caught this week so I guess I can stop worrying about them.
A few weeks ago Nick Cave wrote that he wanted “I am a god” by Kanye played at his funeral, and then of course a bajillion people wrote him saying some variant of “come on dude” and then he wrote a kind of tedious, Red Right Handian riposte about art and transendence and blah blah blah and I was just not having it, so I wrote him back:
I respect the artistry of Triumph of the Will. I have watched it. But I don’t endorse it to 10,000 strangers on the internet and say it should be played at my funeral. That’s not a defense of art, that’s politics. You wrote a decent defense of this art existing, of it being consumed. You did not write a decent defense of endorsing it.
Is there really such a shortage of great art that this has to be the one? If you believe there is, it's time to get out of your bubble.
Anyway, c’mon Nick, do better. People look up to you. Except I hit reply and I guess he’s one of those chickens where if you hit reply on his newsletter it doesn’t go to him. So it bounced. And I did not bother re-submitting. So here you go.
Edith Zimmerman sent out a newsletter that is one of my favorite comics of all time and I thought you might enjoy it: Princesses over 40 Publishing House.
Edith is the best.
Robin Sloan, who is also great, wrote a long(ish) essay about the ethics of AI. It is very good. Even though I disagree with it vehemently. It is called Is it Okay? Robin’s breakdown of the ethical calculations of AI is very solid. And there is one path he goes down which I agree with: no, it is not okay to rip off “everything” to further profit and produce nothing. But then he goes down another path where, I feel, if you extrapolate it out, he is essentially saying that if AI can become all science and all knowing and cure cancer and whatnot, it is acceptable for it to kill of certain kinds of art, writing (I think? It is implied?) among them. And in that tradeoff, Robin finds that AI might be okay.
Let us for the moment leave aside the possiblity and feasibility of this theoretical trade. The feasibility is dubious, both from a scientific and from a social perspective: even if the computers can get there someday, I don’t believe that our society would distribute the benefits to everyone.
But let’s put that aside. Let’s say it is 100% clear that the trade is: you lose music, writing, art and film and you gain… I dunno… the cure to cancer and profound scientific knowledge.
This trade is, of course, still difficult because we don’t know what omniscience is, and for all we know, knowing everything is simply a lot of knowledge that things can’t be done at all. But let us put this third big if aside and assume that omniscience is close to omnipotence, or, like, 85% of it.
EVEN THEN! Is this trade obviously good to you? It is not obviously good to me! Robin says, “we will make new forms of art” but… maybe? Maybe not? And of course that’s not the question. The question is “will we make new forms of art that the AI can’t also ruin?” I feel like Robin sidesteps the real question: would we give up art for science? And that is a horrible thing to reckon with. Maybe in the end… I would? But every fiber of my being says no no no no no.
I feel like we can all picture two worlds: A world where scientific advancement continues at the pace it has for a good long while, and we get art. And a world where it goes a lot faster, and we get no art! I feel like I am maybe not alone where the first of those two scenarios is better?
Maybe I am misunderstanding. But gosh. How depressing.
I read some article about how it’s gonna be so great when AI can go through all the combinations of compounds coming out of the Amazon or something and find all the new wonder drugs and I just had to cry, thinking about the amount of carbon we’ll burn doing that, and how literally nothing about that will actually solve the real problem of, you know, burning the Amazon. Whether it’s humans going slow or AIs going fast, you still gotta save the Amazon to discover drugs from the Amazon.
Then I watched this video someone sent me about how AI can be used in creativity ethically and it was a guy from Amazon who talked about how they used AI to source really funny customer reviews, since they own them anyway, then they made (really very funny!) ads with Adam Driver dramatically reading these reviews, and how it was this great example of “using AI’ but still being “made by people.”
And all I could think about was John C or whatever the reviewers name was. Did he get paid? No, probably not: Amazon owns your reviews. And of course, he, we (for I too, for a time, dabbled in humorous Amazon reviews as an art form) knew, years ago, that when we wrote funny reviews for Amazon, they would own them. But that was the art form. The placement, the situ, was part of the art, the absurdity of it. Gone.
And now years later, boom, your art is not your own, it has been completely decontextualized, an AI targeted it for repurposing in a manner you never envisioned, and well bully for you.
Cool, cool.
This Amazon AI guy seems really nice. Seems to mean well. but. God. I would say… 80% of my lifetime artistic output has been putting things on the internet. And they’re all just… getting stolen. These words right now. This newsletter. One of the most rewarding things I’ve ever made, a sort-of burgeoning new art form, really. Being co-opted as we go. Even though I have all the settings on the platform set the proper way (at least, last I looked). Even though this publishing platform isn’t trying to steal them at all. Someone is. Awesome.
In the future people will pay extra for shit they know hasn’t been through an LLM. Pure, raw art. Kinda like those collectors who used to pay Anaïs and Henry Miller for bespoke erotica. Maybe I’ll start physically mailing this to you guys on disappearing ink.
I should probably go back to bed now.
This Mirar has conveniently rounded out this Noise and Metal playlist I have been working on since, oh, October. All new ish stuff. Thank you, Nick, for teaching me about Bell Witch, they are so great. Katheryn Mohr made her album in an abandoned Icelandic factory r something like that so, you know, legit provenence. Julie Christmas made my albums of the year list from last year, and it is produced by former Boston famed musician and producer Andrew Schneider, who used to work at Pearl Arts and Crafts with my ex girlfrind Megan and GMHHAY reader Keith.
Okay have a good weekend. Wish me luck. Maybe I will get a single thing done. Maybe I will be well enough to join Jane on her Girl Scout Cookie sale. Maybe I’ll even make it to Walmart.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.