AI
-
Moneyday
Turing Testings Like “Goldie Boone,” whom I wrote about here last month, “Luna Azul” (above right) is a fake singer. Pure AI. Her music too, I suppose. I’m sure of it. But neither artist nor music are identified as AI-generated. “New music every week,” Luna’s YouTube channel says. At first, I thought she traced to… Continue reading
-
Oozeday
I was overheard to have said Exhumed this from a Facebook comment to repost here: About advertising, there have been two state changes in the business. One I unpacked eleven years ago, in Separating Advertising’s Wheat and Chaff. The pull-quote: “Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as… Continue reading
-
You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing
How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Gary Isaac Wolfe (who contributes a comment below): “Anthropic watermark scheme appears as a comic policeman blowing his whistle while his pants fall down and Mark Pauline loads a cannon with rotting fish.” But maybe that’s… Continue reading
-
Burrsday
A flipping iceberg. I subscribed to the Los Angeles Times early last year when I was writing about the challenges for journalism in covering the wildfires there. That was in my News Commons series, which I think has some brilliant and useful stuff. But it didn't go anywhere, so I wasn't sure about renewing. But… Continue reading
-
Unotherday
Another Para Digm Spotted one of the above, flying up and down East Beach in Santa Barbara. If I were half my age, I’d be up there too. Unhuman Matt Hinkle: The Week AI Agents Got Hands. It begins, The chat window era just ended. This week, AI agents got hands — Cloudflare shipped a… Continue reading
-
Throbsday
On AI wronging and writing I hate AI writing and can spot it in a second. It’s not just the excess of one-line paragraphs, the contrasty “not that, but this” argument constructions, the excessive use of em dashes. It’s a tone that sounds like the average of a million well-put hunks of text published by… Continue reading
-
Chooseday
Working to kill off cookie notices The IEEE’s cookie notice says, “This website utilizes technologies such as cookies to enable essential site functionality, as well as for analytics, personalization, and targeted advertising. Privacy Policy.” Its privacy policy, at that last link, says it collects eighteen kinds of personal information, and says one of the purposes… Continue reading
-
A Lesson in AI Economics
I am a heavy Photoshop user, and recently upgraded to Photoshop 2026 at Adobe’s robotic insistence. But, when I went to do a “generative fill” on an old photo (in the outlined area above), I was met with this: Fuzzed by that, I hit the View my balance button and got this: This shows I’m… Continue reading
-
Ownday
Elemental differences Look up graphite, graphite company, or graphite the company, and you’ll mostly get geological and industrial answers. (Unless, of course, your search history suggests the company signing the billboard above.) The easy way to find out, of course, is to ask your friendly AI. It will tell you the company behind the billboard above is Graphite.com,… Continue reading
-
Rollday
Well, two of us know With Apple Is the King of AI and Nobody Knows It, Limited Edition Jonathan does a better job of saying what I’ve been saying about where Personal AI is going, most recently here. Mutterings Dana Blankenhorn on The Biggest Shitpie. Steven K. Roberts on Archiving Meets AI. Cory Doctorow: Dealing… Continue reading
-
No body day
Let’s have her sing a country song about life in the uncanny valley Goldie Boone is a “digital country artist” who looks too good to be real. So I’m sure she’s not. Convince me otherwise. Nothing personal. Yet. Mozilla’s The State of Open Source AI is required reading. It makes a great case for open… Continue reading
-
Cryday
Haven’t figured out lighting yet, but I like the idea After struggling for days to make my new Epson FF-680W photo scanner, which does a much poorer job of scanning photos than my iPhone 16, I’m ready for one of these. Welcome to New York AeroXplorer: LaGuardia Tower Alerts Pilots to Possible Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat Near… Continue reading
-
Thurbsday
It’s still a bubble In May of 2018, I posted GDPR will pop the adtech bubble. It didn’t. The bubble is now bigger than ever. My mistake was assuming that there was a policy answer to a morally awful business that paid well. In retrospect, it’s a humbling reminder of how long one can be wrong… Continue reading
-
Intelliday
How about mintelligence? We need different words for human and machine intelligence. The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can’t measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you’d get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends to measure intelligence, but it doesn’t. (I… Continue reading
-
Will Apple Give Us Truly Personal AI?
A couple of weeks ago, in The George Carlin Model of AI, I said personal AI needed to work first on what George called a place for my stuff. Should Apple occupy that whole personal space, kinda like René Magritte visualized in a surrealist painting seventy-five years ago? I think that’s where they’re going. You… Continue reading
-
Theday
Markets are Money It doesn’t say that in The Gluetrain Manifesto, but the long-gone (but archived) parody of The Cluetrain Manifesto is still funny. Or was it? I didn’t hear that China was building robot armies before it was debunked. May the most talented robots still lose 404 Media: Tidal Says It Won’t Pay Royalties for… Continue reading
-
Un Day
And in your browser, it’s hard to tell who’s winning Remember “fair use”? It’s a concept kind of like “public airwaves.” There’s an ideal in there somewhere, but the context is a world where social contracts really aren’t, and it’s all kind of worked out, but not really. Alex Raksin tackles “fair use” in How… Continue reading
-
The George Carlin Model of AI
Forty-five years ago, George Carlin forecast the future of AI: Listen to what George says, if you haven’t already. You can stop about two and a half minutes in, after he talks about how all your shit is stuff and everyone else’s stuff is shit. Because that’s the reason Big AI will never be personal… Continue reading
-
Ladderday
Ed Zitron's latest two are good reads: Exclusive: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion Premium: The Silicon Valley Bubble (Part 2) I've worked in the Valley, both on-site and in the world, since 1977. (On site was '85 to '01.) It ain't the same. On the contrary?::: Notebook LM does… Continue reading
-
Fewsday
One frontier of anthropomorphism In the midst of a dialog with ChatGPT, I just got this: "Doc, I've been thinking about this off and on since your earlier questions…" Is it really thinking? Will it feel insulted or betrayed that I just blogged this? Olds In the continuing story of news as a business, newspapers… Continue reading