I read this series ages ago; when I got it through an Image Humble Bundle, I decided it was worth a reread.

The art isn’t bad, and the basic ideas of the series are interesting, but it’s remarkable how much generative AI has kind of ruined what the series could be.

So much of this reads differently now: the premise of people seeking companionship in sycophantic robots, the secondary premise of people being convinced that there’s true intelligence behind the scenes just waiting to be unlocked, the idea of “robots rights” in a society that’s skeptical of artificial intelligence. What would have been pretty standard scifi 4 years ago now hits differently, feeling like an allegory for the most delusional parts of pro-AI advocacy.

If one idea from Ellul has made the most impact on me, it’s his fierce criticism of attitudes of inevitability.

I genuinely don’t know what legal liability for generative AI products should look like, but arguing that the onus was on the kid and his family because of TOS strikes me as incredibly shitty, not to mention falling back on “look, we have a mission to benefit humanity by building AI, have you taken that into account?”

This just makes me want to dig my heels in further.

I really struggle with deciding whether a local event sounds fun. If only I could ask a computer to determine that for me!

Le sigh.

Sometimes, AI news gets so depressing that it loops back around to hilarious.

Another suspected use of generative AI, another decision that I still won’t subject my students to surveillance and policing, another step towards complete grading nihilism.

One of the great “be careful what you wish for” stories is The Monkey’s Paw in which a family receives a magic item that grants wishes but discovers to their horror that all the wishes are granted in terrible, horrible ways. I can’t remember when I last read the story (though I’m confident I have—maybe in high school?), but monkey paw has stuck in my brain as the metaphor for this idea that wishes can go terribly, terribly wrong, so you really ought to think them through.

Really enjoyed listening to this on my way in to campus today.

What. The. Hell.

Adding some nihilism to my Tuesday morning, just for fun.

Honestly trying to figure out whether the reason I see Ellul everywhere is because I’m excited about a new scholar I’ve discovered or because his ideas are so well suited for the current moment. “We can be a leader or we can be left behind” captures the opt-in determinism of Ellul’s technique so dang well.

Of course, how the heck am I going to keep expressing concern about AI (through an Ellulian lens or otherwise) if the university has already decided that we’re all getting on board?

Who could possibly have anticipated this?

Booooooo. That Wikipedia is being mined by AI scrapers and negatively affected by AI search is such a perfect encapsulation of my concerns about generative AI.

“AI is as good as any rubric” (an actual statement I overheard at a campus-wide meeting), if true, is more of an indictment of current assessment practice than praise of AI quality.

Some good (scary) observations in here—not least speculation on what xAI’s version of Sora would look like.

Strong Ellul vibes in this passage:

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it. Society as a whole will have to treat videos with as much skepticism as people already do words.

Unclear, though, whether Ellul would be cool with increased skepticism of the image or angry at the technology causing it.

Something feels off here. An AI CEO who claims they genuinely didn’t anticipate copyright and deepfake concerns is either dumb or playing dumb. I can’t help but suspect the latter, which is arguably worse, since it suggests an effort to shift the discourse before complaints come in.

Just bookmarking everything I read on Sora for future grumpiness.

Platformizing AI video generation in the way OpenAI is doing right now just makes me grumpier than I already am.

Look, I know I’m predisposed to not like any new AI product, but this seems horrifying. Gift link.

Surprised that more isn’t made of the fact that Anthropic was surveilling users’ conversations for its research. Are professors and students thinking about the company’s ability to read everything they type?

I continue to believe that cracking down on intellectual property is not the right way to resist AI, but Koebler does a great job of describing how maddening it is that big companies are going to get away with worse infringement than individual people taking advantage of fair use.

Saw an AI “summarize this discussion” button in Canvas today and it was a real downer. It seems to be only instructor-facing, which is better(?) but still makes me angry.