There’s all this talk about AI and Google Zero effectively ending the internet as it has been known—creating a sole point-of-contact online to be an all-encompassing AI bot. The people who will profit from this are, of course, touting the possible ‘benefits’ from such a thing, and there are plenty of users out there who can’t live without something like ChatGPT telling them how to raise their children. I am against all of this, but as an example I will use something from internet history I personally detested—the Mommy Blogger.

Mommy Bloggers consisted of predominantly affluent, lonely housewives who shared every minute of their existence on personal journals which revolved around motherhood, housekeeping, and marriage. It was the kind of societal trend that rose to enough prominence to merit its own plotline on House by 2010. I didn’t give it much attention because I was basically the opposite of its target audience.

Now this demographic has moved on to social media or podcasts, but I can’t help but feel something was lost when that happened. The format of the blogs they were writing inherently required a sense of creativity and a forthrightness that, while possibly creating controversy, garnered camaraderie among other mothers. While the results can be similar in the world of podcasts, the off-the-cuff nature of just chatting feels far less heartfelt and more gossip-oriented. The inherent nature of what is being communicated gets reduced from meaningfully inquisitive from an individual perspective to a bland riff.

That’s what the ‘new internet’ and AI truly deliver: less creativity, less meaning, less potential for individuals to discover relationships with themselves and others alike through actually thinking about things. Considering yourself and others can be paths to empathy, social bonds, and overall feeling less lonely in the world. Silicon Valley tech has not only frayed those ends but is promising a world with even less possibility for those things (at least online). The internet will be reduced from a once-mecca of individual expression to a recursive loop of slop. Getting rid of search functions where people can actually discover the independent side of the internet only accelerates all of this.

There are still Mom Blogs out there, and a search over at DuckDuckGo will show as much. Yet it’s only a matter of time before people become unaware that this, or any type of personal expression, ever existed online to begin with. (The great irony being all of this is what fueled the ‘knowledge’ of AI bots to begin with.) There are many, far greater, crimes that AI and its proponents commit, but these sort of existential losses of potential creative outlets feel particularly damning of the road humanity is headed down from a purely meaningful perspective.

New Views (Hoover Street)

Sometimes I think poetry will be the only art form that resonates from this era, the only thing that lasts. When you have too much of something, it becomes less valuable—and right now, even if we were to exclude all the AI filling the internet with slop, the mere technology jump we’ve had over the last 30 years has created an excess of available art. When art was regional, restricted by geography and analog methods of reproduction, sharing it was an experience in and of itself that became an integral part of culture.

Now with billions of interconnected screens, experiencing something new, and possibly profound, isn’t so much a desire, opportunity, or possibility—but an expectation. (Even worse is that experience is now integrated directly into the mechanics of capitalism.) The part of us, as humans, that can be affected by the inspiration of another person (and therefore building a sense of connection at a deep, spiritual level) is being bulldozed by a grotesque combination of algorithms and advertisements.

Thanks Metro (Wilshire / Vermont)

Thus, I think poetry probably matters most in this moment. The best poets are able to connect the dots of the human experience emotionally and physically with both the observable and ethereal aspects of reality that I don’t think any machine could ever reproduce. The one thing humanity will always have advantage of over any coded invention is a soul, and though all art forms can represent that depth of feeling alive, the best poems can touch the surface of what it means to be human, as opposed to what it feels like.

(Maybe I’ve just been putting off watching that Mary Oliver documentary for too long, a mistake I’ll rectify this week.)

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

—Mary Oliver, “Praying”

Wilton and Wilshire

For some time now, I’ve used the Adobe Lightroom mobile app to edit photos I take on my phone, such as this one snapped today on my drive home. However, when I went to edit the photo upon getting home, Adobe had an update to promote to me:

On Lightroom Desktop and Mobile, the headline feature is Generative Expand, which Adobe first rolled out in Photoshop in mid-2023. The tool uses generative AI to extend a photo beyond its original borders, filling transparent areas created by perspective adjustments or making room for new aspect ratios without leaving blank edges

The Generative UI in question

There’s plenty of debate about AI ‘art,’ even though most people who are pro-AI have little to no appreciation for creative process or results—however when it comes to photography, using Generative AI is somehow more offensive. Photography, by its fundamental nature, is documentation. Evidence. An account of reality, interpreted through a lens certainly, but otherwise, nothing that exists in a photograph was not in the scene that was shot.

To use Gen AI in any kind of photographic tool is to go against the very nature of photography. While the people who are shoving AI down our throats at every corner have absolutely no appreciation for the nature of the foundations of how we make things, they also disregard why we make them, or how significant these processes and results are to the relationship humanity has to itself and the world.

People promoting AI exist completely within the idea of technologically-driven bubbles that serve purposes of, well, I don’t even know, coordinating meetings better? Client pitches? Coding apps? A projected version of the world that doesn’t exist but serves the idea of selfish indulgence? Certainly nothing honest, nothing dignified, nothing human.

While there are likely ballistic wars coming over resources such as water, wealth, energy, and political domain, there’s this brewing existential, intangible conflict about the fundamental nature of how we relate to one another, how we share reality, how we celebrate it, and what it actually comprises that is becoming an increasingly depressing landscape.

The new Polaroid anti-AI, pro-real-life-interactions ad campaign is pretty great. While advertising in general is a menace of a media system, any dialogue we’re having in public about AI—or digital addictions in general—is important to keep front-and-center, as we seem too eager to stray from the idea of our basic humanity being at stake. (It is interesting how some responses to the campaign discuss the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of data centers and how any corporate dialogue against AI is hypocritical, which is understandable but I feel on the wrong side of the subject.)

The AI debate as a whole kind of annoys me, but I do find value in dialogues centered around our collective humanity and what that means, because I think it should be the central focus of all this. The potential impact of AI (or advanced LLMs, whatever you want to call them) could touch on just about every aspect of modern civilization—but there’s no way I’m gonna trust those who could profit from this saying it’ll all be, ‘for the better.’

On the industrial side, it’s not that automation is usually a bad thing in regards to pushing civilization forward, but when it comes to economics, it can create turmoil if the system society exists within doesn’t look out for its people. If computers run the show and we still live under a capitalist system, how do the economics work out as jobs could disappear from media to healthcare to shipping? Silicon Valley openly jokes about a permanent underclass, but that’s a very real possibility if the current economic model remains as all resources are funneled into technological development as opposed to human services.

Creatively speaking the whole thing is a fucking joke. The outright theft of the collective cultural history of humanity in order to create heartless visuals and sounds is criminal—both in the law of the land and the law of nature. Anthropic destroying rare books because it’s the easiest way to scan them to train AI models is so on-the-nose evil it wouldn’t make the script of a blockbuster movie. The things that make us human—the tangled relationships between ideas, labor, production, and objects—are being completely disregarded for this idea of creating a future that embraces a new era of subjugation and control instead of growing into a state of egalitarianism.

I think that’s the most enraging part of all of this. Regardless of what part of the AI debate is being scrutinized, the human benefits are largely abstracted and obfuscated—there are quips about the end of money or a complete reformation on how we work, but no dialogue about how those processes might actually work to benefit people. No one can convince me that those who are fully invested in AI as the future aren’t some of the most evil people to have ever lived, looking out only for their own stake in a hyper-violent, automated future and willing to dispose of not only everything we’ve collectively created since the dawn of time but also a majority of the lives on earth for the sake of a few dollars.

After living in a number of small to mid-size cities throughout my 20s and 30s, I’ve landed in Los Angeles for the past five years and feel like it’s the right kind of fit—even though, somewhat ironically, I’d call it the most American city in the United States. It’s a sprawling collection of towns and suburbs connected by freeways and back roads more than it really is a city, with a few urban centers with skyscrapers orbiting the official ‘downtown.’ There’s any number of reasons this is an interesting set-up, which is a post for another time.

Right now I’m finding the most relevant aspect of this to be moving. I’ve spent my time in LA so far in a couple different apartments in East Hollywood—a neighborhood I liked a lot for its convenience to public transit, generally central location, decent walkability and a solid variety of places to eat. Now I live in Westlake, which feels like I may as well have moved across the country.

Fountain Ave, East Hollywood

It’s only four miles southeast of where I used to live, but the differences are stark. This is one of the reasons I really enjoy LA as a city—when I lived in Portland, it didn’t really matter what part I lived in. It was generally similar across the board and small enough where getting across town was no chore. San Francisco had more destination neighborhoods (where people might gravitate to the Mission on the weekend, no matter what part of the city you were from) and it didn’t seem to matter where anyone lived, as the city was only seven miles square. When I lived in those places, I felt like in order to change up my life I had to get out completely, whereas here I just have to find a new place in a new neighborhood and it feels about the same.

This offers such an interesting take on reinvention. A city that is known for being constantly in flux also offers the chance to change your life without ever leaving. While there’s plenty to have a grievance about in LA, the opportunity to have that kind of existential relationship with a place is pretty unique in America. And while my new place is pretty incredible and I hope to not leave anytime soon, it’s good to know if I ever need to, I won’t have to go far.