You may remember…
a few issues back, my son was exploring curse words. We talked about language and power and the lazy shortcut of profanity, and I told myself we’d turned a corner.
Reader, we have not turned a corner. We have, if anything, gone further down the road.
Last week he went on a class trip to a historic Dutch house and learned about Delft tiles: hand-painted ceramic tiles, made slowly, deliberately, tastefully. Windmills. Canals. Ships. A civilization at the peak of its powers, pointing at itself and saying– This. This is what we value.
Every kid got a blank one and was invited to participate in this tradition.
He came home with this:
“A.I. SUCKS. DESTROY. A.I. IS CRAP. A.I. IS SHIT. NOBODY LIKE A.I.”
The other kids, I can only assume, painted tulips.
I should probably talk to him about it and where this came from. I’d ask ChatGPT how to start the conversation, but that feels like it might be missing the point.
He is not wrong. Kids have this inconvenient habit of cutting straight to how something feels.
AI has been trained on all of human creative output, including in some small part work I’ve spent my career making, and then a flag planted in it saying this is ours now. Creative colonialism? I keep reaching for a lighter phrase but come back empty.
And yet I’m currently making a film with a considerable amount of AI in the production, and there are moments it feels like being fifteen with my first video camera. That feeling- that you could make anything, that the only limit is what you can think of. Who wants to give that up? I’m aware this makes me a hypocrite aka a parent.
Though even that is a fairly comfortable place to stand. To treat AI as primarily a creative question - rich, thorny, worth a long dinner - is to quietly not think about the data centers drinking aquifers, the jobs quietly leaving, the arms race conducting itself quietly above all our heads. My feelings about authorship are, in the scheme of it, a pretty small tile.
I’m not sure he knows exactly what AI is. I’m not sure any of us do. He just picked up a marker and got on with it. Kids have this inconvenient habit of just knowing.
The tile is on our windowsill. It faces outward.
xLenski
8:50 AM
Live on KEXP TRT · 5:13
Two masked musicians. They perform in a language nobody speaks, including them. Microtonal guitars, drums, a loop pedal, and absolutely no interest in being understood by an algorithm. The internet has been losing its mind over them. Now I want a floppy nose!
AROUND THE WORLD — DAFT PUNK (1997) Dir. Michel Gondry · TRT 3:58 Every costume is a different instrument. Every loop is a different body. Repetition as joy. Machines making something so human it hurts.
Dir. John Halas & Joy Batchelor · TRT 72 min
George Orwell’s farm animals stage a revolution. The pigs, it turns out, have plans. Made the old way, by hand, frame by frame. About power and who ends up with it. Your kid will think it’s about pigs. They won’t be wrong.
That’s all for this week. Class is dismissed.
P.S. Got a clip, short, or lost gem you or your kids loved? Send it my way. I’m always looking for the strange and wonderful stuff that slipped through the cracks.
xLenski
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