Worthy Read is an ongoing series here at the blog where I link out to a piece I think is worth your valuable time.
Is this AI?” my girlfriend will ask me, pointing to a post on TikTok or Instagram. If you’re online, you ask this question every single day. As the years have gone on and the models have gotten deceptively better, the talent of discerning what is and is not AI has entered into an arms race with what the models are capable of. This learned suspicion is fatiguing, and being baited and switched is like going out to see a movie only to be confronted with a video of someone describing a boring dream instead. There is no baseline for the veracity of images; they start at suspicion now.
This has all become the most convoluted and exhausting when it comes to my hobbies. I am a man who cares deeply about open source software, particularly projects that destroy the barriers between existing platforms. I care about accuracy in retro gaming quite a bit; I wouldn’t have spent years restoring an arcade cabinet by hand if I didn’t. But I also care about passion and rigor, about a person making software because no viable alternative exists or because nobody did it correctly, and devoting a big portion of their life to maintaining that for strangers. (Perhaps I should not fetishize labor like that, as much of open source software can turn developers into janitors.) But what is happening now with AI has made it difficult to discern who cares and who doesn’t, who knows what they are doing and who cannot be bothered to check what code they shipped. I’m exhausted.
Another day, another essay from Aftermath linked to by me.1
But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t eloquently share an active anxiety I’ve felt within myself these days.
I love(d) really cool apps for my iPhone and Mac. But are they actually being maintained by any people who have any idea what they’re doing?
I love(d) cool visual effects in movies. Did an artist make this? Or a prompt?
Hell, I love(d) cat videos on the internet, and I have no idea if the cats are real, let alone their actions anymore.
It’s hard to love something when you don’t trust it. For better or worse, over my 42 years, I’ve defined myself through my hobbies and interests. What do you do when you can’t trust those hobbies anymore?
- Hey, if you can? Subscribe to Aftermath. It’s good. Very good. ↩︎