Good morning hello hi howdy how are you greetings from 8:17 AM in sunny, frigid, Chatham County, NC. No snow, though. How are you faring, Northeast United States? Thank you for all your snow photos. I do not particularly like snow anymore, given my snowbound upbringing, but I do love photos of snow glistening in the sunshine, provided I am not in them.

I forgot to buy Springsteen tickets on Saturday, that was dumb. I was too excited doing CHORES CHORES CHORES to be in front of my computer. Now they are like $2,000 a seat, so, yeah I guess I won’t be going to see Broooooooooce again which is sad because I really want to see him one more time before one of us dies not saying which.

No one said we are not fucked in the California gubernatorial primary when I asked about it a week or so ago, so I assume we are fucked. Cursory reading of the polls confirms this. I would prefer not to be fucked. I like Katy Porter, I like Tom Steyer, especially his book Drawdown, which included the inspiration for the best song I ever wrote, Pasture Cropping Drinking Song, but I am not a giant fan of billionaires in politics, benevelant or no. I do not know Eric Swalwell from a hole in the ground which is an impressive accomplishment for a politician, what with me being politically engaged since, oh, 1985 or some shit. But shit, man, we gotta rally around someone or something. I guess if all of Steyer’s supporters went to Katie we would get somewhere.

When I was a kid I had a firm belief that “Katie” was the correct spelling, but now I believe “Katy” is the preferred one. Not because of the majestic, only-in-America 20-lane freeway in Houston, but because of the cancelled indie rocker Mark Kozelek. This was reinforced with the introduction of the amazing Katy Rose in my life, oh, fifteen years ago. Hi Katy Rose, miss you.

Actually I know two Katy Roses, both in Texas, now that I think about it. Lost touch with the other one, though.

Lines that Would Have Been Tweets in the Oughts

Hey whatever happened to Atom Egoyan? Annie would know. I miss Annie.

Went to the grocery store this morning and there is no sale this week on six packs of zevia. Very sad. The soda gods are aligned against me this week.

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We are listening to Mandy, Indiana this morning, their divine new album Urgh. It is great. It reminds me of “Bang On It”-era Test Department, which would would know is a killer dance tune if you were ever a Man Ray dance club denizen. Also very into this new Mandy, Indiana video that premiered a month or so ago it is just great.

So after ranting about AI last week my friend Chad wrote in and sorta called me on it. It was a very prescient email and dead on. “You actually hate the players, not the game,” he said. He goes on:

You don’t hate AI. I bet you think it’s kind of technically amazing. You hate who is getting paid, and I don’t blame you…. But that means that you hate the incentives and lack of regulations — not AI. You hate that for an artist to get paid they are forced, by law, to defend their ownership at great cost. The world is set up to incentivize private equity, centralization of power, and deregulation of tech in support of it.

You sir are not anti-AI… you are anti-establishment, and that warms my heart.

And he is right! I am pissed because it is cool tech! Cool tech built on an (irredeemably?) immoral foundation that I cannot condone. Not just the IP theft, but the dumbing down of humanity, the inability to opt-out, the environmental damage, the potential impact on jobs.

I used to try and thread the needle on this. I used to be more accurate in my speaking about this and I have gotten lazy. I used to differentiate between ML and LLMs. I used to rail against people calling it all AI. I used to specifically say what I didn’t like about it and not just blanket diss it.

I have gotten way more sloppy about this as the grey goo continues to spread over the entire planet and the distinctions were lost on people.

This is kind of sad!

I should not give up?

Or should I give up.

I mean, I really want to have a little AI buddy too. I would just want it to be ethical.

I cannot stand people who talk about all the whizz-bang fun parts of AI and just leave out the immoral parts it drives me fucking crazy. I mean, am I a weirdo who eats meat but routinely says “man meat is terrible i gotta stop eating meat.”? Yes. Is that normal? I suppose not.

And then I watch Anil Dash out there, more or less alone, trying to thread that needle and say “AI is pretty cool we should try and make it ethical” and watch him get absolutely creamed by the anti-AI people (like me!) who are not interested in giving ground one iota and who could blame them we’ve all been pushed so far by capitalism and tech.

Buuuuut… against my will, two nights ago, as I was falling asleep, I started thinking about the details of the mechanics of a fair compensation system for creators who have had their content sucked into LLMs.

When I am arguing about AI stuff, I usually say something along the lines of “compensating creators is easy and the logistics are obvious, what we’re missing is the will,” and leave it at that. Because in my head, it is obvious how we would compensate creators.

But as I was falling asleep I realized that I had never actually seen, anywhere, an actual plan. I started to make some inquiries. There are groups that do advocacy, there are lawsuits winding their way through the courts and there are licensing deals based upon IP considerations, where the LLM creators would license their IP to specific LLMs. My friend Rex points out that there are many industry-specific efforts: musicians and filmmakers and social media posters and writers and whatnot. Bot nothing that he is aware of or that I can find that offers any concrete solutions.

There’s this org, which seems interesting. I am a big Hold Steady fan. But they do not seem to have any proposed solutions. I signed up but they haven’t sent me any emails yet. We shall see.

It’s obvious to me that all of these are barking up the wrong tree for how to solve the problem, or simply doing advocacy that the problem be solved, without knowing how.

SO. In my sleep I started mapping out a solution that seeks to solve the problem of creator compensation to LLM training now and forever. That scales with the industry — if the industry truly becomes the underpinning of our economy, it would scale up. If it flames out like NFTs, it would scale down to nothing. It takes inspiration from CanCon and the Alaska Permanent Fund and the Alaska Land Claims Settlement Act and SoundExchange and more.

I got a pretty decent outline going, but there are a few challenges:

Firat: As ever, I do not particularly want to write this document. It is not very domestic or pedestrian. I am so over writing shit to convince people, so over writing shit in a normal voice that sounds like LLMs. I love writing. But the way we write in the modern world — writing for idiots, with long passages of super-obvious introductory shit? So not my cup of tea. I mean, I recognize it’s necessary.

I recognize we are all islands in the stream and barely connect with one another and are all on different planes of reality and understanding, and when you write a piece for the consumption of many many others (as opposed to you, lovely, wonderful like-minded few hundred), you have to do this. But my god it is boring.

Oh man maybe my daughter is rubbing off on me and I don’t want to do boring things anymore. But man, life is too short.

Next: I do not want to be the face of this. I just want the framework solution to exist, and I want people to be aware of it, and I want politicians to endorse it but I don’t want to deal. I learned long ago that you gotta choose your hills and battles and I only have so much time in this world and… I mean I dunno. There are worse things to fall on your sword for than the fair compensation of millions of creators. That’s not a bad way to go down. But I guess I am small and selfish and I rather spend my remaining days on this planet snuggling and making drone music.

Normally what I do in these situations is I just write it anyway, without any introductory or explanatory material, just the barebones facts. And then I throw it into the middle of a GMHHAY edition about gardening or paper shredder models, and call it a day. Just get it out of my system like an itch. Because ambition is evil.

But also I know, I know, that is dumb and not productive and not correct. I know that this deserves more attention to that. (So does my proposal to turn Johnston Atoll into a Spandau prison for American fascists, but that is a topic for another day.) And for whatever reason, no one else seems to have gotten around to it? I mean maybe some policy wonk on some senator’s staff or at some think tank but I sure can’t find it. It definitely hasn’t entered the discourse. And it should.

Finally: even if you completely solved the problem of creator compensation, AI would still be immoral! I am (still) optimistic about AI eventually being carbon neutral. In the long run, against the will or actions of those who are most involved in AI right now. But until then, it’s not particularly great from an environmental point of view. It is still making people dumb, and I do not have a clear solution for that, it’s not clear that anyone does. It’s still a geopolitical nightmare, and it is still threatening jobs. It has so many problems!

But having a lot of problems is not a reason to not solve one problem. Gah.

SO. I have written the outline. It would be lovely if some of you helped. Read the outline. Asked questions. Marked parts that are confusing or you do not know about.

I am looking for a few volunteers. People who care about this stuff and think about this stuff. The work isn’t much, maybe ten-fifteen minutes of your time for now. Maybe later if it turns into an actual essay, something more?

Let me know if you’re interested.

Jane is still nutso at night but I think I made a little progress last night? Emma called me up for my shift dealing with her manic pixie bedtime terror and I did get her to settle down and actually talk about it a bit. She does not know why she gets crazy at bedtime, why would she? She did say she wishes she had more time to be crazy in the daytime. And she doesn’t because she chooses screens when she can. So I guess this is more evidence of reduced screentime. I mean, she gets no iPad on weekdays and only an hour or so of Real Civil Engineer after our (incredibly early) dinner. So it’s not like she is getting a ton?

I’m actually considering trying the opposite. To lock down an iPad to 30 minutes of anything, and… just let her use it at bedtime.

Is that crazy?

Got a metal playlist for you and it is awesome man I love weird-ass black metal so much these days what has happened to me I used to be a sensitive boy who only listened to sad slow songs about pain. Now I listen to loud fast songs about pain. And Charlie XCX.

I hope you have a lovely day.