Today is my first day renting a desk in a co-working space. I’m sitting among other entreprenourial hopefuls and figured that my first point of action should be to catch up on my browser tabs and write a blog post. Y’know, really start with a clean slate like.
The company is named Matepo Research AB and as of this writing I’m offering 1) usability studies, large and small, and 2) foresight workshops, especially targeting the Design Fiction Kit that I localized to Sweden under the Hintlab name. I have a few months runway before I need to get a regular paying job — I’m throwing so much stuff at the walls that I’m afraid I’d not getting the deposit back, had there been one.
As so much these days there’s a lot written about AI – especially how it affects *waves hand all around.* I thought Frank Chimeros essay was a worthwhile attempt:
What surprised me wasn’t the AI hype, though, but the lack of solidarity that came with it. Faced with the story of AI labor displacement, our first instinct as technology workers wasn’t to protect one another, but to search for ways to use the tools to replace our collaborators.
Frank Chimero: Beyond the Machine
I’m not particularly convinced of his analogy of GenAI use and different approaches to music, but it’s an honest attempt at finding some sort of peace with how the AI worls looks today — oligarchs and all. One sentence in the essey resonated with me:
When the system is designed to respect artists, scale becomes a tool rather than a threat.
Frank Chimero: Beyond the Machine
This was a good articulation of a dissonance I’ve had for a while: I really don’t mind people using AI as such for whatever purpose, but it’s too easy to do create too much mediocre and intellectually lazy crap, which has the added consequence that it’s drowning out people whose work — ironically — all GenAI has been taught on.
Even if the current AI scene wasn’t a 100% value extracting scam by a few oligarchical players who ought to be strung up and flogged, the signal-to-noise ratio is defeaning. This problem will sooner or later come out in the wash where new services, a revival of “auteurship” or whatever else will happen when people get bored of AI generated Halloween scenes from Friends, but it still doesn’t have to be a problem in itself: Noise can make artful points, but when everyone’s shouting it’s just a waste of breath.