joe posner

my simplest AI take is that it's like auto-tune for everything. remember when Jay-Z wrote a diss track against auto-tune? eventually people came around to the fact that great artists can have different defining characteristics. great pipes are merely one option.

@DKThomp i've been trying to think this through and made a video, song & 2x2 for it!! some parts of any process are special. some feel like a pointless bore. which will differ by process & by person. youtube.com/watch?v=pEEVdC…

Writing is thinking, and people who outsource the full writing process to AI will find their screens full of words and their minds empty of thought. But also: All writing involves and has always involved “outsourcing”—reaching outside of the writer’s mind to pull in pieces of the world, before and after the work of making words. Writers draw their ideas from other people, books, articles; after writing they often rely on outside copy editors, fact checkers, transcribers. Some of this stuff is just going to be done by AI in the future, and the boundaries between “good behavior” and “bad behavior” will have some blurry lines, and we should be honest and open about the blur rather than declare everybody with an open Claude window a part of the slopclass. Anybody who says AI transcription of long interviews obliterates the identity of a writer is being a little silly. But what about copy editing? Claude is a fast and decent copy editor, but it is inhuman to rely on it for that function? Is it moral to google “Econ papers on income transfers for child poverty” but immoral to write the same thing as an AI prompt? What about throwing 500 muddled words into ChatGPT and saying “does this make any sense? what do you think I’m trying to say here?” That’s going to be useful for some people. At an aesthetic level, I don’t like copy-pasting AI paragraphs into articles and pressing publish. That feels like me cheating myself. It feels like de-skilling. But the idea that “using AI” is anathema to the identity of being a writer is, in a few years, going to sound an awful lot like claiming that “using a computer” is a violation of the craft of writing. (Which, haha, maybe it is and we should all just go back to Steinbeck and his pencils; but talk about ships that have sailed.)

@AutismCapital clippy has tried to murder me multiple times

He lies dormant. Haunting us. We know he's going to make his move one day. He wants us to let our guard down. The bastard is sneaky. We know he's cooking something up.

@drorpoleg @DKThomp you rang?

@DKThomp JOE (just online enough)

i think being 'just online enough' is a major skill -- for journalists, politicians, companies. for politicians, you don't want to be offline (the vibes matter) but you don't want to mistake viral moments for the pulse of popular opinion same for firms. i think maybe openAI was a touch too online. they fell in love w the ability to author global viral moments (ghibli, sora)

@JerusalemDemsas sounds like somebody from cambridge! (though my dear hometown did finally do the thing cambridgema.gov/News/detail?pa… )

Warren seems like a uniquely bad actor in the housing policymaking space. A hostility towards negotiation and a reluctance to accept that there could be any sort of thing as good faith disagreement. Good on Schatz for standing strong here.

@chaykak they should let us take the vox youtube channel back over. worked wonders for barry diller and @dropout (nee @CollegeHumor)

If vox media is fracturing into pieces, I hope The Verge spins off / stays independent

@JerusalemDemsas sorry jerusalem

watching grown adults make short form video content in public... bring back shame, open the schools, idc, just end it

@mattyglesias i've gotten the sense the feeling of membership in a "we're AGAINST AI!!!!" group is valuable to people – a lot more powerful than cheap things like logic

@Noahpinion i mean – biggest mouth, biggest belly, biggest digestive tract. when data is food, they're an apex predator

It'll be kind of insane if Google ends up winning the AI era

@HeinrichKuttler @mattyglesias the thing your boss agreed with was that we'd need to "make women sad." you're saying he meant that supporting conservative causes might make them sad. but like, what causes? women and men have disagreed often. for example, remember women's suffrage?

@mattyglesias To steelman the original point, which is hardly new: There is a divergence between the genders in political views and it stands to reason that following the side with less extreme change might be better for stability. But you know all that and still chose cheap populism.

@Spotify i loved sharing my account with my wife for years, playfully stealing or forcing the music feed from/on. we finally upgraded to family plan, but found that the audiobook hours are not actually shared. should i go back to the cheaper plan?

@mattyglesias at least… in the absence of an INDEPENDENCE DAY type event where bill pullman can finally create an international community

@luke_winkie WHAT SHINS LYRICS!!! the people need to know

Motherfucker I have read your blog. You were quoting Shins lyrics. You were listening to The Postal Service. There is no way you can name more than three Kid Rock songs. Is there anything you don’t lie about?

@Noahpinion it's the "generals always fight the last war" of the information age

Theory: People are negative about AI because social/mobile kinda sucked. People were positive about social/mobile because the Web was kind of great. People were positive about the Web because computers were kind of great. People were positive about computers because

NEXT battleground for news? lol

if these guys hate being compared to other imperialist forces in history... why do they keep acting like them?

to celebrate the reintroduction of the term "NARCO-TERRORISM" here's a staff-picked video about how the DEA invented it vimeo.com/147954780

BREAKING NEWS: I will name Donald Trump the inaugural winner of my very prestigious and not at all transactional "The Best Looking and Least Corrupt Politician Ever Award" if he will talk to me

sure i am a 41-year-old dad jumping off a mountain, but i'm also hoping you will help me build a parachute mid-fall. sign up here. fireswork.co

hi there -- i've got some rage bait for you: A REQUEST! i know, this is anti-social media. but if you have been wondering "wow, wtf happened to joe" – i have been building! i'm relaunching my original pre-vox LLC fire-works and we are almost ready to start publishing.