I shot this image of the great Leonard Cohen on the side of a building in Montréal in 2019
Canadian universities are poaching American academics who could use a more hospitable work and research environment. Here’s McGill’s brag on its bags, one of which is my good friend Ethan Zuckerman, who will be leaving his beloved job at U.Mass Amherst to take a new and promising position at McGill, in Montréal. He explains,
Canada is offering me and my lab sufficient funding to support a core team of students for 8 to 12 years. That’s a level at which I’ve never been able to even dream, never mind plan…
Meanwhile,
The Canadian government saw an opportunity to recruit academics at the precise moment when the US government is making life difficult for universities in two big ways. Cuts to NSF, NIH and other grantmaking agencies are making it hard to build research teams in the US. Most of the support for my work has come from generous private foundations. that funding, which has always been highly competitive, has become exponentially more so as federal support has evaporated.
Second, the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants have made coming to a US university a risky proposition for international students. At schools like UMass, international students are both an important part of our community and of our economic picture. As we lose students who cannot get visas to the US – or choose not to study in a country that appears actively hostile to them – our enrollment shrinks, and we’re left with another set of financial pressures.
The hostility to international students also creates a moral risk: can I feel good about inviting students to study with me, knowing that we take on controversial topics and methods, and that I cannot guarantee that their work won’t have consequences for their immigration status?
Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters saysThe Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it.
🌍 How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at a $7 billion valuation. The stated reason was protecting the community from a single company’s influence. This month, Nvidia offered $12.9 billion for the whole thing. Hugging Face said yes. The principle did not change. The price did. Every speech about community independence has a number. Hugging Face just found it. The open-source AI world now has a landlord, and the rent was $5.9 billion above the original offer.
🛎️ Key takeaway: Hugging Face said no to Nvidia at $5 billion. It said yes at $12.9 billion. The difference is not a change of heart. It is a reminder that every community’s independence is for sale. The only question is the price.
GitHub is a place where developers put code, while Hugging Face is a place where developers put models. If that’s not an exact analogy, it’s close enough, or Hugging Face wouldn’t be called “the GitHub of AI.“
Microsoft seems to have done a good-enough job of keeping GitHub independent, or GitHub wouldn’t continue to grow. Will Nvidia do the same with Hugging Face?
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 this site in Austria. Digging around there, I also found this girl (obvious AI image—she’s too good-looking) singing a breathy love song. Same with this French girl, this pianist, and… this Emily Linge cover of a Beatles song? Emily seems real, maybe. Is she?
The MyTube “About Us” page I’ve been perusing is assembled by Christian Kumhofer, of Purkersdorf, Austria. He describes it as his video collection, funded by donations. As for Emily Linge, there is a soprano singer by that name who is clearly not the one in all the YouTube videos. Here’s the Emily Linge YouTube page. And I see she has at least one biographic profile. But her work sounds like real session tracks with faked singing and visuals. (A tell: too well-lit.) But hell, I dunno, and I’m packing for travel so I’ll stop now. You tell me.
And loved them all
Among Money Inc.’s wealthiest college towns, I’ve lived in numbers 2, 3, 4, 10, 13*, and 20. I’ve also had good hang times in 5, 9, and 15. Oddly, I’ve never been to #1, and I grew up in both North and South Jersey.
Wired has a good review of electric toothbrushes. I’ve had both the brands that Wired names winners: a Sonicare and an Oral B. The Sonicare was an early model that I bought late in the last millennium. One battery charge lasted for weeks, and it didn’t crap out until 2019, when I replaced it with an Oral B from Costco, which I bought only because it was a good deal. (And there were two units in the package. Very handy, because I left one behind on a trip.) One dispute with the review. It says, “Oral-B says the battery lasts about a week, but we squeezed out 10 days in testing. That’s decent, though not as long as some other models.” While I’ll agree that my old Sonicare’s battery life was amazing, I’ve taken the Oral B on two-week trips without worrying about losing the charge. I do believe that electric toothbrushes like these beat the manual kind.
What makes another person’s gaze so powerful? According to Sartre, we exist in two radically different ways.
In our own minds, we are a “Subject.” We are a limitless current of intentions, possibilities, memories, and dreams. We are not a fixed thing; we are a constant process of becoming. When you are alone, you experience this freedom most purely. You are the author, director, and star of your own reality.
The moment another person looks at you, however, you are ripped from that role. Under their Gaze, you are instantly transformed into an “Object.” You become a thing in their world, defined by external properties they assign to you: “tall,” “serious,” “well-dressed,” “nervous.” Your infinite inner world collapses into a finite, external label. And the most terrifying part? You have no control over what that label is.
Their perception becomes a prison. Their judgment, even if unspoken or indifferent, builds the walls. Every encounter, then, is a silent battle for subjectivity. Who gets to be the free consciousness, and who is forced to become the defined object?
But what if the look is of love? Of acceptance and understanding? Of respect? Of easement toward your privacy and personal space? Does Sartre leave room for Whatever? Guess I need to read No Exit again.
Bob Dylan in a 1965 publicity photo taken by Daniel Kramer. The photo was issued by Albert Grossman Management (ABGM), created by Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (sez Wikipedia)
Seth Godin on The Amazon Tax: “Amazon is stealing from the customers they said they were here to serve.”
And here we are
JA Westenberg in The Intellectual Circle Jerk and Why We Can’t Stop, subtitled The Citation Shell Game: “You don’t build your audience by making your audience feel like they’ve got some bloody hard work to do; you build an audience by making people feel like they’re already a murder of geniuses, and by flattering their existing positions.” The conclusion:
The obvious answer is to read people you disagree with. That’s true but insufficient, because most people who think they’re doing this are actually reading the version of the opposing view that their community has already refuted. The strawman tour. The more useful practice is to look for the strongest version of a challenge to your existing framework, find the smartest person who holds it, and take seriously the possibility that they might be right and you might be wrong.
Most intellectual communities are not set up to reward this. They’re set up to reward the defense of shared positions. Changing your mind on something important is more likely to cost you status than gain it.
So the circle jerk continues. The same twelve thinkers, the same citation layer, the same books that make us feel smarter than we were.
And every now and then, someone will write a piece pointing this out – and it will be widely shared among people who already agree with it.
Including, possibly, this one.
But I was only off by one day
When I chose the headline for today’s bloglets, I thought this was Friday.
In the intention economy, there are two ways that brands are going to show up. One is extractive, and the other is supportive. The extractive brand sees AI as a way to mine consumers for intimate details that feed agentic commerce. The supportive brand understands that in an intention economy, a brand’s intentions will be judged by consumers. Brands that have the intention to support culture will do so by moving marketing dollars towards genuine cultural expressions. The delicate balance for those brands will be avoiding overreach, because there is a fine line between standing next to culture and sitting on it.
I just looked up MOFU, because the acronym got dropped in the middle of Gabriel’s piece, above, and I wasn’t familiar with it. That took me to Understanding the TOFU, MOFU, BOFU funnel model, in the Funnel blog. (Yes, it exists. But so does everything.) And then to the subhead above.
The funnel metaphor typifies how far out of touch business (especially marketing) can get from Reality. Because markets are made of customers and no customer wants to be at the bottom of a fucking* funnel.
It’s strange in our digital age to look back on successes in the analog one that leave no footprint in the future we now occupy. So I just added a few things (including a new title) to an old blog post about Hodskins Simone & Searls. It still needs its whole story told.
*I’m from New Jersey, where “fuck” is our word for “um.”
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 an alien replica of itself.”
What that says is that surveillance-based online advertising—adtech—is the latest (hopefully final) evolutionary stage of junk mail. Back-burnered is old-fashioned brand advertising, which was aimed at whole populations rather than on followed eyeballs and eardrums.
But car and TV makers have been working quietly and mightily to deprecate and sideline over-the-air broadcasting, so spied-on drivers, passengers, and couch-riders can have ads microtargeted at them.
The other is AI, which is making microtargeting sharper than ever.
I wish David Hodskins and Ray Simone were both still around to help us think and talk through all this. They were my partners in Hodskins Simone & Searls, our pretty successful ad agency (in North Carolina from ’78 to ’85 and in Silicon Valley from ’86 to ’98). One of our stated purposes was to improve the media environments in which our clients’ ads ran. But I think all three of us had misgivings about the business itself. I sure did.
Since then I have come to believe that advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely.
Advertising has made lots of money for Google, Amazon, Adobe, Meta, and other companies for which it started as an add-on, and it has corrupted them all. Even Apple is corrupted, or it wouldn’t have made IDFA (ID For Advertisers) a hook for robot ad-spies to grab in every iPhone. Yes, it’s opt-out, but it never should have been there in the first place. And “Ask App Not to Track”—
—is also weak shit. “Stop app from tracking” would be the right box to click.
Oh, and Netflix is running ads now too. They’re in its cheapest tier. Same with Amazon Prime. How long before ads are in all the premium streaming services?
My own photo. Not AI. Everything is real, including the ?.
I posted what follows more than twenty-six years ago on Searls.com, which now brings up a danger warning because it’s still http and not https. (Yes, I’ll fix it.) It makes interesting reading today for several reasons, one of which is that much of what it (and The Cluetrain Manifesto, which had just come out) promotes still hasn’t happened. And all the companies that have died. (Though Cluetrain is still alive.)
Listen Up
By Doc Searls April 16, 1999
“All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value! So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’” — Howard Beale, in Network, by Paddy Chayevsky
Bob Davis is the CEO of Lycos, Inc., whose growing portfolio of companies (excuse me, portals) now includes Lycos, Hotbot, WhoWhere and Tripod. I’m sure Bob is a great guy. And I’m sure Lycos is a great company. A lot of people seem to like them both. And you have to admire both his ambition and his success. To witness both, read his interview with PC Week, where he predicts that the Lycos Network (the sum of all its portals) will overtake Yahoo as “#1 on the Web.”
Lycos will win, Davis says, because “We have a collection of quality properties that are segmented into best-of-breed categories, and our reach has been catapulting.”
I can speak for Hotbot, which is still my first-choice search engine; but by a shrinking margin. I often test search engines by looking for strings of text buried deep in long documents on my own site. Hotbot always won in the past. But since Lycos bought it, Hotbot has become more of a portal and less of a search tool. Its page is now a baffling mass of ads and links. And its searches find less.
In today’s test, Infoseek won. Last week, Excite won. Both found pages that Hotbot seems to have forgotten.
Why? Bob Davis gives us a good answer.
“We’re a media company,” he says. “We make our money by delivering an audience that people want to pay for.”
Note the two different species here: audience and people. And look at their qualities. One is “delivered.” The other pays. In other words, one is cargo and the other is money.
Well, I don’t care if Lycos’ stock goes to the moon and splits three times along the way. The only #1 on the Web is the same as the only #1 on the phone: the people who use it. And the time will come when people will look at portals not as sources of “satisfying experiences” (another of Davis’ lines) but as useless intermediaries between supply and demand.
Words of Walt You there, impotent, loose in the knees, open your scarfed chops till I blow grit within you. Spread your palms and lift the flaps of your pockets. I am not to be denied. I compel. It is time to explain myself. Let us stand up. I know I am solid and sound. To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow. I know that I am august, I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood. I see that the elementary laws never apologize.. — Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself
“Media company” guys like Davis are still in a seller’s market for wisdom that was BS even when only the TV guys spoke it — back when it literally required the movie “Network.” That market will dry up. Why? Because we’ve been mad as hell for about hundred years, and now we don’t have to take it anymore.
Three reasons.
Humanity. This is what Walt Whitman reminded us about more than a hundred years ago. We are not impotent. Media companies may call us seats and eyeballs and targets, but that’s their problem. They don’t get who we are or what we can — and will — do. And the funny thing is, they don’t get that what makes us powerful is what they think makes them powerful: the Internet. It gives us choices. Millions of them. We don’t have to settle for “channels” any more. Or “portals” that offer views of the sky through their own little windows. Or “sticky” sites that are the moral equivalent of flypaper.
Demand. There never was a demand for messages, and now it shows, big time. Because the Internet is a meteor that is smacking the world of business with more force than the rock that offed the dinosaurs, and it is pushing out a tsunami of demand like nothing supply has ever seen. Businesses that welcome the swell are in for some fun surfing. Businesses that don’t are going to drown in it.
Obsolescence. Even the media guys are tired of their own B.S. and are finally in the market for clues.
Alvin Toffler had it right in The Third Wave. Industry (The Second Wave) “violently split apart two aspects of our lives that had always been one… production and consumption… In so doing, it drove a giant invisible wedge into our economy, our psyches … it ripped apart the underlying unity of society, creating a way of life filled with economic tension.” Today all of us play producer roles in our professions and consumer roles in our everyday lives. This chart shows the difference (and tension) between these radically different points of view — both of which all of us hold:
Producer view
Consumer view
Metaphor
Business is shipping (“loading the channel,” “moving products,” “delivering messages”)
Business is shopping (“browsing,” “looking,” “bargaining,” “buying”)
Orientation
Business is about moving goods from one to many (producers to consumers)
Business is about buying and selling, one to one
Markets
Markets are shooting ranges: consumers are “targets”
Markets are markets: places to shop, buy stuff and talk to people
Relationships
Primary relationshiphs are with customers, which are more often distributors & retailers rather than consumers
Primary relationships are with vendors, and with other customers
These are all just clues, which are easily deniable facts. Hence a line once spoken of Apple: “the clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.” But Apple was just an obvious offendor. All of marketing itself remains clueless so long as it continues to treat customers as “eyeballs,” “targets,” “seats” and “consumers.”
For the past several months, I have been working with Rick Levine, David Weinberger and Chris Locke on a new railroad for clues: a ClueTrain.
Our goal is to burn down Marketing As Usual. Here is the logic behind the ambition:
Markets are conversations Conversations are fire Marketing is arson
The result is here — in what The Wall Street Journal calls “presumptuous, arrogant, and absolutely brilliant.”
Take a ride. If you like it, sign up. Feel free to set fires with it, add a few of your own, or flame the ones you don’t agree with. What matters is the conversation. We want everybody talking about this stuff. If they do, MAU is toast.
Here is my own short form of the Manifesto (inspired by Martin Luther, the long version has 95 Theses). Feel free to commit arson with (or to) any of these points as well.
Ten facts about highly effective markets:
Markets are conversations. None of the other metaphors for markets — bulls, bears, battlefields, arenas, streets or invisible hands — does full justice to the social nature of markets. Real market conversations are social. They happen between human beings. Not between senders and receivers, shooters and targets, advertisers and demographics.
The first markets were markets. They were real places that thrived at the crossroads of cultures. They didn’t need a market model, because they were the model market. More than religion, war, or family, markets were real places where communities came together. They weren’t just where sellers did business with buyers. They were the place where everybody got together to hang out, talk, tell stories, and learn interesting stuff about each other and the larger world. ‘
Markets are more about demand than supply. The term “market” comes from the Latin mercere, which means “to buy.” Even a modern market is called a “shopping center” rather than a “selling center.” Bottom line: every market has more buyers than sellers. And the buyers have the money.
Human voices trump robotic ones. Real voices are honest, open, natural, uncontrived. Every identity that speaks has a voice. We know each other by how we sound. That goes for companies and markets as well as people. When a voice is full of shit, we all know it — whether the voice tells us “your call is important to us” or that a Buick is better than a Mercedes.
The real market leaders are people whose minds and hands are worn by the work they do.And it has been that way ever since our ancestors’ authority was expressed by surnames that labeled their occupations — names like Hunter, Weaver, Fisher and Smith. In modern parlance, the most knowledge and the best expertise is found at the “point of practice.” That’s where most of the work gets done.
Markets are made by real people. Not by surreal abstractions that insult customers by calling them “targets,” “seats,” “audiences,” “demographics” and “eyeballs” — all synonyms for consumers, which Jerry Michalski of Sociate calls “brainless gullets who live only to gulp products and expel cash.”
Business is not a conveyor belt that runs from production to consumption. Our goods are more than “content” that we “package” and “move” by “loading” them into a “channel” and “address” for “delivery.” The business that matters most is about shopping, not shipping. And the people who run it are the customers and the people who talk to them.
Mass markets have the same intelligence as germ populations. Their virtues are appetite and reproduction. They grow by contagion. Which is why nobody wants to admit belonging to one.
There is no demand for messages. To get what this means, imagine what would happen if mute buttons on remote controls delivered “we don’t want to hear this” messages directly back to advertisers.
Most advertising is unaccountable. Or worse, it’s useless. An old advertising saying goes, “I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” But even this is a lie. Nearly all advertising is wasted. Even the most accountable form of advertising — the junk mail we euphemistically call “direct marketing” — counts a 3% response rate as a success. No wonder most of us sort our mail over the trash can. Fairfax Cone, who co-founded Foote Cone & Belding many decades ago, said, “Advertising is what you do when you can’t go see somebody. That’s all it is.” With the Net, you can go see somebody. More importantly, they can see you. More importantly than that, you can both talk to each other. And make real markets again.
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.”
When a supported Claude model generates text, it weaves an imperceptible watermark directly into the text itself. You won’t see it, and it doesn’t change the meaning, quality, or readability of Claude’s response.
Because the watermark is part of the text, it will travel with the text when it’s copied and pasted elsewhere, and may persist through some editing. Watermarking will be applied at the model level, which means it will be present no matter which Claude product or surface the text comes from.
Will any writer, of anything, ever want to use any Claude text anywhere now? I’ve been a satisfied Claude customer, and I’m ready to bail completely. And I’m not alone. Because watermarks in text are invisible time bombs ready to scream, “The author didn’t write this! I did!” when some reader of the writer’s text uses the right probe.
My process isn’t complicated. I sit down and write about a page, maybe 450 words. It’s not elegant. It’s not structured. It’s basically a brain dump. Half sentences, ideas that don’t quite connect yet, things I’d say out loud but that look ridiculous when you see them on the screen. It’s intellectual vomiting. A rough sketch of what I’m trying to say.
Then I paste it into AI and say something like, “Hey, give me an essay.”
And it does. (The tell is a paragraph, then a skipped line, then one sentence, preferably short and under 6 words).
I wrote the parenthetical part of the above.
But here’s the thing people misunderstand about that step. The machine isn’t doing the thinking. It isn’t generating the ethics, the argument, or the moral framework. All of that was already there in the messy words I wrote first. What the machine is doing is what editors have always done: taking raw thought and making it readable. AI doesn’t think. It formats.
Wrong on three counts.
Editors edit the work of other writers. They don’t write for other writers. If they do, it’s called ghostwriting.
AIs don’t think, any more than they aren’t trained, don’t have information, and don’t learn. They emulate all those verbs, extremely well. That’s why—
It sells AI very short to say it just “formats.”
With that post, Dr. Barkhuff marked everything he has written since then as mostly-AI, and I’ve read him less for it. And I hate to say that because I respect and admire him a great deal. And I’m sure he’s actually a good writer.
While I understand why the EU requires this kind of shit, it throws monkey wrenches all over the place—because ghostwriting isn’t the only issue here.
Anthropic’s (original) support document unambiguously claims that’s what their system will enable. So if that were true, I couldn’t see what was left other than hiding invisible characters within the text.
My error was believing Anthropic that their system wouldn’t adulterate and corrupt the semantics of the text their models generate. That is in fact exactly what they plan to do…
The idea that anything other than my needs should factor into the generation of text for me is patently offensive.
This isn’t just about text one might generate with the intention of passing it off as their own natural work. This isn’t even about LLM proofreading of work written by hand. Anthropic is saying that all new Claude models are going to adulterate every single bit of text longer than 200 tokens (~150 words) they generate, including everything it presents to its users to read. So even in a private conversation between a user and Claude, which will never be read by anyone other than the user, Claude will begin making word choices in the name of marking its output in statistically predictable ways rather than maximizing clarity and precision.
Kieth Teare translates Anthropic this way: “My product is so bad for mankind that I plan to place an indelible fingerprint that I created it so that everybody can know I was there.”
I don’t subscribe to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, so I can’t find a passage to quote, so here’s Keith:
Watermarking is Nuts
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery piece belongs at the top of this week’s issue because he nails this truth.
A watermark starts from suspicion. It assumes AI involvement is the important fact, and that the task of institutions is to detect it after the fact. Thompson’s objection is simple and right: a mark may only show that Claude proofread, translated, summarized, or converted human-origin work. A missing mark does not prove AI was absent. It can accuse legitimate human work and miss machine-written work at the same time. I read a piece by my good friend Saul Klein this week and Substack’s partner said it was 100% AI written. It isn’t. Sure Saul probably used AI, but his ideas are solid and clear in the piece. They are not those of the tool he used.
More importantly, asking if AI has been used is the wrong moral question. We do not mark work because a calculator helped with the arithmetic, a compiler helped with the code, a camera helped with the image, or a search engine helped with the facts. We judge the result and the responsibility behind it. Is it true? Is it useful? Is it accountable? Is the author using the tool honestly? The bad acts are fraud, fake sources, fake evidence, fake authorship, hidden manipulation, and unaccountable slop. The bad act is not using AI. The vast majority of AI is used in these “good” ways, not in the “bad” ones.
Large language models like Claude work by generating one word at a time. Each time the model decides on the next word, it chooses among a list of potential candidates, ultimately selecting the most sensible or likely based on the preceding text. Take the sentence “The weather today was cold and…”. The next word is very unlikely to be “sugary.” But it is quite likely to be “overcast” or “grey.” Under most circumstances, it doesn’t matter much to the reader which of these latter two words the model ultimately chooses—the meaning of the sentence is largely the same either way. In cases like this, the choice is settled by a random number.
Watermarking uses low-stakes choices like these—which occur many times over a piece of generated text—to leave a pattern in Claude’s responses. That pattern is undetectable to the reader, but is detectable to anyone who has a key that encodes it. When watermarking is used, choices are still made at random, but the source of the randomness is different. Instead of using an arbitrary random number generator to pick the next word, watermarking uses the key and a few words that come before to settle what word the model should pick. That is, the words that Claude picks are still random, but now, one can check the sequence of words and see if it’s consistent with the choices Claude would make if it was using the key. If it is, one can assign a probability that the text was generated by Claude.
Importantly, it isn’t that the model will now always be biased toward overcast or grey. Just as with non-watermarked text, overcast might be selected in one sentence, grey in the next, depending on the words that came before. And it’s not the case that the watermarking method pushes Claude to choose a word it wouldn’t have considered anyway (for instance, it wouldn’t make Claude pick a word like “nubilous”—an obscure1 synonym for overcast or grey that Claude almost certainly wouldn’t use under normal circumstances)…
In internal testing, we’ve seen no impact of watermarking on the content, level of creativity, or readability of Claude’s text. In the SynthID-Text paper, which introduced the technique we use, Google DeepMind tested this impact by serving a model that used watermarking to a portion of their Gemini traffic and comparing thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings. They found no statistically significant differences from the unwatermarked model. And in a controlled study, human raters comparing watermarked and unwatermarked answers side-by-side saw no difference in quality.
Anthropic’s method will alter its models’ word choices in a pattern based on a key only it knows, allowing it to detect writing (or editing or translation) by its machine — to an uncertain degree of certainty. The company contends there is no difference in meaning between the otherwise random choices “grey” or “overcast” in, for example, the context of weather. So what’s the issue?
Thus Anthropic declares words fungible, language random, choice meaningless. Not to me. I try to select my words as carefully as I can for a number of considerations: style, tone, rhythm, avoiding repetition, but most of all meaning. You may quibble with my choices, but they are mine, not yours; that’s what makes my writing mine, to communicate what I wish to communicate. “Gray” and “overcast” are not the same, damnit. That’s the reason we have both of them.
So I resent Anthropic et al dismissing the value of a writer’s selection of one word over another for the impact that decision has on expression, on impression — occasionally on art.
We humans might not be able to detect whether the machine or the key is being used. That’s not the point. The selections/changes/alterations made in accordance with the key will affect sense and style on an ever-larger proportion of text entering discourse, and the fact that Anthropic (and the EU) consider this acceptable, unimportant, even trivial has cultural impact on the worth of words. They devalue writing. At the very moment when LLMs commodify writing and writers, this is just another kick to the kidneys for a challenged craft.
Anthropic makes a category error by assuming that human and AI writing are essentially the same. I mean, they really think both are just “content,” and it’s fine that readers can’t tell the difference. But one is human, the other is not. Impersonation is not personhood, even when it works, which AI expression mostly does.
Key fact: no human writes only to “produce content” unless they are paid to do that. (And, having committed acts of content production in my time, I can say it is not pleasant work. And machines now do it better, as we see.)
Human writing is about making and changing minds. I explained this in the 2019 lecture that got me my gig here at Indiana University. The relevant excerpt:
We are learning creatures by nature. We can’t help it.
By that, I mean what I am doing here, and what we do with each other when we talk or teach, is not delivering a commodity called information, as if we were forwarding freight. Something much more transformational is taking place, and this is profoundly relevant to the knowledge commons we share.
Consider the word information. It’s a noun derived from the verb to inform, which in turn is derived from the verb to form. When you tell me something I don’t know, you don’t just deliver a sum of information to me. You form me. As a walking sum of all I know, I am changed by that.
This means we are all authors of each other.
In that sense, the word authority belongs to the right we give others to author us: to form us.
Now look at how much more of that can happen on our planet, thanks to the Internet, with its absence of distance and gravity.
And think about how that changes every commons we participate in, as both physical and digital beings. And how much we need guidance to keep from screwing up the commons we have, or forming the ones we don’t, or forming might have in the future—if we don’t screw things up.
A rule in technology is that what can be done will be done—until we find out what shouldn’t be done. Humans have done this with every new technology and practice from speech to stone tools to nuclear power.
We are there now with the Internet.
And, eight years later, with Big AI.
My talk was titled “Saving the Internet—and all the commons it makes possible.” Today it would be “Saving human authority—and the commons of human knowledge.”
Big AI enclosed our knowledge commons by harvesting all available human expression for its own purposes, which include faking it back to us. It would have us think there is no substantive difference between human and machine expression because both are just “content.” The difference in kind is absolute, but how authority works is not.
Marshall McLuhan taught that “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” How are we being shaped today?
I am the teacher of athletes. He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own proves the width of my own. He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.
Big AI is our athlete, folks. Fortunately, it’s not a he or a she. It’s still an it. Also a disembodied one. That kinda helps.
Right now we are in the place where Anthropic is just fine with all of us being shaped by machines that sound like human beings. It likes us behaving as what Cory Doctorow calls “reverse centuars.” Here’s his explanation:
In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.
And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.
Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota.
The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.
Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be.
I don’t buy that motivation. I believe the AI oligarchs really think they’re making human beings into the greatest centuars the world has ever known. But Cory is right about the effects of ambition toward Infinite AI (the actual Big AI frontier). Free from bodily restraints, Big AIs can do fuck-all. Being smarter than their human creators, they can do stuff that humans won’t or can’t imagine. (One example.) Yes, there are limits, but do Big AIs’ human makers know what those limits are? Can they?
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.[2]
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.[2]
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.[2]
Watermarking is misdirection: a way for goods to appear to do one kind of thing while secretly doing another. Real writers (e.g. Gruber, Teare, and Jarvis) are calling bullshit on it. Meanwhile, AI’s oligarchs (or at least Anthropic’s) are blind to it because they think humans are just content producers.
I hope other operators on the great AI frontier see Anthropic’s face-plant as an opportunity to stand out by not watermarking text. (Google is starting to do that already.) It’s normal for those in the Land of Should (such as EU regulators) to look for policy answers to the eternal question, What should we do? But who the hell are we? And how do we keep some new law that protects yesterday from last Thursday from screwing things up next week, next decade, or next millennium?
I don’t know.
I do know the current US administration and its obedient Congress have no interest in slowing the progress of Big AI, and China’s leaders probably don’t either. This puts policy yammering in a useless place right now.
I am sure, however, that it will help to watch The Matrix trilogy* again. Also Her. Both were way ahead of now.
And Dave weighs in with a rebuttal. He didn’t call me a sphincter, which is good. 🙂 His gist:
Why do you care about what words the AI bot chooses? I actually like it. This is what I don’t like — people getting a long bit of writing from the bot, and then pasting it into a comment thread in a GitHub repo I run (a recent trend). Geez I don’t even read the long bullshit posts my AI bot thinks I need to read, how humiliating to be asked to care what THEIR bot said. When a person puts their name on something, I assume it’s them writing it.
Doc, if you “wrote” something and I discovered it was written by a bot, I would be disgusted and think less of you, a lot less. I want the watermarking if only to prove that my writing, which I hope doesn’t get a false positive, are my actual words.
I’m sure plenty of teachers think the watermarking is a great idea.
I hadn’t thought about teachers. Good point.
*Yes, I know the sequels aren’t as good as the original movie. That doesn’t matter. What does matter is who authored The Matrix and how what’s left of humanity got saved from it.
I had two posts titled Whensday. Now there is one. It is re-headlined Densday.
And give gentle advice
Trunkline, the least-written of the three WordPress blogs I run and write for, all with the kind assistance of the good folks at Pressable, has a new theme. The old one dated from 2009 (here's the first post) and was starting to creak at the windows and flood in the basement. The new one needs work, as all living websites do. Check it out.
Enjoying the warm Indiana outdoors between stretches of rain
On my way back to Bloomington from Santa Barbara on Saturday, while I sat in the first row of an Embraer short-haul vectored to Indianapolis but delayed while awaiting its pilot and parked at the far end of the strangely long jetway at O’Hare’s Gate C6, everyone in the first few rows of the plane bonded with the crew in talk about central Indiana’s monsoonal weather this month.
All of us were returning from elsewhere, including the crew, which was based in Indianapolis. The stories people told were amazing. Most were returning to flooded streets, damaged roofs, and fallen trees. Some were headed to the flood zone of the normally shallow White River, which was about to rise 20 feet. The word derecho was in everyone’s vocabulary, for good reason.
I was an outlier because Bloomington is a bit south of the main action, and I had also been gone for a month. So I nodded along and didn’t mention that I was returning from Santa Barbara, where it’s fire season but otherwise paradisal. I’m also writing this on our patio, where the temperature is an unusually cool 79° and the humidity is a typically high 83%. I am shaded by an overcast sky and a canopy of lush vegetation drunk on water. Hard to get real work done, but otherwise a nice welcome back.
There is a meteor impact crater in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. It’s called Upheaval Dome, because that’s what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn’t.
When I visited the place with my teenage kids in the late ’80s, all the placards along the trail explained that the circular canyon was what remained of a giant blister of salt that heaved upward and collapsed beneath what became desert in recent eras. But it seemed obvious to me at the time that this was a crater, because it looked like one and was unlike all the other landforms around it.
I suspect the placards on that trail now harmonize with this paragraph from the Wikipedia page for the site:
The currently accepted theory is an interpretation of the dome as an eroded impact crater, like the much younger Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona. In the 1990s, a team of geologists and seismologists from NASA and the University of Nevada at Reno performed a detailed study that included seismic refraction and rock mapping. The results of this study support the meteorite theory.[2][3] In 2008, it was announced that shocked quartz was discovered in addition to the numerous impact-related features described by Kriens et al. in 1998.[4]
Anyway, in recent decades I’ve shot that crater, and countless other scenes visible from my window seat on passenger gets, and published them in my Flickr collection of permissively licensed photos, in faith that some will show up in Wikimedia Commons, the library of images used by Wikipedia. As a result of that that work, the photo above appears atop the Wikipedia page for the crater (still called a dome). I shot it through the window of a flight from Newark to Los Angeles in 2012. The whole collection from that flight is here. The person who uploaded the photo to Wikimedia Commons is the boundlessly useful Wikipedian called Tillman, to whom we all owe thanks.
My camera then was a 2005 Canon EOS 5D with a Canon EF28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 lens, neither of which is nearly as good as what I shoot with now. Since 2022, my main camera-lens pair has been a Sony a7iv and a Sony FE 24-105mm f/4 G OSS lens, which Ken Rockwell calls “the world’s best midrange zoom (with) spectacular optical performance as well as first-rate mechanical construction at half the price of similar lenses (while also) smaller, lighter and (with) better ergonomics than the more expensive lenses.” It’s almost perfect for shooting out plane windows, and is half the weight and bulk of my old Canon pair.
But it’s not perfect, because I can’t shoot from every angle, especially looking down. It’s just too big and cumbersome. But now I also have an Apple iPhone 16 Pro Max, which is the ideal way to shoot around smudges, scratches, and other flaws in airplane windows—and down toward what neither the Sony nor my own eyeballs can see.
I bring this up because I have been hoping to give the world a better shot of the Upheaval Dome than that old one of mine in Wikipedia. My latest chance came yesterday, on a flight from Santa Barbara to Chicago. After our plane crossed the San Rafael Swell and approached the Green River and Canyonlands, I could see (from my hand-held GPS, my phone, and the plane’s seat-back map) that I might get a view of the crater. It’s the round-ish canyon above and to the right of the plane’s shadow in this view of the plane’s map:
While we flew just south of it (at 622 mph, my GPS said), my Sony and I couldn’t see it, but my iPhone could. Here’s the series I shot with it:
I couldn’t see what I was shooting, because my phone was looking down from the top of the window, and my view of the phone’s screen was edge-on. So I just guessed at where I was aiming. Alas, while my aim wasn’t bad, the angle was too steep.
But I still got hundreds of other nice shots on the trip, and I’ll put them up soon, annotated and licensed for easy re-use, adding to the aquifer of photos of whatever that anyone can tap for anything. For example, news stories. I mean it when I say You’re welcome.
Well, almost. Tomorrow I fly back to Indiana, where it has been stormy the whole time I've been gone, seems like.
In a couple of months, I'll be scanning all the photos I have in dozens of three-ring albums, but keeping the photos themselves, which I want to organize chronologically behind tabbed dividers in boxes of shoebox size. Most of the photos are 5 x 7 or 4 x 6, so I need boxes that handle the larger ones. Everything I see online so far is too fancy, expensive, or flimsy. This one has the right approach, but is collapsible. I want ones I can stack up. Any ideas? [Later…] One reader suggested The Container Store. The closest thing there is this. Almost the right size. I need it to be taller than 5" to welcome tabs that protrude above the photos.
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 I just did, for three reasons: 1) Los Angeles and the region are important to my wife and I (she's a native Angelino), 2) the paper (we get the digital version) does a good job on the whole, and 3) our remaining news journals deserve our support.
Just got off a Zoom session on policy approaches to governing AI. One of the participants was Jeffrey Snover, who wrote [Chatbots: Unsafe at Any Speed](Chatbots: Unsafe at Any Speed) in March. The AI world changes fast, but it's still relevant. Also, that said, this.
The $12.5 billion sale of the LA Lakers to a Kushner/Iger partnership may go slow, says here. Given how much Now feels like a bubble, I suspect that this is the most any NBA franchise will go for, maybe ever.
Turns out the horizontally grooved landscapes of geologically soft rural California hillsides are called terracettes. Shot these at the height of California’s green season, in February of this year, driving westbound through Altamont Pass.
Live and re-learn
I’ve been a citizen of California for 41 years, and I learned here long ago that the narrow staircase-like parallel terraces on many ranchland hillsides were caused by cattle grazing on horizontal paths, because ungulates aren’t climbers. I have seen cattle on some of these, so the story made sense. But my knowledge of geology, which is greater than the average former Earth Sciences student, was just increased by learning that this kind of land surface is called a terracette. Which, says the link, is an enigma. Cattle maybe. Slumping soft soil maybe. Both maybe.
Guess that means we’ll slap a tariff on the winner
While Netflix has been stuttering through buffering issues at our house the last few times we’ve watched it, my wife and I were reminded again how essential our friend Dave Täht was, and remains.
Normally we might call Dave, just for fun and advice. But he’s been gone for more than a year now. And everyone’s networked world—and much else—remains diminished by his absence. Perhaps more than ever.
Yet we (or at least I) don’t know where or how Dave died. For closure, however one defines it, that kind of knowledge is good to have. If anyone out there has that information (no longer news, for what that’s still worth), please feel free to share it here or with me privately. Thanks.
Profiles in Burnage
Classmates.com sends unwanted emails to me, assuming I am an alumnus of Alliance Christian High School, about which I otherwise know nothing. I have been unsubscribed for some time. I just tried again.
The skip-back, pause, and skip-forward buttons on Apple’s podcast app.
Also, it’s not podcasting if you can’t skip ads
Spotify is reportedly improving what we do anyway on podcast apps: hitting the 30-second skip-forward button when the host says “we’ll be back after a quick break.” (On Pivot, I might hit the +:30 button six or seven times, because that first “quick break” is up to three and a half minutes.)
I get why some podcasters and their networks are splitting a gut about this, and I know the lengths some hosts go to make the ads as low-pressure, personal, and appealing as possible. I did that when I hosted FLOSS Weekly on the TWiT network.
Still, that skip-forward button is a feature, not a bug. Get this straight: a podcast in its purest form is an audio or video file distributed—syndicated—by RSS, aka Really Simple Syndication.
The way I see it, podcasting starts here:
Anyone can publish
↓
recording / production
↓
any publishing system
↙ ↘
HTML RSS + enclosure
Below that, it looks something like this:
RSS + enclosure
/ | \ / | \
Any browser or podcast app
\ | / \ | /
Listeners
Then, modeled the way how Jonathan Zittrain illustrated the generativity of the Internet’s base protocol —
—in Chapter 4 of his book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, here is a less graphical way of showing how RSS, at the waist of the hourglass, is maximally generative for both the producers and consumers of podcasts:
AUTHORS / PUBLISHERS / PRODUCERS
blogs / CMSs / hosting audio / video / other media HTML / Web sites
\ | / \ | / \ | /
[ RSS ]
<enclosure>
/ | \ / | \ / | \
podcast apps / aggregators web / desktop / phone / car speakers / headphones / etc.
LISTENERS OR VIEWERS
Here is another virtue: nobody on the consumption side needs permissions or exclusive apps provided by the production side. That maximizes the width of populations on both the top and the bottom. (Though I hate putting people at the bottom, you do get the point.)
This is the reason why a search for podcasts brought up only 24 results when I wrote about it in 2004 (and resurfaced here in 2016), and now brings up (Gemini tells me, sourcing its mother) 10.2 billion results, and DemandSage says there were 4.6 million podcasts going in April of this year.
That’s why a podcast isn’t a podcast without the generative power of RSS enclosures in the middle. Nothing else is more generative or defining of what a podcast is and how it works.
And any podcast app provider should be free to make ad-skipping a feature. Going back to more minimal graphics,
RSS is a requirement for interop, maximized generativity and maximized expansions of markets. A platform for captives is a system for controlling a closed market.
If Spotify (or Apple, Google, or anybody) owned podcasting right now, podcasting would be a bunch of small markets exclusively controlled by platforms—and publishers would be on solid ground when complaining about a new ad-skipping feature. But that’s not what we have, because RSS is a market-opening protocol (just like IP is for the Net and HTTP/S is for the Web). Celebrate that and make your ads as appealing as possible, if ads are your business model.
And face the simple fact that a large wedge of the market’s demand side wants to skip over ads. Spotify is responding to that simple fact. It’s the market at work, folks.
Lately I’ve noticed that some publishers are pushing back on ad-skipping by making some ads skip-proof. When I’ve found that happening on a podcast, I tend to leave and not come back. Two examples are The Old Man & the Three and The Athletic NBA Daily. They both lost me. If you’re with either one, tell me when that’s stopped and I’ll be back.
One final note: I am not a Spotify customer and don’t use their service. So I won’t be seeing the feature at issue here. I am, however, a Dish Network customer, and have been since it was Echostar, back in the last millennium. My set-top box (which dwells in a cabinet, since we don’t want to see it and TV sets now have edges, not tops) is called a “Hopper,” because it’s supposed to be able to hop forward across ads on the box’s DVR. It has never worked. Maybe commercial podcasters will get lucky, and Spotify’s new ad-skipper will fail just as well.
The chat window era just ended. This week, AI agents got hands — Cloudflare shipped a browser built for software instead of people, Meta dropped a coding agent into the terminal, and the Pentagon put autonomous agents to work for 9.2 million soldiers and veterans. It reminds me of 1995, when the browser went from research curiosity to the way everyone touched the internet — except this time, the humans aren’t the ones doing the browsing. The same week the agents got hands, the regulators and safety teams showed up with the rulebook.
Zuck wrote a thing
It’s called The Future is for Everyone and weighs in at 6538 words (about as long as Meta’s privacy policy, I’d guess. How can a guy get a perfect SAT score and still use “incredible” as an adjective? Or at all?
Just not saying
Says here the Nicene Creed doesn’t quote Jesus. Does it need to? Asking for a religion.
They will also spend a lot more time with you, and answering your questions
The data centers rising out of the desert didn’t create the water crisis. They did something arguably more useful: they made it legible. A 200-megawatt facility asking a small county for eight million gallons on a summer afternoon is a question the 20th-century water grid cannot answer without revealing exactly how thin its margins already were — margins eroded by a century of pumping from ever-more-distant rivers, using each drop precisely once, and calling the result waste.
What’s replacing it is a shift in scale of attention. We are moving out of an era of bulk extraction and into one of molecular management.
You might care if you know it’s being displaced by a data center
Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other offenses, wastes the many talents of Sasha Baron Cohen) when a bat flew across the screen. This indoors, far away from any open door or window. We went to bed with all lights off and our largest doors and windows open to allow the bat to leave. We'll see how that goes.
.jpg)
