I was at a dinner last Saturday night and my friend put on the track from Velvet Sundown and asked me what I thought. I thought, super clean sounding production, super clean sounding raspy voice, kind of meaningless lyrics.. what’s new?! I have to say I was pretty shocked to find out it was Ai as I’m about to go into the studio soon to record a new bunch of songs I’ve written and it left me feeling pretty defeated. But when I thought about it afterwards I realised that Ai is really just mimicking what is already there. Slop. Not everything is slop of course, we put on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain afterwards and I felt a lot better.
This technology is not evil in and of itself but it is being used in an evil way. It’s stealing our humanity and we are aiding that process by listening to it and choosing it over something organic. As Tolkien said, and I loosely repeat, “evil cannot create anything itself, it has to steal and mimick everything from the ones who create.”
And yet evil keeps winning, so the stealing and mimicry must be effective.
Creation of something truely new is rather rare i think. We all engage in mimicry and stealing(we often call this inspiration and influence), and often we arent even conscious of it. I dont think that process is to be deprecated.
Which leaves us with intention. And lets be real, we're talking about humans here. Humans are the very creators of evil intentions..
AI is the asbestos of the digital age. They put it in *everything* (and I literally mean everything, from floor tiles to boiler jacketing, paints, ceiling tiles, cars, high chairs, you name it, they wanted to try to find a way to use asbestos in it) ...until they realized that it kills people. And then we spent / are-spending another century (and trillions of dollars) on asbestos abatement, sort of like what we have coming in AI abatement. But hey!, they spent tens of trillions of dollars on that slop ...and they're gonna want it back, ...and they're looking at you and I to pay the tab.
Maybe.. but itd be silly to assume this iteration of ai is the end of it. Theyve invested alot of money, this is just the first salvo. I would expect any concessions they make rn to be of a tactical nature.
Its like, great news everybody, our new vests stopped their 9mm bullets, were winning! Meanwhile theyre cooking up icbms in the back.
Why the pissy view? Well i cant remember the last time good news wasnt followed by bad, and then worse. Just the amount of money theyre investing in FUTURE ai capabilities portends something far greater than the ai threat we're facing right now.
But ofc i dont keep my finger on the pulse of these things. Im basing my view on my own reading of the room, albeit from a distance.
This shits not going anywhere, and attempts to control them WILL be sidestepped or neutralized. We should be very suspicious of anything that comes from them that looks like a victory. And i think it behooves us to remember that in this world things are never what they seem.
Referring to Tolkien, as has already been done, he thought of his legendarium as chronicling what he called the Long Defeat - until ultimate victory, not of our making. Worth bearing in mind, perhaps.
Thank you for this post! This gives me some hope for the future.💕✨️ I feel ai can have a good impact (in my personal hopes helping chronic illness warriors to find much needed diagnosis etc) but the fact its been being used to create income for creativity is a bit greedy... glad to see YouTube is changing this soon.
I think Apple's failure to deliver an AI assistant was a turning point. Apple has a lot of flaws, but it can usually take a new technology and extract a useful nugget of it and make it easy for their users to use. There are numerous examples: touch pads, NFC, code signing, text layout, disk backup and archiving, textual search, facial recognition and I'm sure I'm missing a ton more. If there was some useful nugget that AI could deliver with some level of reliability, odds are Apple, if anyone, could have delivered it. Apple failed. Idiots are screaming for blood. Tim Cook the CEO, is a moron. The truth is that AI is less than meets the eye. It gives a great demo. I worked on an AI product in the 1960s, and it gave a great demo. Apple found out the hard way. Others are going to learn the same lesson.
Among those learning the same lesson are Spotify and Youtube. LLMs seem perfectly suited for the arts since they generate the same kinds of artistic output as humans: words, music, images. The problem is that there is a lot less there than meets the eye or ear. If you want to generate Muzak, something invented in the 1930s, ambient music-like sound to fill in an auditory vacuum, then AI can be useful. If you want actual music, you'll need actual musicians.
Yet those of us who treasure human creativity seem to be a huge minority. My Spotify usage is all consciously chosen. I want to hear what I want to hear. Word of mouth for anything "new," new being post 1994 for my main Playlist.
A lot of people want Spotify, especially, to fill in an auditory vacuum. It produces music-like sounds that fit within an expected envelope. I know I hear Spotify in lots of places like medical offices and non-chain stores where it serves to hide the hum of the HVAC system. I'm sure there are lots of people who love Spotify because it lets them curate a huge collection of music that they actually want to listen to. If nothing else, it offers a chance to try out new music without springing for a whole CD up front.
All my previous music collections, whether vinyl, CD, cassette (or even my old 8 tracks) have been lost or "stolen," so Spotify is my affordable option. But they don't choose anything for me. I'm not interested in their opinion. I know what I want to hear. This whose opinions I respect introduce me to enough modern talent.
This is a good sign. I've been predicting the biggest new product in the next 5-10 years will be an authenticity verifier or an AI detector—something like a virus detector—to alert the public to which creative products have been doctored and which haven't. A product like that, along with the public's apparent distaste for fakery, might go far to stanch the flood of junk that's coming our way.
You'd think so...but false positives are possible and have left human authprs discredited. Some universities have turned off the ai ai detectors as there's some evidence they're more likely to give false positives against neurodivergent authors or authors for whom English is not their first language. It's a minefield.
I’ll bet. It’s likely that no one has cracked the problem yet. Plus, AI cheating is a moving target. Peter Norton’s product team was never finished with Norton antivirus. It never ends. Job security!
Agreed. Not sure what that would be as far as song creation is concerned, though. Maybe some sort of extremely reliable lie detector that everybody is asked to take. To me the heart of a song is the melody. We should create a culture where using AI to come up with melodies is a one strike you’re out offense.
It seems to me that the same machine reasoning that led to automated mimicry could be used detect music plagiarism or doctored files. It shouldn’t be rocket surgery.
I'm sure others have seen the following sort of thing in their Google feeds of which I will give the most stunning of idiotic examples:
It was a beautiful, formal color portrait photo of an extraordinarily handsome, young, and wealthy couple, from circa 1958. What I call for lack of a better term, "AI slopover," which appeared in small letters under the photo, said something like "Woman wearing pearls and man wearing suit pose for photo."
It was a photo of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, probably taken in their Georgetown home.
Have others seen things like this, for example, a photo of The Beatles circa 1964 with a slopover caption which is something like, "Young men with long hair and guitars performing?"
The thing about AI narration is that it's always detectable. First of all, our souls sense it, but second, if you listen long enough to a piece which your instincts tell you is almost certainly AI, you're bound to hear a moment's telltale stretching out or jumbling of syllables. If it's a YouTube video, I usually leave the following comment, or a close variation:
"Don't you know that there are probably a hundred thousand semi professional, community, or college theater actors in this country who would be happy to narrate for free, just to be able to list the credit?"
They never seem to catch on.
Oh, yeah, here's something I've seen on YouTube in the last year: having been unwontedly ( of course Spellcheck squigglylined it in red, but Spellcheck squigglylines its own name in red ) and uncomfortably close to a half dozen psychopaths, several of whom did their best to kill me, in my lifetime, I have an interest in learning as much about "Cluster B personality disorders" as I can. The YouTube Algorithm knows this about me. It's just amazing how many addresses people such as Jordan Peterson and C.S. Lewis ( ! ) made about Cluster B personality disorder! I imagine Peterson, at least, has lawyers trying to run all of these counterfeits to ground, but inasmuch as there are several hundred million YouTube channels, it will take them a while.
Once we cut through all the mythology, it’s a lot easier to see this stuff for what it is. For every little impressive thing it can do, there are a hundred places where it’s wasteful and wrong.
YES!!!!! AI bubble pop cannot happen soon enough! People want heart and soul in the creations they spend their time on, not zeroes and ones. Next bubble pop (please God): Digital currency. No intrinsic value to Bitcoin and its ilk. Just more zeroes and one that go away when the electricity goes out. If the U.S. goes through and invests public money in digital currency, it will be not only be bankrupt, but so far in the hole we may never dig ourselves out. But that's exactly what the Trump administration plans to do. Probably because Trump benefits from it.
“Real” physical currency as in dollars or euros are no more real than cryptocurrency. The value of any “real” currency is given by the supply and demand for the currency. The supply is controlled by the central banks and the demand is based upon the trust of the national and/or international investors (common people who buy dollars as a “reserve” and institutional investors as well). Right now the us dollar is on a multi-year low because of the uncertainty provided by the trump administration and other systemic factors such as the ever-rising debt ceiling. All of this to say that cryptocurrency is the same than any other form of currency. The difference is that you’re giving the keys to the supply side to someone else and not the central bank. If the central bank got a hold of a crypto then it’d be the same. The true value that people often miss is in the trade-ability and traceability provided by the blockchain. Its transparency. You can see all the transactions happening (whereas you can’t do that with the banks). The value here is transparency and accountability. Crypto tech is here to stay. Crypto infrastructure is only getting better.
We'll agree to disagree on that. Blockchain technology has value for privacy and security purposes. But the whole point of cryptocurrency is its untraceability. That's why ransomware fraudsters want payment in cryptocurrency. The only reason cryptocurrency has Trump's support is because he and his family launched a cryptocurrency and it's a bang-up way to siphon off tax dollars (masquerading as investments of public money). It's a scam from start to finish. A digital house of cards.
I also believe there’s a great conflict of interest with this admin’s support on crypto and Trump’s financial gain, however I believe you are misled when you say cryptocurrency is untraceable. It’s actually quite traceable. If I disclose my crypto wallet with you to receive a payment, you’ll be able to see all the transactions that I’ve made with my wallet. There’s dozens of cases of celebrities that have managed to scam their fans with trash crypto projects. You’d think that this is easy to do because crypto is untraceable but actually such scams can be proven thanks to the technology and the transparency provided by the blockchain. The problem is the lack of regulation. This is one of the main reasons crime is allowed to happen within crypto. I strongly encourage you to look into this. It’s very interesting. There’s a recent video on Melania coin made by coffeezilla on youtube. He discloses how this scam (and many others) is being done in plain sight.
AI & also Bitcoin is the largest scam ever perpetrated upon Humankind. In the end though its likely downfall may be when people realize its Massive destruction & a reason for Future lack of Water. There just ain't enough for the Scam & Humans ...
A bigger scam than organized religion(most notably christianity)? Mm idk... hard to top many millennia of money siphoning, misery, maltreatment, manipulation, and mourning, my man.
Who is to know where mythology leaves off & history begins?
This "winning!" narrative is premature at best, & delusional at worst: a false causality presented, again & again, in headlines & broadcasts around the world, as a simplified version of the zoopolitical process.
We're all living through this myth. We're all living through a period in which the powerless are intoxicated with the fundamentally self-serving notion that they're on the "right side" of history, & if their obsession with victory isn't worth scrutinizing, the victory, for what it's worth, isn't worth having.
Do you think power respects antagonism?
Do you think power respects subordination?
A.I. can't be a canvas for your discontent with Silicon Valley. Why do you pantomime conscience?
Why do you have such a fetish for impotence? Your expressive rhetoric is a public choir of outrage recital.
Victory isn't a vibe. Victory isn't a mood. Victory is a threading of needles. In active "war zones".
Reality: YouTube & Spotify aren't banning A.I. content. They're issuing disclosure rules, & moderating & throttling spam. That's not a moral grandstand: it's a basic hygiene measure to preserve user trust, & avoid reputational blowback. YouTube's policy changes are aimed at deepfakes & "misinformation", not "slop". Neither platform prohibits generative creativity.
Spotify's takedown of V.S. isn't a rejection of A.I., either. It's a cleanup, a wiping of the stain, akin to removing a mislabeled or misleading product. Spotify, et al., still eat up boatloads of A.I.-generated music via DistroKid, Tunecore, & similar aggregators. Spotify's C.E.O. even told the Financial Times that A.I. music is "here to stay", as long as credits are clear & legal boxes are ticked.
No gatekeeping. No screening. Just more volume.
Conclusion: these are calculated P.R. & legal recalibrations. Not an outright rejection. The bosses are polishing their high-rise windows while the A.I. flood pools at the entrance.
What else is new?
Claim: "I.B.M. Found 75% of A.I. Projects Fail To Deliver; Sound The Death Knell!"
Reality: while many A.I. projects don't deliver R.O.I., neither do most software projects, most startups, or most R&D ventures. Failure rates in the tech industry are high by design: it's the price of experimentation. 90% of startups fail, yet the startup economy hasn't vanished. If anything, it's booming, especially in Asian & African countries.
I.B.M.'s 2024 study, too, reflects executive dysfunction, not A.I. uselessness. Poor planning, slow integration, lack of clear goals: a classic case of corporate midwittery. A 75% failure rate doesn't mean the tools don't work. It simply means implementation is difficult.
This is your average day at any large corporation.
Again, I ask: what else is new?
On developer productivity, GitHub Copilot & other tools might slow down complex debugging, but a slew of (peer-reviewed) studies have shown real progress in boilerplate coding, onboarding, & prototyping, especially for juniors.
Conclusion: high failure rates are par for the course in emerging sectors. A.I. isn't imploding: we're sorting the hype from the hope.
Claim: "Whole World Is Primed To Reject Slop!"
Reality: people are frustrated with mass-generated spam, but that doesn't signal a collapse in A.I. use. It signals a maturing phase in which audiences, curators, & platforms are (finally) learning to filter junk.
Yes: Amazon Kindle is overrun with A.I.-generated books. Yes: content caps were introduced.
They're adding labels, disclosure layers, & opt-in policies for artists.
As for music production: A.I. is already a tool of the trade. Stem separation, beat mastering, songwriting, vocal assistance: these are standard kit, from garage bands to major labels, quietly using it with (& without) permission.
WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
Conclusion: we're not witnessing a rejection of A.I. We're seeing the end of anything-goes A.I.
Quality control is coming, not prohibition.
Is that so awful?
Claim: "From PetsDotCom To A.I., Bubble Set To Burst!"
Reality: the "bubble" comparison is tempting, but incomplete. Convenient, but lazy. There's overhype & speculative froth, but underneath the surface, infrastructure investments, product integrations, & A.I. enterprise deployments are accelerating, not slowing down.
NVIDIA's revenue quadrupled in 2024.
That's 14 billion dollars, in just the first quarter of 2025, driven almost entirely by demand for A.I.
Is that froth?
Or is that fire?
Microsoft, Apple, Google, & Amazon are also baking A.I. into every core product: from email, search, & shopping, to cloud & internal tooling.
Is that an experiment? Or a strategic pivot?
Enterprise adoption is still in its infancy, but Goldman Sachs projects 7 trillion dollars added to global G.D.P. over the next decade.
Conclusion: the slop might crash & burn, but A.I. isn't the slop.
It's the cheap engine that powers it.
We're in the "disillusionment" phase for generative spam, but the fundamentals of A.I. investment & deployment are running hot.
It's not a cultural victory, but a split.
A bifurcation in the creative landscape.
Path one: algorithm-chasing sludge, automated & mass-produced, designed to game clicks, farm ad revenue, & fake engagement, a.k.a. the real slop.
Path two: skilled artists & technologists using A.I. as an amplifier, not as replacement. Voice models as effect, not as crutch. A.I. for sampling, not plagiarism. Image-drafting tools, not forgery factories.
A.I. isn't the villain. The system rewards volume over value, & quantity over craft. Not the technology, but the incentive structure, is broken.
What? Else? Is? New?
And what could work?
· Universal disclosure requirements as a baseline rather than an exception.
· Metadata & provenance tagging at scale, without black-box content;
· Retraining algorithms to deprioritize, rather than reward, mass-repetitive content;
· Labor protections, royalty systems, & creator class-action bargaining around derivatives & training data; &
· Evolving audiences' media literacy to teach them how to spot, mass-report, & devalue A.I. spam.
Break out of a cozy filter bubble: cultural pressure only works when paired with awareness & alternatives. We're not "winning". We've entered the sorting phase, a turbulent period in which quality will not rise automatically, on its own, but by design.
In other words: it has to be made, filtered, & protected. And if creators, platforms, & regulators don't coordinate?
The sludge wins by default.
We can reclaim SOME culture from the slop.
Not via fear or nostalgia, but by building better platforms that incentivize & reward authenticity.
The choice isn't between A.I. or no A.I. It's between sloppy A.I. or sharp A.I.
That future?
Still unwritten.
Technology is not a hose to douse fires. It's always an opening of the floodgates that will drown as much as it'll lift.
Technology inherits human fallibility, stupidity & incompetence, & distributes it at scale.
Every prosthesis is an amputation.
Yet you're treating it like witchcraft.
With "slop"?
A.I. is a threat.
Without it?
A spark.
Nurture curiosity.
Don't extinguish it.
The rise of A.I. isn't nearly as terrifying as the collapse of the desire to learn, & adapt.
This says exactly what i suspected, but idk enough about it to speak intelligently on the subject. But if i did im pretty sure this is what i wouldve said lol.
This comment should be near the top, bc everybody should read this take.
I should just get around to recording myself singing and playing folk songs on my violin and mandolin. It will probably have mistakes, but it will be real.
With AI we are in early adoption still, the age of the Model T not the Ferrari. The way they are pushing AI on us runs the risk of ruining the brand for a generation as everybody walks away from shitty products. There is a place for AI but much like the personal computer, the quality expectations of what you produce will change. If you are in a creative field you need to be checking it out. I don't need it but my 26yr old niece does.
I use a writing assistant and sound and video capture everyday. What comes out is extremely useful but flawed. It needs human supervision and cleanup. I can't use it in its raw form. Under controlled conditions, with some care by someone who understands how it works, it's extremely powerful, capable of summarizing large amounts of information into condensed form. Out on the public internet, with no human mediation and supervision, it's a disaster, especially in the realm of deliberately faked generation, as Ted likes to point to. It's just junk.
The company I work for has been slowly building a machine learning and genAI strategy for well over a decade, and the slowness has worked. No mania, no crash. Lots of mistakes were avoided. Failures were identified and killed off before they could do much damage. Agentic AI has been highlighted yet also clearly called out for requiring intensive training, with intensive testing and scrutiny of results. (We run agent marathons and kill off the losers, which are the majority. A smaller fraction of successes survive and live on to the next stage, maybe 20%) The all-important cybersecurity issue, and the status of IP and copyright, were put into the strategy early. We deal in sensitive data, so no other way was possible. A decade littered with carefully curated failures was needed to identify the successful methods and ideas. Failure had to be honestly identified and ruthlessly flushed out.
Interesting, My late wife was a graphic designer, she started in the mid seventies, with an exacto and a paste pot. The personal computer completely changed her world, she had to retrain herself but she had the artistic talent so that once she learn her way around a PC ...
After she passed away, I was going through her things and ran across her portfolio. It had things from the 1980's to the 2020's. What I noticed was the change in acceptable quality. Yes the computer let you do more but you had to step up your game because the rest of the world was too.
The world moves on automation doesn't scare me I've been watching it happen all my life
In the 1920's my father as a teenager worked the farm with horses, in the 80's I worked the farm with equipment that could do as much work in a day as he and several hired hands did in a week. By the 2040's there won't be anyone but a automated piece of equipment.
Indeed. The reason for the sloppy excess and corner-cutting that Ted sees and decries is the insane amount of capital that gets thrown at Silicon Valley. Relative to other sectors, it benefits from a crazily lopsided system (much more lopsided than 30 years ago) from which it benefits relatively more, with maybe only the financial sector and (sometimes) the energy sector as plausible rivals. It leads to legal corner-cutting, insane hiring and firing practices, and antisocial business models. With the technology programs on the East Coast, I see, every month, more and more skepticism and pushback about SV's claims and forced march to the Nerd Rapture AKA The Singularity. These tools are augmenters of human capabilities, not independent automatons. It's like a medieval knight putting on his suit of armor that extended his skin and clothes and picking up his sword that extends his arm.
Who me? I work in technical writing, product documentation and marketing, and innovation programs. We see the good, bad, and ugly every day. This AI business is more Model T right now than mature tech. Its future will not be dominated by highly centralized servers and godlike oracles, but by decentralization, bespoke models, and custom agents, once the major kinks are worked out. Admittedly, they're major right now, although headed in the right direction. Someone on here wrote that Apple is probably happy that they didn't jump on the genAI bandwagon early. They know their retail audience and what it will tolerate and what it wants, and doesn't want. In Nerdland, meanwhile, we see the technology as making initial inroads into reliable production, after much angst and dashed hopes. The bulk of it is still in research and development.
Well you definitely seem well informed on this topic. And youve reinforced one of my assumptions, one that everybody seems to miss, that the ai we have now and the way its currently used is not the ai or its uses of the near future. That the churning out of ai slop is more of an aside, and that ais true impact on humanity is yet to be revealed.
And while i do think decrying the ai slop is a worthy pursuit, i also think its distracting everyone from whats really(i assume) going on.
I personally dont think it will be such a blessing, even though it has the potential to be, bc behind it all remains greedy and power hungry people. But i am admittedly old fashioned and maybe just a bit stuck in the past lol. Perhaps it will also amplify the good side of humanity, but thats something we see less and less of as times passes. Or perhaps thats just the swing of the pendulum, idk. Time will surely tell. But ive always been more of an observer than a participant, so i dont think it much matters to me either way(at least in the sense that im going to do anything to influence the outcome).
You're welcome, ty. At least one thing will come from this, I'm pretty sure. The trend of the last 15 or 20 years, of ever more internet centralization, is coming to an end. Along with that went a lot of attempts to push functions and responsibilities out of organizations that will now be in-sourced, because no other way will make them work. I hope this will mitigate or stop the transformation of the public internet into a dumping ground, a real “tragedy of the commons."
I agree with your car analogy, but not so much that theyll ruin the brand for a generation. Its not gonna take them 50 years to go from the model t ai to the ferrari. One of ais strengths is its persistence. While people are sleeping its still learning, training, whatever. More and more they will use ai to improve ai, and theyll have that ferrari ai in no time.
People talking about how easy it is to detect ai or the failings of current ai are missing the point. Newer versions will quell these objections. And people really are lazy, so when a more perfect ai comes, theyll jump on board.
And i think the entertainment side of ai is like an add on, and not their real focus. People are just playing around with it rn. And for a newer generation that has no connection to our preai past, are they gonna care if the newest hit song is made by a human or not? Ai is already playing the role of adviser and confidant. These trends arent going anywhere but forward, despite any current backlash.
I feel like i didnt do a very good job of connecting my thoughts here lol. In my head i made the connections but didnt really get all that onto the page, so it reads kinda jumpy, sorry about that:/
It is a complicated subject and we are approaching it like the blind men and the elephant. We each see a little piece and we talk about it as if that is the whole.
I don't know that much about AI myself but I just bought a new phone and I do understand how much the modern tech companies can screw up a simple thing. Currently google is sending me selections from the pictures on my phone and adding cutsie titles for them. I have yet to figure out how to turn it off. LOL, So if there is a way they can screw it up I'm sure they will. ;-0
Which hopefully wont be for awhile, ive got the s23, which i believe is the last one to not come with ai baked in, and i never update my phone until i absolutely have to lol.
But the day will come :(
Though honestly sometimes i think maybe i dont need a damn smartphone, go back to a laptop and a flip phone, idk...
And, they intentionally screw shit up imo. Like how every update just makes your phone worse and worse, i cant believe theyre bungling the job. I think theyre doing exactly what they intend to
I pick and choose, go with the stuff that works for me. I do little on my phone, text just a little and look to see if there are any morning emails that need my attention, and the weather. If there is an email that needs a reply I fire up the laptop. It is so much easier to use, at least for me. Actually reading and writing work better for me,on the laptop. It , also means I can leave the phone on the night stand so when it rings, as it is now, I can ignore it. If it is important they will leave a message
But I've been noticing this problem for some time with my new laptops, as well as my phone. Stuff I don't want loaded on just to sell ads. This discussion reminded me I needed to try and see if I could cleanup my phone with all the preloaded crap. Some I can uninstall, some, like the Amazon app I can just disable but I get a scary warning that if I do so it could affect the functioning of my computer. LOL
The fact that they think I might be stupid enough to believe that...
There is another person who (when the day comes) needs to be put up against the wall.
I was at a dinner last Saturday night and my friend put on the track from Velvet Sundown and asked me what I thought. I thought, super clean sounding production, super clean sounding raspy voice, kind of meaningless lyrics.. what’s new?! I have to say I was pretty shocked to find out it was Ai as I’m about to go into the studio soon to record a new bunch of songs I’ve written and it left me feeling pretty defeated. But when I thought about it afterwards I realised that Ai is really just mimicking what is already there. Slop. Not everything is slop of course, we put on Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain afterwards and I felt a lot better.
This technology is not evil in and of itself but it is being used in an evil way. It’s stealing our humanity and we are aiding that process by listening to it and choosing it over something organic. As Tolkien said, and I loosely repeat, “evil cannot create anything itself, it has to steal and mimick everything from the ones who create.”
I found AI renditions of Bro Country to be no more annoying than the genuine article.
It may be, because Bro Country is so generic formulaic and non-threatening, that it's easy for AI to pull musical patterns out of it.
I thought the tune was sheer crap. But so is much non-AI music. Musically bad, lyrically trite.
And yet evil keeps winning, so the stealing and mimicry must be effective.
Creation of something truely new is rather rare i think. We all engage in mimicry and stealing(we often call this inspiration and influence), and often we arent even conscious of it. I dont think that process is to be deprecated.
Which leaves us with intention. And lets be real, we're talking about humans here. Humans are the very creators of evil intentions..
Excellent assessment. Exactly right.
Pretty shocking !
Thank you for reminding me that we choose what we listen to every day!
"Abandon Ship!"
"Ai, Ai, Cap'n!"
I'd take my hat off to you if I were wearing a hat.
Hat management is an extinct craft.
Observation of the month, in my estimation.
Sadly, it takes me thousands of efforts to get one a those. Grindstone, nosed, an' all 'at...
I'm envious of it, though. I wish I had thought of it.
Watch enough old movies and it (and other antiquated practices*) leap off the screen...
*cigaret smoke & ubiquitous ash trays, elevator operators, land lines, toothpicks(!)...
I can't heaaaarr yoooouu! 🎶
AI is the asbestos of the digital age. They put it in *everything* (and I literally mean everything, from floor tiles to boiler jacketing, paints, ceiling tiles, cars, high chairs, you name it, they wanted to try to find a way to use asbestos in it) ...until they realized that it kills people. And then we spent / are-spending another century (and trillions of dollars) on asbestos abatement, sort of like what we have coming in AI abatement. But hey!, they spent tens of trillions of dollars on that slop ...and they're gonna want it back, ...and they're looking at you and I to pay the tab.
Great analogy
IIRC, at one time, they made asbestos cigarette filters.
What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe.. but itd be silly to assume this iteration of ai is the end of it. Theyve invested alot of money, this is just the first salvo. I would expect any concessions they make rn to be of a tactical nature.
Its like, great news everybody, our new vests stopped their 9mm bullets, were winning! Meanwhile theyre cooking up icbms in the back.
Why the pissy view? Well i cant remember the last time good news wasnt followed by bad, and then worse. Just the amount of money theyre investing in FUTURE ai capabilities portends something far greater than the ai threat we're facing right now.
But ofc i dont keep my finger on the pulse of these things. Im basing my view on my own reading of the room, albeit from a distance.
This shits not going anywhere, and attempts to control them WILL be sidestepped or neutralized. We should be very suspicious of anything that comes from them that looks like a victory. And i think it behooves us to remember that in this world things are never what they seem.
Your last sentence is one we all need to commit to memory, and deploy daily.
Good points.
Referring to Tolkien, as has already been done, he thought of his legendarium as chronicling what he called the Long Defeat - until ultimate victory, not of our making. Worth bearing in mind, perhaps.
Your handle is tree killer. You’re a misanthrope.
Thats some stupid logic youre applying there.
Thank you for this post! This gives me some hope for the future.💕✨️ I feel ai can have a good impact (in my personal hopes helping chronic illness warriors to find much needed diagnosis etc) but the fact its been being used to create income for creativity is a bit greedy... glad to see YouTube is changing this soon.
I think Apple's failure to deliver an AI assistant was a turning point. Apple has a lot of flaws, but it can usually take a new technology and extract a useful nugget of it and make it easy for their users to use. There are numerous examples: touch pads, NFC, code signing, text layout, disk backup and archiving, textual search, facial recognition and I'm sure I'm missing a ton more. If there was some useful nugget that AI could deliver with some level of reliability, odds are Apple, if anyone, could have delivered it. Apple failed. Idiots are screaming for blood. Tim Cook the CEO, is a moron. The truth is that AI is less than meets the eye. It gives a great demo. I worked on an AI product in the 1960s, and it gave a great demo. Apple found out the hard way. Others are going to learn the same lesson.
Among those learning the same lesson are Spotify and Youtube. LLMs seem perfectly suited for the arts since they generate the same kinds of artistic output as humans: words, music, images. The problem is that there is a lot less there than meets the eye or ear. If you want to generate Muzak, something invented in the 1930s, ambient music-like sound to fill in an auditory vacuum, then AI can be useful. If you want actual music, you'll need actual musicians.
Yet those of us who treasure human creativity seem to be a huge minority. My Spotify usage is all consciously chosen. I want to hear what I want to hear. Word of mouth for anything "new," new being post 1994 for my main Playlist.
A lot of people want Spotify, especially, to fill in an auditory vacuum. It produces music-like sounds that fit within an expected envelope. I know I hear Spotify in lots of places like medical offices and non-chain stores where it serves to hide the hum of the HVAC system. I'm sure there are lots of people who love Spotify because it lets them curate a huge collection of music that they actually want to listen to. If nothing else, it offers a chance to try out new music without springing for a whole CD up front.
All my previous music collections, whether vinyl, CD, cassette (or even my old 8 tracks) have been lost or "stolen," so Spotify is my affordable option. But they don't choose anything for me. I'm not interested in their opinion. I know what I want to hear. This whose opinions I respect introduce me to enough modern talent.
Nice! They're trying to force AI upon us. But the resistance to it is real.
This is a good sign. I've been predicting the biggest new product in the next 5-10 years will be an authenticity verifier or an AI detector—something like a virus detector—to alert the public to which creative products have been doctored and which haven't. A product like that, along with the public's apparent distaste for fakery, might go far to stanch the flood of junk that's coming our way.
Ironically the detector will / does rely on ai
Sure, it takes one to know one.
You'd think so...but false positives are possible and have left human authprs discredited. Some universities have turned off the ai ai detectors as there's some evidence they're more likely to give false positives against neurodivergent authors or authors for whom English is not their first language. It's a minefield.
I’ll bet. It’s likely that no one has cracked the problem yet. Plus, AI cheating is a moving target. Peter Norton’s product team was never finished with Norton antivirus. It never ends. Job security!
Agreed. Not sure what that would be as far as song creation is concerned, though. Maybe some sort of extremely reliable lie detector that everybody is asked to take. To me the heart of a song is the melody. We should create a culture where using AI to come up with melodies is a one strike you’re out offense.
It seems to me that the same machine reasoning that led to automated mimicry could be used detect music plagiarism or doctored files. It shouldn’t be rocket surgery.
I'm sure others have seen the following sort of thing in their Google feeds of which I will give the most stunning of idiotic examples:
It was a beautiful, formal color portrait photo of an extraordinarily handsome, young, and wealthy couple, from circa 1958. What I call for lack of a better term, "AI slopover," which appeared in small letters under the photo, said something like "Woman wearing pearls and man wearing suit pose for photo."
It was a photo of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, probably taken in their Georgetown home.
Have others seen things like this, for example, a photo of The Beatles circa 1964 with a slopover caption which is something like, "Young men with long hair and guitars performing?"
The thing about AI narration is that it's always detectable. First of all, our souls sense it, but second, if you listen long enough to a piece which your instincts tell you is almost certainly AI, you're bound to hear a moment's telltale stretching out or jumbling of syllables. If it's a YouTube video, I usually leave the following comment, or a close variation:
"Don't you know that there are probably a hundred thousand semi professional, community, or college theater actors in this country who would be happy to narrate for free, just to be able to list the credit?"
They never seem to catch on.
Oh, yeah, here's something I've seen on YouTube in the last year: having been unwontedly ( of course Spellcheck squigglylined it in red, but Spellcheck squigglylines its own name in red ) and uncomfortably close to a half dozen psychopaths, several of whom did their best to kill me, in my lifetime, I have an interest in learning as much about "Cluster B personality disorders" as I can. The YouTube Algorithm knows this about me. It's just amazing how many addresses people such as Jordan Peterson and C.S. Lewis ( ! ) made about Cluster B personality disorder! I imagine Peterson, at least, has lawyers trying to run all of these counterfeits to ground, but inasmuch as there are several hundred million YouTube channels, it will take them a while.
Once we cut through all the mythology, it’s a lot easier to see this stuff for what it is. For every little impressive thing it can do, there are a hundred places where it’s wasteful and wrong.
YES!!!!! AI bubble pop cannot happen soon enough! People want heart and soul in the creations they spend their time on, not zeroes and ones. Next bubble pop (please God): Digital currency. No intrinsic value to Bitcoin and its ilk. Just more zeroes and one that go away when the electricity goes out. If the U.S. goes through and invests public money in digital currency, it will be not only be bankrupt, but so far in the hole we may never dig ourselves out. But that's exactly what the Trump administration plans to do. Probably because Trump benefits from it.
“Real” physical currency as in dollars or euros are no more real than cryptocurrency. The value of any “real” currency is given by the supply and demand for the currency. The supply is controlled by the central banks and the demand is based upon the trust of the national and/or international investors (common people who buy dollars as a “reserve” and institutional investors as well). Right now the us dollar is on a multi-year low because of the uncertainty provided by the trump administration and other systemic factors such as the ever-rising debt ceiling. All of this to say that cryptocurrency is the same than any other form of currency. The difference is that you’re giving the keys to the supply side to someone else and not the central bank. If the central bank got a hold of a crypto then it’d be the same. The true value that people often miss is in the trade-ability and traceability provided by the blockchain. Its transparency. You can see all the transactions happening (whereas you can’t do that with the banks). The value here is transparency and accountability. Crypto tech is here to stay. Crypto infrastructure is only getting better.
We'll agree to disagree on that. Blockchain technology has value for privacy and security purposes. But the whole point of cryptocurrency is its untraceability. That's why ransomware fraudsters want payment in cryptocurrency. The only reason cryptocurrency has Trump's support is because he and his family launched a cryptocurrency and it's a bang-up way to siphon off tax dollars (masquerading as investments of public money). It's a scam from start to finish. A digital house of cards.
I also believe there’s a great conflict of interest with this admin’s support on crypto and Trump’s financial gain, however I believe you are misled when you say cryptocurrency is untraceable. It’s actually quite traceable. If I disclose my crypto wallet with you to receive a payment, you’ll be able to see all the transactions that I’ve made with my wallet. There’s dozens of cases of celebrities that have managed to scam their fans with trash crypto projects. You’d think that this is easy to do because crypto is untraceable but actually such scams can be proven thanks to the technology and the transparency provided by the blockchain. The problem is the lack of regulation. This is one of the main reasons crime is allowed to happen within crypto. I strongly encourage you to look into this. It’s very interesting. There’s a recent video on Melania coin made by coffeezilla on youtube. He discloses how this scam (and many others) is being done in plain sight.
AI & also Bitcoin is the largest scam ever perpetrated upon Humankind. In the end though its likely downfall may be when people realize its Massive destruction & a reason for Future lack of Water. There just ain't enough for the Scam & Humans ...
A bigger scam than organized religion(most notably christianity)? Mm idk... hard to top many millennia of money siphoning, misery, maltreatment, manipulation, and mourning, my man.
Y’all should check out Coffeezilla on youtube to see what I’m talking about.
Nailed it.
Bitcoin is here to stay. The other coins will disappear. Beware!
You're dead wrong on bitcoin. Study.
"A.I. Machine Flops; Stop-The-Sloppers Did It!"
Who is to know where mythology leaves off & history begins?
This "winning!" narrative is premature at best, & delusional at worst: a false causality presented, again & again, in headlines & broadcasts around the world, as a simplified version of the zoopolitical process.
We're all living through this myth. We're all living through a period in which the powerless are intoxicated with the fundamentally self-serving notion that they're on the "right side" of history, & if their obsession with victory isn't worth scrutinizing, the victory, for what it's worth, isn't worth having.
Do you think power respects antagonism?
Do you think power respects subordination?
A.I. can't be a canvas for your discontent with Silicon Valley. Why do you pantomime conscience?
Why do you have such a fetish for impotence? Your expressive rhetoric is a public choir of outrage recital.
Victory isn't a vibe. Victory isn't a mood. Victory is a threading of needles. In active "war zones".
It's not about outrage or hollow slogans.
It's about outcomes.
Shop?
Let's talk it.
Claim: "YouTube Regulates A.I. Content; Spotify Pulls Back!"
Reality: YouTube & Spotify aren't banning A.I. content. They're issuing disclosure rules, & moderating & throttling spam. That's not a moral grandstand: it's a basic hygiene measure to preserve user trust, & avoid reputational blowback. YouTube's policy changes are aimed at deepfakes & "misinformation", not "slop". Neither platform prohibits generative creativity.
Spotify's takedown of V.S. isn't a rejection of A.I., either. It's a cleanup, a wiping of the stain, akin to removing a mislabeled or misleading product. Spotify, et al., still eat up boatloads of A.I.-generated music via DistroKid, Tunecore, & similar aggregators. Spotify's C.E.O. even told the Financial Times that A.I. music is "here to stay", as long as credits are clear & legal boxes are ticked.
No gatekeeping. No screening. Just more volume.
Conclusion: these are calculated P.R. & legal recalibrations. Not an outright rejection. The bosses are polishing their high-rise windows while the A.I. flood pools at the entrance.
What else is new?
Claim: "I.B.M. Found 75% of A.I. Projects Fail To Deliver; Sound The Death Knell!"
Reality: while many A.I. projects don't deliver R.O.I., neither do most software projects, most startups, or most R&D ventures. Failure rates in the tech industry are high by design: it's the price of experimentation. 90% of startups fail, yet the startup economy hasn't vanished. If anything, it's booming, especially in Asian & African countries.
I.B.M.'s 2024 study, too, reflects executive dysfunction, not A.I. uselessness. Poor planning, slow integration, lack of clear goals: a classic case of corporate midwittery. A 75% failure rate doesn't mean the tools don't work. It simply means implementation is difficult.
This is your average day at any large corporation.
Again, I ask: what else is new?
On developer productivity, GitHub Copilot & other tools might slow down complex debugging, but a slew of (peer-reviewed) studies have shown real progress in boilerplate coding, onboarding, & prototyping, especially for juniors.
Conclusion: high failure rates are par for the course in emerging sectors. A.I. isn't imploding: we're sorting the hype from the hope.
Claim: "Whole World Is Primed To Reject Slop!"
Reality: people are frustrated with mass-generated spam, but that doesn't signal a collapse in A.I. use. It signals a maturing phase in which audiences, curators, & platforms are (finally) learning to filter junk.
Yes: Amazon Kindle is overrun with A.I.-generated books. Yes: content caps were introduced.
But not to ban A.I.
Again: to manage volume & quality.
ArtStation & Adobe Stock aren't banning generative images, either.
They're adding labels, disclosure layers, & opt-in policies for artists.
As for music production: A.I. is already a tool of the trade. Stem separation, beat mastering, songwriting, vocal assistance: these are standard kit, from garage bands to major labels, quietly using it with (& without) permission.
WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
Conclusion: we're not witnessing a rejection of A.I. We're seeing the end of anything-goes A.I.
Quality control is coming, not prohibition.
Is that so awful?
Claim: "From PetsDotCom To A.I., Bubble Set To Burst!"
Reality: the "bubble" comparison is tempting, but incomplete. Convenient, but lazy. There's overhype & speculative froth, but underneath the surface, infrastructure investments, product integrations, & A.I. enterprise deployments are accelerating, not slowing down.
NVIDIA's revenue quadrupled in 2024.
That's 14 billion dollars, in just the first quarter of 2025, driven almost entirely by demand for A.I.
Is that froth?
Or is that fire?
Microsoft, Apple, Google, & Amazon are also baking A.I. into every core product: from email, search, & shopping, to cloud & internal tooling.
Is that an experiment? Or a strategic pivot?
Enterprise adoption is still in its infancy, but Goldman Sachs projects 7 trillion dollars added to global G.D.P. over the next decade.
Conclusion: the slop might crash & burn, but A.I. isn't the slop.
It's the cheap engine that powers it.
We're in the "disillusionment" phase for generative spam, but the fundamentals of A.I. investment & deployment are running hot.
It's not a cultural victory, but a split.
A bifurcation in the creative landscape.
Path one: algorithm-chasing sludge, automated & mass-produced, designed to game clicks, farm ad revenue, & fake engagement, a.k.a. the real slop.
Path two: skilled artists & technologists using A.I. as an amplifier, not as replacement. Voice models as effect, not as crutch. A.I. for sampling, not plagiarism. Image-drafting tools, not forgery factories.
A.I. isn't the villain. The system rewards volume over value, & quantity over craft. Not the technology, but the incentive structure, is broken.
What? Else? Is? New?
And what could work?
· Universal disclosure requirements as a baseline rather than an exception.
· Metadata & provenance tagging at scale, without black-box content;
· Retraining algorithms to deprioritize, rather than reward, mass-repetitive content;
· Human-curated ecosystems & human-centered search engines, ranking originality over popularity;
· Labor protections, royalty systems, & creator class-action bargaining around derivatives & training data; &
· Evolving audiences' media literacy to teach them how to spot, mass-report, & devalue A.I. spam.
Break out of a cozy filter bubble: cultural pressure only works when paired with awareness & alternatives. We're not "winning". We've entered the sorting phase, a turbulent period in which quality will not rise automatically, on its own, but by design.
In other words: it has to be made, filtered, & protected. And if creators, platforms, & regulators don't coordinate?
The sludge wins by default.
We can reclaim SOME culture from the slop.
Not via fear or nostalgia, but by building better platforms that incentivize & reward authenticity.
The choice isn't between A.I. or no A.I. It's between sloppy A.I. or sharp A.I.
That future?
Still unwritten.
Technology is not a hose to douse fires. It's always an opening of the floodgates that will drown as much as it'll lift.
Technology inherits human fallibility, stupidity & incompetence, & distributes it at scale.
Every prosthesis is an amputation.
Yet you're treating it like witchcraft.
With "slop"?
A.I. is a threat.
Without it?
A spark.
Nurture curiosity.
Don't extinguish it.
The rise of A.I. isn't nearly as terrifying as the collapse of the desire to learn, & adapt.
This says exactly what i suspected, but idk enough about it to speak intelligently on the subject. But if i did im pretty sure this is what i wouldve said lol.
This comment should be near the top, bc everybody should read this take.
I should just get around to recording myself singing and playing folk songs on my violin and mandolin. It will probably have mistakes, but it will be real.
AI Slop that no one likes or watches also uses up valuable server space. Money losers.
With AI we are in early adoption still, the age of the Model T not the Ferrari. The way they are pushing AI on us runs the risk of ruining the brand for a generation as everybody walks away from shitty products. There is a place for AI but much like the personal computer, the quality expectations of what you produce will change. If you are in a creative field you need to be checking it out. I don't need it but my 26yr old niece does.
I use a writing assistant and sound and video capture everyday. What comes out is extremely useful but flawed. It needs human supervision and cleanup. I can't use it in its raw form. Under controlled conditions, with some care by someone who understands how it works, it's extremely powerful, capable of summarizing large amounts of information into condensed form. Out on the public internet, with no human mediation and supervision, it's a disaster, especially in the realm of deliberately faked generation, as Ted likes to point to. It's just junk.
The company I work for has been slowly building a machine learning and genAI strategy for well over a decade, and the slowness has worked. No mania, no crash. Lots of mistakes were avoided. Failures were identified and killed off before they could do much damage. Agentic AI has been highlighted yet also clearly called out for requiring intensive training, with intensive testing and scrutiny of results. (We run agent marathons and kill off the losers, which are the majority. A smaller fraction of successes survive and live on to the next stage, maybe 20%) The all-important cybersecurity issue, and the status of IP and copyright, were put into the strategy early. We deal in sensitive data, so no other way was possible. A decade littered with carefully curated failures was needed to identify the successful methods and ideas. Failure had to be honestly identified and ruthlessly flushed out.
Interesting, My late wife was a graphic designer, she started in the mid seventies, with an exacto and a paste pot. The personal computer completely changed her world, she had to retrain herself but she had the artistic talent so that once she learn her way around a PC ...
After she passed away, I was going through her things and ran across her portfolio. It had things from the 1980's to the 2020's. What I noticed was the change in acceptable quality. Yes the computer let you do more but you had to step up your game because the rest of the world was too.
The world moves on automation doesn't scare me I've been watching it happen all my life
In the 1920's my father as a teenager worked the farm with horses, in the 80's I worked the farm with equipment that could do as much work in a day as he and several hired hands did in a week. By the 2040's there won't be anyone but a automated piece of equipment.
Maybe I'll still be around to see it.
Indeed. The reason for the sloppy excess and corner-cutting that Ted sees and decries is the insane amount of capital that gets thrown at Silicon Valley. Relative to other sectors, it benefits from a crazily lopsided system (much more lopsided than 30 years ago) from which it benefits relatively more, with maybe only the financial sector and (sometimes) the energy sector as plausible rivals. It leads to legal corner-cutting, insane hiring and firing practices, and antisocial business models. With the technology programs on the East Coast, I see, every month, more and more skepticism and pushback about SV's claims and forced march to the Nerd Rapture AKA The Singularity. These tools are augmenters of human capabilities, not independent automatons. It's like a medieval knight putting on his suit of armor that extended his skin and clothes and picking up his sword that extends his arm.
Im really curious about what it is you do?
Who me? I work in technical writing, product documentation and marketing, and innovation programs. We see the good, bad, and ugly every day. This AI business is more Model T right now than mature tech. Its future will not be dominated by highly centralized servers and godlike oracles, but by decentralization, bespoke models, and custom agents, once the major kinks are worked out. Admittedly, they're major right now, although headed in the right direction. Someone on here wrote that Apple is probably happy that they didn't jump on the genAI bandwagon early. They know their retail audience and what it will tolerate and what it wants, and doesn't want. In Nerdland, meanwhile, we see the technology as making initial inroads into reliable production, after much angst and dashed hopes. The bulk of it is still in research and development.
Well you definitely seem well informed on this topic. And youve reinforced one of my assumptions, one that everybody seems to miss, that the ai we have now and the way its currently used is not the ai or its uses of the near future. That the churning out of ai slop is more of an aside, and that ais true impact on humanity is yet to be revealed.
And while i do think decrying the ai slop is a worthy pursuit, i also think its distracting everyone from whats really(i assume) going on.
I personally dont think it will be such a blessing, even though it has the potential to be, bc behind it all remains greedy and power hungry people. But i am admittedly old fashioned and maybe just a bit stuck in the past lol. Perhaps it will also amplify the good side of humanity, but thats something we see less and less of as times passes. Or perhaps thats just the swing of the pendulum, idk. Time will surely tell. But ive always been more of an observer than a participant, so i dont think it much matters to me either way(at least in the sense that im going to do anything to influence the outcome).
Anyway, your comments are very enlightening, ty.
You're welcome, ty. At least one thing will come from this, I'm pretty sure. The trend of the last 15 or 20 years, of ever more internet centralization, is coming to an end. Along with that went a lot of attempts to push functions and responsibilities out of organizations that will now be in-sourced, because no other way will make them work. I hope this will mitigate or stop the transformation of the public internet into a dumping ground, a real “tragedy of the commons."
I agree with your car analogy, but not so much that theyll ruin the brand for a generation. Its not gonna take them 50 years to go from the model t ai to the ferrari. One of ais strengths is its persistence. While people are sleeping its still learning, training, whatever. More and more they will use ai to improve ai, and theyll have that ferrari ai in no time.
People talking about how easy it is to detect ai or the failings of current ai are missing the point. Newer versions will quell these objections. And people really are lazy, so when a more perfect ai comes, theyll jump on board.
And i think the entertainment side of ai is like an add on, and not their real focus. People are just playing around with it rn. And for a newer generation that has no connection to our preai past, are they gonna care if the newest hit song is made by a human or not? Ai is already playing the role of adviser and confidant. These trends arent going anywhere but forward, despite any current backlash.
I feel like i didnt do a very good job of connecting my thoughts here lol. In my head i made the connections but didnt really get all that onto the page, so it reads kinda jumpy, sorry about that:/
Hey bad writing is how we spot humans? right?
It is a complicated subject and we are approaching it like the blind men and the elephant. We each see a little piece and we talk about it as if that is the whole.
I don't know that much about AI myself but I just bought a new phone and I do understand how much the modern tech companies can screw up a simple thing. Currently google is sending me selections from the pictures on my phone and adding cutsie titles for them. I have yet to figure out how to turn it off. LOL, So if there is a way they can screw it up I'm sure they will. ;-0
This makes me dread having to get a new phone!
Which hopefully wont be for awhile, ive got the s23, which i believe is the last one to not come with ai baked in, and i never update my phone until i absolutely have to lol.
But the day will come :(
Though honestly sometimes i think maybe i dont need a damn smartphone, go back to a laptop and a flip phone, idk...
And, they intentionally screw shit up imo. Like how every update just makes your phone worse and worse, i cant believe theyre bungling the job. I think theyre doing exactly what they intend to
I pick and choose, go with the stuff that works for me. I do little on my phone, text just a little and look to see if there are any morning emails that need my attention, and the weather. If there is an email that needs a reply I fire up the laptop. It is so much easier to use, at least for me. Actually reading and writing work better for me,on the laptop. It , also means I can leave the phone on the night stand so when it rings, as it is now, I can ignore it. If it is important they will leave a message
But I've been noticing this problem for some time with my new laptops, as well as my phone. Stuff I don't want loaded on just to sell ads. This discussion reminded me I needed to try and see if I could cleanup my phone with all the preloaded crap. Some I can uninstall, some, like the Amazon app I can just disable but I get a scary warning that if I do so it could affect the functioning of my computer. LOL
The fact that they think I might be stupid enough to believe that...
There is another person who (when the day comes) needs to be put up against the wall.
Ed Zitron's newsletter has long detailed his predictions of an AI bursting bubble due to a lack of "there" there.