TRASHFUTURE - Let 10,000 Heads Bloom feat. Brian Merchant

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) returns to discuss Elon Musk’s frantic UK civil war wishposting, and the role of his particular personality in encouraging right wing insurrection around the globe. Then, we move on to discuss Brian’s piece for Wired about what AI is already doing to the games industry—deskilling and displacing artists, and driving down quality. We end by asking: why on earth are we doomed to automate the arts? Check out Brian’s article for WIRED about AI in the games industry: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-is-already-taking-jobs-in-the-video-game-industry/ And check out Brian’s newsletter here: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Uh, Hussain, do you just want to like start talking about what your plans were to beat the heat? Oh, beat the heat. We're beating the heat. So we're going to do a recording. Uh, we got, we just gonna be a good episode. I'm going to go home. I'm going to fill up my bin with my, my wheelie bin with lukewarm water. I'm going to take out a half a can of monster. That is the right, the right kind of,

it's not quite, it's not too fizzy. It's not too flat. I think it's like the perfect, perfect consistency. And I'm going to, I'm going to chill out and watch the sun, you know, watch the sun go down while drinking my Monster Energy Zero Sugar Original. Things are gonna be great. A vivid sort of intrusive thought of a champagne bucket filled with ice and open cans of Monster. Just slowly dissipating carbon dioxide. And Hussain's just sitting in his bin with water up to his nipples. Hey, you know what? He's gonna enjoy that if fucking two-tier Kyr doesn't come in and make it illegal.

Yeah, that's true. Because, yeah, because Kyr Stammer is, you know, two-tier Kyr is, he's going around and he's like preventing people from having fun in the sun. They finally found something that rhymed with Kyr, you know? It only took them years, but they finally did. I was really hoping it'd be like, no fear Keir, like if Keir took up like skateboarding or something. My, my favorite is, uh, Sir Queer Harmer. That was, that was a thing that's been kicking

around in trans circles for a while. And it's just, it's so contrived. It's almost funny again. This is also kind of why, like, because my thing is like, like, like, look, if Trump gets elected in November, things are going to get like, demonstrably worse for the world. It's not to sort of say that like the Democrats will be better, but we know for sure that like things will just get massively, massively worse. However, and I, this is a very, very nuanced caveat. I was looking forward to the name that Trump would give Keir Starmer. And I did think it would be queer starmen.

It's entirely possible. And I want that to still happen. No, I'm not. No, you're telling me more about you. You're telling anyone about me with that hurtful name. Uh, hi everybody. It's TF. Uh, we're, we're beating the heat English style. We're all in the high school. Oh, beating the heat. We're all sitting in the bins full of water. We're enjoying our lives here. But we are joined by returning two-time champion. It's Brian Merchant going for the two-fer. Brian, how are you doing today?

Oh, I'm just fine. Thanks guys. We are going to talk a little bit about an article you've written about... We like to talk about like, oh, here's what AI is going to do as it comes into different industries, right? You've now written an article saying, okay, well, games is basically the one that it's penetrated most. Here's what it has already done. However, before we get to that, I wanted to explore another angle of some, a little bit of critical tech talk, a little bit of UK

politics, which is that Elon Musk has declared war on the United Kingdom. That's right, it's another whoever wins, we lose situation. ALICE Yeah, I saw a former senior executive of Twitter in the pages of The Guardian this morning saying that Elon should be arrested. And listen, it's like I said last time, I love it when the authoritarian state defends itself against the right, I want them to send, I want Keir Starmer to send the SAS to Texas to extraordinarily rendition Elon Musk, I think it would be funny. Because Elon is so pickled by belief.

He's now posting like, fucking, the meme of the girl on the couch surrounded by the black guys, you know the meme. Yeah, it's the same thing he always does, right? Which is that he gets into a little red-pilled Nazi posting spree, like, embarrasses himself, and then tries to post his way back out of it again after he like loses the sort of situation he was concerned with, right? Like civil war did not happen despite his best efforts. And so now more posts, exactly the same thing he does with his kids, right?

Like functionally he is treating kids like the UK, like one of his kids, right? And it's like, it's not doing what he wants. And so he's just going to complain about it as loudly as possible. There's Nazi friends. See, I think what would happen is if the essay has tamed to Texas, to star base Texas, to extraordinarily rendition and arrest Elad Musk, call of duty black ops in Texas. Yeah. It was just like, he's like, Oh, you're not going to arrest me. You'll be too busy giving your pronouns. And then it was just like, grab him, take him into a helicopter. Well, the fuck kind of name is Elon anyway. Now, Brian, you've watched this happening from, from the States and you've watched like

Elon basically like not just Elon, but Elon and Twitter, obviously, because those two are as one basically weighed into commenting on the race riots from the perspective of, oh, this is a combination free speech issue and parroting every standard British right-wing talking point. How's it looked to you from the other side? Yeah. I mean, he's just, he's given himself a chance to lose it even more than he usually does because he obviously knows nothing of the history or the context or the actual politics or what's going on. He knows

basically what Ian Miles Chong is tweeting at him in the replies and that's basically his entire political platform. He's moving even further away. And that's what we get here. But he's also what's unique now. It's been bad for a long time, but when he came out, I think that he thought that after somebody took a shot at Trump and he was almost assassinated, that everybody would come out for Trump and that it would be this big patriotic moment, and he could safely just kind of reveal himself

as just a right-wing troll through and through. And that didn't really happen. So, there's this particularly embarrassing window where he was like, I'm donating all my money to Trump. Trump is, you know, he's the future of them. And then like two weeks later, he's like, oh yeah, did I say I was going to give $45 million a week to Trump? No, no, no, no, no. Because everybody, he's just such a creature of intuition and his intuition intuition is just is bad and it's been wild to see him just like a dig dig deeper because he towed the line for pretty long and now we realize that it must have taken more effort than than we knew at the time for

him to restrain his very worst impulses and now that there's not even any semblance of that it's is, he's just tweeting with Andrew Tate and just the, it's Twitter's just a far right hell hole. It's always been a hell hole, but now it's just, you know, a reflection of, of the id of Elon Musk. Andrew Tate's going to like tell, to show Elon Musk around Britain and they're going to like take him to Hamel Hempstead for like the worst night, the worst like house party of his life.

They're both gonna punch that guy. All I can say is that now every like hagiographic mention of Elon Musk in anything, but particularly like Star Trek, it's getting funnier all the time. Can I tell you what's getting funnier all the time? Elon Musk's daughter, who is outposting him on threads, bizarrely. She's like the one sort of like USP of that app. By the way, also, what you said earlier, Brian, about Elon Musk not donating money to Trump's campaign, I'm afraid you're actually wrong. He didn't say he's not going to do it. It's

just delayed until October. And then when October rolls around, it'll be delayed until February. We call this an October lack of surprise. This is how he rolls. This is how he always, always does this. He, he's how we ended up with Twitter. He, except they roped him into actually buying it because, because he said he was going to, and then he had a fiduciary duty to do it, but if he had his way, he would not even own Twitter right now. Imagine that future. ALICE Twitter forcing him to buy Twitter has to be one of the, like, consequentially worst

but funniest things to have happened. LIAM Could not agree more, that's so true. ALICE Trying to style it out, entering the building with the fucking sink. LIAM So embarrassing. That's so true. Trying to style it out, entering the building with the fucking sink. So embarrassing. And just like, he's gonna be in the fucking like, newly relocated Texas epic ex offices like the fucking Führer bunker in a few months.

It's gonna be like, the SAS are gonna be outside and he's gonna try and end it with the like, foam replica Cyberpunk 2077 gun, you know? What's so funny though, right? Is that he's saying, oh, the UK, it's a lost society, it's been lost for years, no one can govern it, and this and every previous administration was terrible. So true. And it's like, wait a minute, weren't you the guest... You're proving him wrong by presenting him with a champagne bucket of open monster.

Wait, hold on. Weren't you the guest of honor of Rishi Sunak's AI conference like six months ago? Yeah. Like, it is so, it is darkly retrospectively funny that six months ago, this is the person who is again, like just stopping just short of continuing to like incite racial hatred in the UK was like applauded by the party whose job it job it is to make that 1% more circumspect, and 1% more amenable to liberals, and he just... that one little veneer of respectability that

the Conservative Party tries to put over British fascism, he's just ripped down. ALICE Yeah, I hope Keir goes full authoritarian about it, you know? Set me free. Ban Twitter. You know? Like, who's... I forget, I think Egypt maybe? Just ban Twitter for like... no, Venezuela, fuck, yeah, it was, just go full Maduro, just ban Twitter for like a week and a half, you know? Just to see what happens. I get a vacation from posting, Elon Musk gets to go like even more insane. I'm not seeing a downside here. So one of the main sort of drivers of this, of course, is we haven't really talked about the aftermath of the riots, which, you know, appeared to at the time of recording, heavy caveat here, appear to have like largely fizzled out, at least in much of England. They were

sort of, they were proceeding in like Northern Ireland as well. Kind of what kind of watch this space, I think you can attribute a lot of that to rapid community anti-fascist organizing, right? I mean, obviously the state's gonna attribute it to the police, yeah, partially, but not as much as they think. You see that Stella Creasy's being GoFundMe to massage? Why are they so creepy? This is like the fucking, when Marcus Melitsis tried to like, uh, like, brought Nancy Pelosi a

room full of roses, like, why are they like this? Yeah. No, it's yeah, it's like Stella Creasy had nothing to do with this, at all, but there was a GoFundMe created to buy her a massage. Cool. It didn't get as big as, as Marcos Melitsis, uh, sort of trying to drown Nancy Pelosi in roses, but the, um... Just trying to do the shot from American Beauty, to like a 90 year old woman.

So, one of the after-maths of this, in addition to, as you say, November, it being countered by huge amounts of local anti-fascist organizing throughout the country, of people just, like in Brighton, a few people gathered and ended up having to get protected by the police, because there were like, eight of them. I was in Brighton, and I ended up not going to this, my apologies, because I was reliably informed that the entire city kind of had it covered, and then four guys showed up and got surrounded by the cops in order to protect them from the rest of Brighton. Now of course, this mass politics event, where these riots are stopped, their momentum of them is taken out so far, largely by local community organizing, has to be processed

by the British media and political class. Bear in mind, the 2011 riots, okay, okay, the scale was bigger, but like, the criminal penalties, the sentences that were handed out, like, dwarf anything that we're seeing here. But we are getting some repression, right? And I think you're entitled to have mixed feelings about it, I think you're allowed to be like, conflicted about Keir Starmer locking up, like, Britain's most racist 12 year old, or whatever.

Like, oh, on the one hand, but on the other hand, and on the third hand, you know? But like, I think it's chiefly in the PR sense, this is a real case of like, the CPS and the police being kind to themselves, right? And being like, we successfully deterred more of these by locking up the woman who was woman who was, like, drunk and pushed a flaming wheelie bin at us, you know? Or the officers did, at one point, rush to arrest a man who was yelling, I'm English. These days. Yeah, I mean, we've had some moments in police comedy, right?

Much like AI, the police can never be good, but they can be funny. And so we did have the guy who was like fighting the police and yelling, I'm fucking 70. And then one of them said, why are you at a fucking riot then? You mentioned November, this is something I think it's also worth talking about from the perspective of like social media companies, Twitter, Elon, and so on, which is that one of the main laws being used to put the rioters in jail or just riot friendly people in jail posts, you know, um, is the offensive communications act, which is, you know, and it fully is like, it was used to like arrest the guy. You're

like mocked captain Tom. Again, these days, you know, and I think one of the worries, right. One of the, one of the parts of Elon's crusade, you know, and why he sort of posted a picture of Peter Griffin in the electric chair. I hate that this man is politically relevant and that like, I have to say the phrase in like the actual politics discussion segment. So we posted a picture of Peter Griffin. I'm really, I'm like, every time you mentioned him, I'm like upgrading from the SAS to like triple tap drone strike, you know?

He says, you know, oh, in 2030 for making a Facebook comment the UK government doesn't like with Peter Griffin on the electric chair, following up with, of course, if Facebook even exists in 2030. I hate this stupid cunt so much. And he did, he did it, this is what he did, he just he bought his way into relevance He this was always been since his first companies and and since he became a like a Twitter addict He just his entire prerogative was just sort of what was ensuring that everybody had to listen to him His memes were always bad his posts were always bad But he could not accept that fundamentally and you could argue that like that has been his primary crusade is just buying up as much as much as much at least a facsimile of credibility

as he possibly could to the point where you have to talk about Elon Musk posting family guy memes as part of the as part of the context of the of the race riots happening in Britain. What a future, what a future we have here. Because of course the mop up here, right, is that Elon Musk is now sort of feeding into this, I'd say, you know, furor, that the days after the race riots, a number of your sort of standard right wing British political commentators, some of them tried to get off the bus, some of them might have like examined for one moment their complicity and what happened. The Daily Mail and the Telegraph tried to like say, oh, hey, two cheers to community

organizing against fascism. Just forget what we said about the black shirts earlier. Everyone sort of had to do that for about a minute. And now they're all able to turn around and say, okay, we have our new thing that we're angry about, that we're organizing around, which is that we are scared that we're going to go to jail for wrong thing. And it's like, well, wait, hang on. Number one, yeah, as you said earlier, November, the Offensive Communications Act is a mess. It puts a lot of people in jail for posts. And it's most likely, this is I think one, one of the more anti-carceral sort of opinions about it, is that it's most

likely what's going to do is it's going to take a bunch of Facebook moms and turn them into a fascist prison gang, essentially. You know, by just putting them all in prison, an incredibly sort of violent and traumatizing experience that, guess what, makes you more violent and traumatized. But again, not the hardened ones, the posters. The Facebook moths. ALICE Yeah, I mean, you can deter stuff like this, and interdict stuff like this by really bringing the hammer down, but you have to actually do that, and it means you have to take it seriously, and this is a government that really

wants desperately to sweep this back under the rug. Right? government that really wants desperately to sweep this back under the rug. Even to do the repressive thing, I think it is possible, in the same way that you can't now be in Al-Mahajaroun, but you have to get the security services and the police and everyone to take the thing seriously in order to do that, and that's just not something they're capable of doing with right-wing extremism like that, y'know? I think it's a legitimate, y'know, concern for... I mean, one thing you can do is you can kind of look at, y'know, like, what if this, what

if a law like this existed in the United States, and you have, y'know, I don't know what sort of the infrastructure on the right is like in the UK, but we have, you know, entire people, organizations and accounts like Libs of TikTok that single out, you know, people who post, you know, things that they don't like and that organize go to like PTA meetings, parent teacher association meetings and school boards and they have all these different things. I could, you know, with like sort of the thirst and the fascist tinged sort of right wing political movements happening on the local level here, all those like moms that you're talking about, I could see like a lot like this getting weaponized pretty quickly. And I mean, it's look at what, you know, Elon

is is posting on one side of it right now. But the minute that, you know, there's an opportunity to wield it against his enemies, you can guess what he's going to be in favor of all of a sudden. Robert Leonard With all of this soul searching, sort of the half hour of soul searching done, having pivoted now to, okay, the government is now making it illegal to have right wing beliefs. And it's like, well, wait, which right wing beliefs? And you know the ones. A number of people are starting to show a lot of quite high power levels, such as Will Tanner, the Tories need to appeal to younger voters guy, the Theresa May burning in justice- That seems like a perfectly ordinary point of view that couldn't conceal anything horrid.

Well, the guys who were being lauded, again by the new statesmen of the Guardian or whatever it is, the people who are bringing the Tory party into the modern era, now that they're out in the wilderness, they have to look at... Don't call them the Great White Hope. They're now sort of wish casting about like, fucking Rhodesia and like, Orange Stat in South Africa, being like, look, it's racist! It's just people making a nice community where this kind of thing wouldn't happen. But it's like we said last time, a lot of people got very excited, including Elon, and

thought that things were gonna go much further with this than they seemed to have done, and are just like, now is the moment to really take off the mask, y'know? And with all of that being said, if we're looking at who's getting arrested, who's getting punished, who's still on fucking television, right? And who is named as the powerful enemy. They seem to have like swept up the kind of like, usual underclass, you know? Like, admittedly, like, who seem to have been doing this stuff, like there's body cam, like footage of them, like, you know, throwing the fucking wheelie bin at the cops after like, eight ciders or whatever.

But all these people with solicitors get up in court and say like, uh, you know, they're not racist, they just wandered in off the street after like, five morning ciders or whatever, because alcoholism is one of the major unaddressed things here, and got arrested for the like, 23rd time. And it's like, well, yeah, this is like, it's reflexive action, right? And it's, it's something that was like very easily done. And yeah, I guess it's a deterrent in that sense, but like, you're not really going up against any of the kind of like organizational capacity here, which means it can all happen again. It was also just like a refusal to acknowledge that organizational capacity exists, right?

Because like, the feedback, the sort of like aftermath and like, well, when, when the sort of commentators sort of realize that like, oh, we kind of, we, we can't be seen to sort of endorse them or they made the calculation to not to then like the next step was to just be like, oh, these people aren't, you know, we don't, you know, they may have like, I think the furthest they went was like, you know, they may have like legitimate views, but we don't, we don't agree that they should express them this way. To which like a lot of the response was just like, I think the furthest they went was like, you know, they may have like legitimate views, but we don't, we don't agree that they should express them this way. To which like a lot of the response was just like, oh, these people have thrown us under the bus, which is why it's sort of amusing in a very kind of bizarre way to sort of see like right wing

ghouls who have sort of spread or who have expressed their sentiment, but they wanted exactly this to happen to be told to go fuck themselves by the people who either support it happening or who participated in making what they wanted happen. Yeah. And I think the limited hangout here is going to be like Tommy Robinson and maybe Elon Musk, you know? Maybe they will be able to do some kind of sanction against Elon, I don't know what, it'll be funny if they try.

Do you see the other opinion that Musk has, which I believe is going to be shared widely among British columnists, because I believe is going to be shared widely among British columnists, because I think he's kind of leading a lot of them at this point on their response to the response to the riots, which is to post like, hey, in all of everybody's favorite children's books and movies that we read and watch all the time, like The Hunger Games, you're on the side of the rebellion, but now all these progressives are on the side of the empire. Yeah, in Busytown, you cheer for the worm driving the bus, but in real life, you cheer for the imprisonment of the

race riders. Make it make sense. Damn. He's got my ass there. But what we've seen, I think, is a crackdown on sort of the people at the front who are the least important in terms of like making this happen again, in terms of the fascist tendency in Britain. And instead, what Starmer is choosing as the most important enemies, or columnists as well, are choosing as the most important enemies, Starmer, one of them, is tech CEOs and Russia, rather than the columnists who've been calling for this for years. It was, it was all Putin. If only we'd known this sooner. It's like deja vu from the way that liberal politics has operated in the US for the last

six years, right? Blame Trump on Putin, blame it on... Yeah, who's him? It was always him! Even when it wasn't, I knew it was him. And also it's like, rather than traditional media, rather than columnists, rather than the people who are driving all of the people insane. ALICE Nadeem Zahawi is trying to put together a bid to buy the Telegraph and, like, lure

Boris Johnson back. Like, if you wanna know how... And part of the deal that Labour made to get in power was, like, no more press inquiries. Don't need them. Like, we don't need another Leveson inquiry, because it's all solved now, don't worry about it. And in return for that they got a cautious endorsement from the Sun, and, like, a week of race riots.

One of the worst business deals. Look, we are desperate for a Prime Minister who's good at deals, and there's only one world leader who's good at deals. You're saying getting Trump in as Prime Minister after he loses the election? and there's only one world leader who's good at seals. Just can't get it. Getting Trump in as Prime Minister after he loses the election. I hate the little apartment. Very, very shitty door. The light switches. I've never seen one like this before.

Look how they want to make me live. I hate this country. It's still so funny to me that he tried, honestly, for about a year to be president from home because of how much he hated the White House. Yeah, the Winter White House, we all remember the Winter White House. But I think this is something you see on both sides of the Atlantic as well, which is it's so easy, right, when you are unwilling or unable to alienate the normal traditional media, it is so easy to make the main focus of your blame social media. And I think, look, it's also worth saying, by the way, right? Like, no, like fucking Elon Musk absolutely benefits from the conditions that lead

to the race riots, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, he absolutely does. I mean, riots, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, he absolutely does. I mean, Twitter has become basically a more populous 4chan right now. It's so schizophrenic looking at Twitter at any given time. There's like people doing, you know, weird AI boosterism. There's just like, like the sort of content that would show up in a mass email in 2004 forwarded by your uncle going on.

And then there's just like, you know, rabid right wing frothing sort of stuff of the sort that's been spearheaded by Musk. And it's funny that this is that they finally got a right wing platform this way. You know, the conservatives complained endlessly that, you know, Facebook was censoring them. Twitter was censoring them. And now Musk has just sort by sort of deposing the former Twitter and just kind of installing himself now sort of by fiat. There is this major right wing forum, or at least it's sort of like governed.

And the policy is set by a right wing forum. And then all of any time that there's activity like this. And I honestly, it's it's like a governed and the policy is set by a right-wing forum and then all of any time that there's activity like This and I honestly it's it's such a shit show the fact that somebody who knows nothing about you know recent British history or the context of any of these things that are happening can just sort of get some knee-jerk memes And sort of and weigh in and then really just push it You can see the extent to which his views are being shaped by his sort of most influential followers. I mean, he's constantly just going like, is this true?

Like is this is this true? Like is half of is half of English pedophiles? Is this true? Community notes? Is this true? Like he's concerning concerning, right? And then he's just, he's casting around. He has no really set political beliefs besides grievance, just like most reactionaries.

And so he's cultivated this entire sort of ecosystem that responds to that, is driven by him, and so responds to him. And as we said earlier at the top, then people have to kind of at least acknowledge him, if not take him seriously. And then like he said, columnists and politicians have to respond to him. He owns this entire platform that is still very much the place for better. And I don't know how to move these goalposts. I don't know how to change this, but nobody's like posting their acknowledgement

that they're dropping out of the presidential race on threads or on blue sky, right? It's still Twitter. So like there's a we have to reckon with the fact that like this is still this is the de facto you know, I kill me but Pub Town Square or whatever that he calls this is like the place where the information is disseminated. So like what do we do with that? Every time there's one of these things, it just bolsters Elon's case. And anytime there's an event like this, that he can frame in this way, and that millions of people are happy to see frame this way, it sort of just kind of reinforces what Twitter has already become. And beyond that, right? It's also good for the economics of the thing, right? It's if you need to like try to make the case to advertisers and by the way, basically declaring sort of declaring a kind of like at least

trade war on the UK. Well, at the same time declaring war on all your advertisers, I don't think it's the civil war that Elon needs to worry about. Yeah. Cause I, I push back that I don't, I don't know if it's good for economic. I don't maybe he seems like he's almost given up on it being like economically viable. I just got it. Maybe going to find another way to do it. They're really pushing subscriptions. So I mean, maybe what ultimately happens is people are so disgusted that they eventually leave. He doesn't seem to be promoting any of the stuff that Twitter is doing, right? Like Twitter's introduced a couple of new things.

Elon's not like, check out this free mobile game. Well, like not, not to sort of be like, cause like there's one function that I see on X where it's like, you can search through like your, uh, your, your, uh, tab favorites, right? Like your bookmarks and stuff. And that can be like a useful thing. Like not again, not to give him credit, but it's like, that can be a useful thing, but he didn't like, he's not sort of boosting that or sort of saying that, Hey, Twitter is like a, or like X is a great place for you to do like, you know, these things. And like, if you want to use it as like a general app or the way in which these apps used to sort of be promoted, which is it doesn't matter, like what you're interested in

or who your friends are and all that type of stuff. Like, you know, this app will be great for everything. He's not doing that. He's just sort of going all in on kind of really reaffirming that, no, this app exists if you want to be racist and people hate you. It's just, I've made this joke before, it's not even my joke, but I remember what happened to the last guy who tried to get me to pay to post in his forum, and the trajectory so far is marrying up at an uncanny level. You go back to talking of advertisers, right? How other than trying to sue them?

Because if you remember, Elon was forced to buy Twitter by being sued. I think he wants to sue his way out of the problem by now saying he's going to sue his advertisers. But if you take it all back around full circle, right? He's posting a fake Britain First article about detainment camps in the Falklands for patriotic Brits, or saying civil war is inevitable in the UK. I mean, you like the Falklands so much, you fucking go there. It's a funny idea. I'm sorry I wrote that article, alright?

If incompatible cultures are brought together, conflict is inevitable. Just saying again and again and again, the race rioters had a point. The funniest thing, by the way, just in real, is that like Elon's on there going there like race war is good and you know, retweeting all the worst memes in the world. And then like the CEO of Twitter's on there going like... Linda Yakowacko. The discussion is great. Like three exclamation points after two spaces, just like Twitter, the number one place for your news.

It's all happening here. It's all happening on X. His, his, his are like sort of a conspiratorial thinking, but I wonder whether he was sort of egging on a race riot or like egging on like a civil war type of thing. Because if it did like in a hypothetical world where it did happen, he could be like, Oh look, Twitter was the app that predicted that. Because you know, like remember like the, what you call it? Fucking like the Arab, the Arab Spring and how like Twitter really used that as a sort of like way of promoting itself is like, oh, here's like a useful app.

And this is the reason why it's so much better than like the mainstream news. And I wonder whether he was trying to like he was really trying to hope that something like that happened so that people would sort of like see validity in X. Maybe. But honestly, I don't know, that might even be giving him too much credit. Yeah, I think more than anything, he's just like in a K-hole, just like posting like whatever is enraging him at the moment and just sort of like letting it rip and and then thinking about all these other things as an afterthought, because it is always funny when he comes down

to Earth for a second. Like the other day, I put day, I shared this on Twitter. He like, even it was like after like six race riot tweets and then he's like, somebody told him that X was like number one or number two on the news app. And then he like shared this little certificate he made that it's like, X is number one on the app store. Like it looked like it was made by,

it was like a graphic design is my passion kind of thing. Yeah. And, you know, bringing this back, right, to the advertisers is that he is, the way that he wants to bring advertisers back in the wake of having like, you know, essentially without going so far as to say it cheered on race riots in the UK from the platform, he's asking like, Hey, HSBC, why don't you put your new mortgage product next to this tweet of me saying, send them back or whatever. Yeah, it definitely would be good. He's suing a sort of advertising trade body, saying, Oh yeah, it's an anti-trust issue if you try to use tools to keep your ads from appearing

next to someone like live streaming a mass murder. He's already gotten one organization doing that, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM. One of these trade bodies. On the one hand, it's deranged. It's the most deranged case you could possibly make. Suing them for not advertising, for not paying them money to advertise on his platform. It's just like such a non-starter that like the legal case, like even our more repulsive Supreme Court is not going to let that fly. But on the second hand, again, it kind of works. One of those trade bodies disbanded after he sued them because they didn't they would rather not take the heat put on them by Elon Musk than

then deal with it, then deal with the legal fees, then deal with the fallout. This is basically how libel works in the UK. It doesn't matter if you did or didn't libel someone. If someone brings a charge against you, they can force you to defend it and cost you an enormous amount of money. And so he's doing this, as you say, his wealth acts in some ways like a kind of collapsed star that and he used to have, if you remember like 2017, 18, he used to have what a reality distortion field where he could just sort of get away with whatever, you know, what he got away with. We sort of learned a lot more about in that time.

But you know, what now what we're basically seeing is, oh yeah, that was just money. That was just a huge amount of money. That was just enough money to implement and fight any frivolous lawsuit he wanted to bring. Who could imagine bringing a frivolous antitrust lawsuit? That seems very expensive. And to take it again, all the way back round, it's like we talk about the role of traditional media and amplifying race riots in the UK. And they're certainly the primary culprits. But this is also someone who was like the place where people are organizing, the place where people are sharing a lot of those opinions that are formed by traditional media, where the stochastic call to engage

in race rioting is answered. A lot of that is social media. And a lot of those communication channels are in the hands of someone who is just, as you say, Brian, just wants to be relevant in this way. It is willing to subject anyone to whatever to do that. And you can see what it took to stop this very loose and unofficial alliance of columnist tech CEOs, street fighting fascists, and think tankers, and whoever else is in the modern tapestry of the global nationalist, revanchist movement in the North Atlantic, it took a huge amount of people

to come out and clean up his fucking mess. It does make you angry when you think about it. It's gonna happen again and again. And in a place that he knows even less about, that he has even less of a frame of reference, whatever that sort of catches his eye now, and can sort of, it'd be like a viable arena for him to wade into that's either entertaining enough, or just like pushes those buttons

where he gets the serotonin hits from posting the memes, like, it's just going to, it will happen again. And, you know, I don't have any answers or any solutions. president maduro my social network twitter.com long yearns for freedom from this from this burr extremist it yearns for the guiding hand of jack dorsey a serious risk of this is actually like in places where elon is still sort of considered to be kind of godlike right because i I feel like obviously like in the Anglosphere, the sort of, as he sort of been stupid and people are kind of aware of his stupidity, that may be of Wayne, but like places like India, I think are sort of things to watch because the moment he sort of comments on

that bearing in mind what is happening in India, the fact that like the anti-Muslim sentiment is really, really turbocharged there in a way that like makes this country and the States kind of like very meek in comparison, but also just like the real veneration that they have for like tech guys, but Elon in particular, that to me sort of seems like a Tinder box where like where where an Elon intervention could really kind of have some very nasty material effects. It's a really good point. All he needs to do is just like remember which side he's more bigoted against.

And yeah, it's, it's, it's true though. It's like the, as you say, you say the places he has, at least he has torched his credibility among among some people, but he's unfortunately he has a way to go before he torches it among everyone else. Um, any case, I'd like to, I'd like to move on though to your, your, your article, Brian on how a gaming and AI in the gaming industry. else. Um, any case, I'd like to, I'd like to move on though to your, your, your article, Brian, on how a gaming and AI in the gaming industry. And before we start, I want to read you probably the most hyper-exploited sentence that has ever been written. Ahem. Electronic Arts admits to using AI

in its sports college football 25 release. That there's so many nested layers there, you know? This is a press release. EA, this was the writing. EA utilized photo imagery for 11,000 players, along with machine learning, to generate a head, which was then manually touched up and enhanced. They said, we were able to take in a whole plethora of photo imagery across these players and build out workflows where AI and machine learning would generate head, which is very confusing. They would generate head, generate head. And our very talented artists would then be able to come in and touch up and enhance, enhance head versus having to go through the full head development program.

Uh huh. Sure. Uh-huh, sure. Yeah, what do you think? I love to enhance head. Yeah, Brian, what do you think that the very talented artists, based on your reporting on the games industry recently, how do you think those very talented artists were doing? How do you think they were employed? What do you think your job was like? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the same way that any artist is going to interface with AI in an initiative like this. It's it just means that they're going to it's more it's it's more assembly line, less less human work less touch. I mean, it's just going to be more volume, worse conditions, all of the things that make the job interesting sort of starting to get stripped away and and more of an emphasis on just oning more of this shit. So like this is obviously alluring only to a middle management or an executive somewhere that has calculated that they can generate head with 30% more efficiency if they use

AI rather than actually having human artists sort of do it. So yeah, I mean, it's just the exact fear that everybody has about this stuff beginning to materialize, and it's happening in sort of like the murkier corners where it's a little bit harder to say like, oh, this great artist we all know is being automated away. It's these jobs more on the corners that are out of the public eye directly, and yeah, they're just gonna be forced to work more, harder, longer, and do just worse shit to get by. And I mean, being a sort of, an artist and a gaming, and a game developer was not like

a picnic before this. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's already a hard job, and one with few protections. And I mean, that's the thing, right? This is where we see AI like flourish or be used the most in industries that have already, you know, seen a battering ram taken to them by executives looking to sort of gut protections or they didn't exist in the first place, right? Gaming, famously, non-union, at least in the United States. Lots of sort of cycles where you have a job for nine months

and then you don't work for four months and you rely on these word of mouth sort of job openings and relationships with people and it's really, you know, already precarious, as you said. So it's, it was been very hard for unions to get a foothold. I mean, now, almost ironically, we can talk about this more later. The AI threat is a catalyst for organizing in a lot of corners. So maybe that'll change. But yeah, do you think about like Sports Illustrated using

AI slop in its articles? That was only possible because a 20-year process where it was degraded, cost cut in the normal way, sort of moving from reporting to blogging, online contractors versus staff jobs. And then the end of that process, the AI can come in and flourish. So you have studios that have fewer guardrails,

bad work conditions, And you know, that's where you see AI taking root right now first. So Andrew Wilson, the CEO of Electronic Arts said, in the absence of AI, we simply would not have been able to deliver college football at the level we did, even though we've given the team many, many years in development. Basically saying, yeah, we're fucked that. This exploitation simulator doesn't work without way more exploitation. There's a setting that says, uh, pay college athletes and we've permanently turned it off. You were not able to play it, pay them even in the game. Um, let's talk about your, about

your article, right? The games industry itself, $200 billion, like dollar value, more revenue, more profitable than ever. It's also going through a period of like tens of thousands of layoffs because, and partly because in this, I think, echoes things we talked about recently when we've talked about what is driving corporate decisions around what they're doing with their staff, all Wall Street. Wall Street heard of AI. It was like, oh yeah, use that to lay people off, please, so we can get paid fatter dividends. And it is always been hyper-exploded because as you've mentioned earlier, there's very low union penetration. There's always a lot of subcontractors.

And also, it's like anything, it's a vocation. And any vocation, like people who run those companies long ago learned that people will accept bad conditions to do something that they love. It's why teachers are having to live in cars in Britain now. Yeah. It's used as leveraging its employees. Yeah, exactly. like, you know, teachers are having to like, you know, live in cars in the in Britain now, right? It's and that's used as leveraging its employees. Yeah, exactly. You know, and there's nothing, you know, preventing the AI from being used or these or these mandates and the we can talk about the ways that it's it's showing up. A lot of times it's kind of like a combination of this top down sort of. So I got leaked some emails from Activision's CTO and he basically said, you've been cleared to use these AI

tools to the entire companies in these contexts. And then Activision, of course, is like the almost the top of the food chain. It's been merged with Blizzard and then both have been acquired by Microsoft now. But then underneath that, there's a bunch of studios that either just like work on one game or work on one. So they can interpret these directives differently and loosely. And so people who, as you said,

have been doing this vocation for the love of it. I mean, a job as a concept artist at a games company was sort of a dream job for so many people and they wouldn't, you know, think about asking for more, for more protections, more, you know, I'm writing another story. It might even come out as we are recording this podcast about the animation industry. Same deal. AI is starting to penetrate studios, making animated works.

And a lot of workers in these fields have just not been conditioned to sort of think about their rights or fighting back because of this you know they've been told this is a dream job like you're lucky to have this job you know like where you know where else are you gonna you're gonna do it and that's why in some of the biggest studios and the biggest companies like Activision or Pixar, in the case of animation, conditions are often the worst if you're not on the top tiers. And one of the things I think is also worth talking about is that throughout your article, one of the thieves that I kept seeing coming back again and again, I'm sure this is true

for the animation one as well, is that people will be introduced to these AI tools from the top down, usually, right? That they will then often be fired and then rehired as a contractor to come in and do prompt engineering or to correct stuff that the AI fucks up. And it highlights again, that this is fucking terrible as a product. Even beyond the fact that this is terrible to work for. One of the reasons is that, that it becomes a terrible product is that it fucking sucks to do. It sucks to like, to try and unpick a mashup of a bunch of similar art, some of which might've been yours that you might've done previously to then sort of, to correct

an output, to try to get it to match something you vaguely had in your head. And guess what? How long before you say, ah, good enough? Yep. That's good. Oh yeah, this guy in college football 25, Dan Smith, the quarterback from Brigham Young University

has a third nose and that's just sort of fine. No one really cares about Dan Smith, the quarterback from Brigham Young University. He can have a third nose. It's cool. Yep. No, that's it. There's in fact, like illustrators and artists and creative workers have begun to talk about it in exactly those terms. It's the good enough problem. So it's it's nobody's worried that the AI is going to be better than them or make better product. It's just that where it matters at points in the supply chain and management

or an executive is willing to settle for less and that's where they fear they become expendable. And I would say more so than getting rehired as a prompt engineer, people are getting fired, departments are getting winnowed down and then usually what will happen is they'll come around and say, okay, all of you guys guys who are left we've scheduled you a training session with copilot or whatever so you can learn how to basically automate your your buddy's job so that you can you can pick up the slack now that they're gone and then the person who was fired is gonna is now looking at listings some of which explicitly say oh you know new you, a character designer wanted must have familiarity

with mid-journey and stable diffusion. And so like, this is the cycle that that's beginning to happen. And you know, I think the the $6 million question is going to be whether or not it's the AI is shitty enough that gamers notice in Revolt, and all the people... a lot of these games, another place that AI is being used is in skins and extra stuff that you can pay for, and are gamers gonna notice that this stuff has gotten shittier and then just not want to pay for it, and it's gonna start... I mean, if you're like AI artist soulless, how much soul is going into putting fucking

Homelander from the boys into Call of Duty, you know? Exactly. And are you gonna want to pay for that? If you realize that it's AI, you're like, I don't... Is that gonna start... And so, are they gonna take a hit? Is it going to affect the outcome of the game's development enough to where users are gonna say this sucks, and then there's gonna be a correction?

Or is there going to be a new sort of baseline of mediocrity where the bosses have accepted that for some cost savings they can produce games with less money but just less human input and everybody on every level is just gonna have to get used to everything being kind of shittier and I would say that that's my great fear is is that there, you know, obviously artists are up in arms about this, a lot of people are up in arms about this, but if the gambit works and things are just kind of,

there's a new normal of AI generated shittiness, I would say that the real nefarious thing to do would be to knock down the price of some games and say like, well, you know, if you don't want to pay, you know, 70 bucks for the new, you know, God of War game or whatever, then if you want to pay 60 instead or something, you know, then we can hire more creative workers or something. But so I don't know, it really it's grim.

It was a grim article to report. And I also say that not one person on the artist side, you know, I talked to a dozen plus games workers and nobody was like, you know, AI is kind of cool. Or I could see it in this context. It was like, I don't want to use this. I don't want it anywhere near me. Some of the, on the coding side, on like the development side, some people would be like, you know, on the engineering side, it can automate certain tasks in the code that used to take me longer

to render certain figures. And some of them were actually okay with that. But on the artistry side, there's nobody that had a single nice thing to say about it. And in the animation field for this story, it's even worse. It's just, it is not even, you know, a nuanced sort of thing anymore. It's just, people is not even a nuanced sort of thing anymore. It's just, people want it out of there. It's because, and this is again, I'm going to quote something you said subsequently.

It's not just profiteering executives or firing people to cut costs. It's like the outrage has, it is there, but it goes beyond that to also like, and in so doing are trying to automate the arts. The things that we enjoy do, these vocations, they are basically trying to automate the arts, the things that we enjoy do these vocations. They are basically trying to take something that is a vocation and destroy it. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's, I saw, yeah, I did, I wrote a newsletter that was basically sort of drawing from this piece, at least here in the States, you know, made a pretty big splash because people feel strongly about it, obviously, and the reaction was pretty stunning and I got, you know, reached out to by people in fields where this is sort of creeping into in every way. And it really just kind of underlines the fact that there is no at least moral or substantive reason for doing this. Why? Why do we want to automate this? The production of the arts? What is it? It's only to save money. And I think most people would agree that like, okay, sometimes if you're making like a product on an assembly line or if you're, you know, if you, if you're, if you're, if you're coding software or something

or, or doing something that's unpleasant, which has always been the promise of automation, that it can do the dirty, dangerous and dull jobs for us. That's the kind of stuff that maybe it would be nice to have automated away if it wasn't going to take somebody's job. But why? Why are we pointing this at industries that just sort of thrive on being made by fucking people? Like, I get it. I get the outrage.

There is no reason to be doing this as a society. It has no cultural or societal value to be eliminating this, to be turning this over to sort of automated, you know, statistical number and text generators. Like, why do we even stand to sort of consider this? It should be a non-starter on a lot of ways. And unfortunately, the only way that you can really negotiate this in the workplace in the United States

is with a union. And as you mentioned earlier, union density is low. Most creative industries don't have access to ones. Where they do, like in the screenwriting industry, like the WGA, they actually did win pretty good protections because it's a similar reaction to the prospect of using AI. It's there's I think Miyazaki had that famous quote that really just encapsulates it. He's just like, AI, the prospect of using AI in animation, AI is just an insult to human

life. Like, why would you want to do that? And I saw people at this rally that I went to on Saturday that was they were working people up because they're the animation industry is about to enter negotiations with the AMPTP, which is the studio, the Hollywood studios that the WGA bargained with last year. And once again, the Hollywood studios want to, you know, secure as much right to use AI as they can. It's quite interesting, the job.

Well, first of all, the Miyazaki thing, I would sort of extend that further because he's often said, but like, why would people want to do this job at all? There's like a lot of documentaries of him where he just like looks so miserable and he just hates it. But he's like, but you know, and he said like, he sort of, he said that he's going to retire like four times and every time it's like, oh, I came back for another one. They got me like, just, just when I got out, they bring me back in all that stuff. But the Japan example is really interesting because like the animation industry

there, there's a lot of like, Oh, as you can imagine, there's like a lot of like debates about whether AI should be used or not. And there's like a lot of pushback in the sort of like manga industry, which is not like unionized per se, but it's very much state supported for like the reasons that it's like one of Japan's most kind of, it's very much state supported for the reasons that it's one of Japan's most popular export. The conversations there at the moment are about how much technology can be used because the amount of anime that is produced by that industry is huge. The requirement of using computers and using like automated structures is essential just for the output. But at the same time, again, very, like very much the disposition of like the people who create anime and manga are artisans and like, we need to sort of protect this

craft and like, so it's interesting, like those debates there and how, um, in one way, like they almost have like the reverse problem where they sort of want to keep it as like in-house and people focus as possible. But that also means that everyone has to work themselves to death for a chance to sort of like make it. Whereas like in the, whereas like in the West it's like, well, we're just going to give everything to computers. So we're going to like produce the biggest amount of shit possible. Also everyone still has to die doing it. Yeah. I mean, I would argue that, yeah, it's still, it's pretty much the same in the US, right? Like you have, you already have to work yourself to the bone to even get a shot. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And yeah, and it's, yeah, there was a Netflix released like an animated short last year that had like the background animations were, were generated by AI and it was an anime and, and I, yeah, I think that a Japanese artist came after it pretty, pretty strongly. And it is interesting because there is maybe because of the culture you're talking about, there is like a little bit more of an opening. There's a startup, I think I mentioned it in the piece, in Japan to like auto-generate like anime figures that even when it was mentioned just drew a bunch of ire here in the US. I don't know if you would like really get away with doing something like that and still have any sort of credibility in the arts.

But yeah, I mean, it is something that I hear a lot is that people in other countries are more excited about AI. I guess the industries, for better or worse, are pretty, pretty dense and it they're they're tough industries and they're concentrated in just a few in a few spots. But so it's really it really is. Oh, it's really a labor issue, not not a technological issue. So, you know, it's always seems to be somehow. Yeah, yeah, it's just it's weird

how it turns out that all of these things that were construed as technical issues are always end up being some kind of political thing. I'm sure I am 100% certain you can stick to sports, stick to sports. Why are we getting politics in our tech podcast? How excited are we for a new video games? Right? Like I hear they're developing heads for college football at an unprecedented rate. It's going to be all heads pretty soon. We played the new NCAA and, and like the heads of fantastic. We played the new NCAA booze Kashi game. And let me tell you, they, they rendered the, uh, the, the Kandahar rough riders so well. They should make a boo- That's my new gaming opinion.

It's not new AI. We're not making a booze cashew shirt until you sell the Avignon Pope shirt with the art I made like a month and a half ago for it. We're going to do the Avignon Pope shirt next once it's time for another drop of shirts. Look out for that that by the way I think that's number one put a marker down the next problem that looks like it's technical problem It actually will be a technical problem politics won't be anywhere near it Not like all of those other ones that we've discussed every time before we've ever talked about it

And also I just wanted to add as a caper on to that look if we need to automate all of the Arts and the sort of things that are fun in these vocations so we can have more time to do the dishes, which by the way, it's too difficult to automate. That's true. So I want to read a little bit of your article. You say, when Noah saw the email, a wave of anxiety hit. It was spring 2023 and the artist was reading a message from his company's then CTO, Michael

Vance, about how artificial intelligence is quote, top of mind at the game publisher. Systems are being tested, but what we've seen thus far holds a ton of promise. There have been a couple of emails like this sent to employees of the studio, which produces Call of Duty, among other things. A previous one had approved the use of generative AI tools such as Mid Journey and Stable Diffusion for producing concept art. And it always comes like this very, very softly, right? It's later in the article, you also say Andrew Wilson, CEO of Electronic Arts, the man behind

the 10,000 heads said in a quarterly earnings call, quote, the fear of displacement of the workforce is something we read a lot about and we talk a lot about. But then he noted that in every revolution, agricultural or industrial, they're quote, has been displacement of the workforce in the near term, and then meaningful increases in workforce opportunities over the long term. Our hope is that AI represents the same opportunity. Tell me, in the agricultural industrial revolutions, what did displacement of the workforce in the near term entail? Only good things. A peaceful utopia that we've been enjoying ever since.

Yeah, the enclosure movement happened when people were like, I'm so tired of all this common land. I wish it would just be enclosed so somebody could use a seed drill on it. Yeah, I mean, that's always the thing that, you know, ever since I wrote the the book about the lead out uprising, right, everybody's like, well, haven't things gotten better since? And you have to say, well, in some capacities, yes. But did there need to be decades of nonstop immiseration and child labor and people literally not growing to full size because they're working

around the clock inside poorly ventilated factories where their limbs get cracked? Could we maybe have like imagined an alternate pathway to some of these things? And that's just in the case of something where you could argue that some industrialization is useful. Like, what is the analog here? What great benefit to the economy, once again, is going to arise from automating the production of a video game? You know, what gets unlocked here? Like, is it more little like gig jobs where people have opportunities to like sort of color in the pixels, you know, getting paid piecemeal on some, you know, gig app that that for video game workers of the future, since there's not going to be real real jobs left in the wake. Like I don't I fail to see this. is a crutch that executives the pundit class

Sort of the automation theorists always kind of rely on oh well That'll be painful in the short term which one it does not have to be like come on Can we imagine alternate ways to deploy and develop technology that don't immiserate people? I think we can we're big boys number two It's just like there's just some pablum that they say. It's not even true in every case. It's just an easy way to sort of dodge the question. Well, in the future, this is just how it works. And it's just like some immutable law of nature that you have to endure a little pain for better things in the long term. But again, what better

things? Now we are getting rid of the better things. People having jobs to make cool video games seems like something we want. Like, why are we introducing that pain point right here? They don't have to explain that. They just have to say this line, pain in the short term, more economic benefit in the future. And of course they'll never address it, right? Because the reason that they're deploying AI and laying off 5% of the workforce, which is what EA did less than a year after that earnings call, right? Or when Microsoft lays off just shy of 2,000 employees at Activision

Blizzard, mostly 2-day artists, when all of that's happening, no one is ever asking them the hard question of, hey, what happens when this thing runs out of training data? What happens when you want to make something that hasn't been made before? That isn't just a mission. Just when, when, when the AI gets like prions, right? And starts generating horrible college football player heads. And things that aren't good enough anymore, then I guess you just have to go back to more desperate people and be like, hey, do you want to be an artist again?

Or for the first time, we'll pay you less probably. Exactly. And that's why this is really alarming, because that's exactly what will happen. And that's what, that is what has historically happened. This new technology becomes available that can theoretically reduce the labor cost. They swing it like a wrecking ball into the social structure that has existed for generations

or has existed that is extant at the time of said swinging. And it goes, it falls to pieces, whatever meager norms and protections that workers had relied upon are sort of cast to the wind. And when they come back and they realize, oh, you know, like actually we can't do this, or these college basketball heads fucking suck, like we need you back. But you know, times are tough now,

now that there's like been a downturn since everybody kind of rebelled against all this shit, we can't pay you as much. We wasted all our money on something. I can't remember what it was. Right. Yeah. So we've had some belt tightening. Can you come back and do it as a contract worker? And again, that process is what we were already talking about. But that's cyclical.

That's that that's what happens in the Industrial Revolution. They didn't eliminate workers. They wrote they got they made it so that a child could do the job and put themselves in danger and run the machines instead of somebody who was skilled and knew what they were doing. So it's just, yeah, it's de-skilling. It's tearing up. It's doing exactly what Uber did. It's a way to use technology as a battering ram against regulations, protections, laws and norms. And by the way, we're talking about these technologies as, oh, they're going to be bad

in the future. They're not going to work forever. In fact, when they start running out of new training data, they're going to start either eating what they've created, or they're just going to stop being able to create new things. That's actually not quite true because they suck now. This is another thing you mentioned in the article, which is that it turns out trying to correct the output of an AI as an artist is way more fucking difficult than just making something new, right? You cite an example of Riot games hiring someone.

This is sort of went slightly viral on X, the everything app. Where an artist at Riot games, this person is asked to do some AI correcting essentially. And says, first round of pictures of a sweeping aerial forest landscape come through and it's not bad. They submit a ton of work and it's mostly OK. So the first round feedback goes through.

And I tell them about the perspective mistakes, color changes I want, layers that any matte painting we split into, then a day I get five variants, not changes to the ones I wanted, but variations. Again, benefit of the doubt. I gave them another... Yeah, no object persistence. By the way, oh, you can't just do it. You can't redo it. You can never step in the same river twice. Yeah. It can't be iterative because it's purely generative. Mm hmm.

And they say, when I asked to remove the people that have cropped up, they say they can't and the AI doesn't have the eye to see basic mistakes. So it starts to overcompensate. So people appear all the way over the image clearly taken from holiday snaps. Please remove the people I said. What would you like them changed to? I don't care. I just don't want them there.

But then they can't do it. The only, the only person on the team who can actually use Photoshop hasn't developed an eye to see mistakes. And the only one whose background was a little photography gives me 40 progressively worse images with four wilder mistakes every time. This is four days into the project. So yeah, this is an example of AI falling at the first hurdle because the point of creating art, we even, again, you may bop me over, video games are for our purposes, yes, they are. What you're doing is you're imagining something in your head and you're creating something by which that can give someone else the same impression you had. Art is a fundamentally communicative

process. I have imagined, whether I've imagined, I've seen a landscape and I am painting my impression of it so that you might feel what I felt while looking at it. Yeah, but yeah, but like what if I gave that to a machine that stole a bunch of YouTube videos and Facebook photos? Well, indeed, right? What's that machine's view on the world, you know? Like, the guys making it are pretty sure it'll have one if they keep doing it enough. And so like, it comes back to, to try to do art without communication. It's not just hollow and empty and non-compelling. It also sucks. It's bad because the communication is inherently jumbled. I'm doing a kind of functional Miyazaki where I'm like, I strongly feel that this sucks

ass. Yeah. I mean, why, you know, why would you want that? Why would you want, instead of rendering that landscape or that portrait that you see in your head, why would you want a system that you press a button and then it attempts to arrange from the sum total of data that it has analyzed that may be referential or useful in constructing the average conception

of what that landscape would be? You're just, you are getting, you are by definition sort of getting a dull average of a creative idea. And we should be aspiring to more than that, I think. Especially now, right? You know, there's a lot, a lot of the usual like, you know, right wing talking head, usual suspects in Britain are talking about fucking Orwell again. But if you want to know the actual, an actual example of of technology or something like NewSpeak being used to actually limit the boundaries of what can be imagined or what can be communicated, it's fucking AI. Because it means that it says, oh, the only landscape that exists is the average one.

The only person that exists is the average one. And that is now going to limit what can be communicated and what it is possible to make and what it's possible to say. There's your fucking limitation. Not like, you know, that we're sent Britain's most racist 12 year old to like work on. Oh God, the racist 12 year olds doing child labor as an AI prompt engineer. Listen, I don't think any children should be forced to work. Even the most racist one in Britain. It's worth mentioning, just as we sort of closed out, we've gone over time here, is that we spend a long time saying here's the impact that AI will have in industries that

it's rolled out in. And now that like gaming was the most aggressive to adopt it, animation and films are probably some of the second most aggressive. You know, we were right. This is exactly what we said would happen. This is exactly what happened. And so like, if you see it coming into your workplace, resist it any way you can. If you do, if you see it, honestly, reach out to me. I have like a, I'm trying to keep track of as much of this stuff as possible. I'm in touch with folks who are organizing against it. I may be able to, you know, point you to some resources. But yeah, absolutely. You know, try to throw up the speed bumps, resist it, do, you know, do do what you can.

You will find almost invariably that if you speak out about this, that people agree with you, not your soul sucking, AI, generative, AI loving boss. So, yeah, it's it's it's definitely out there. It's definitely coming. And I think it can be resisted. I think we're at an interesting moment where it can also successfully be resisted as the WGA writers showed us to. So, yeah. All that being said, Brian, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It is always a blast to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure. A pleasure. Yeah. And, you know, do do check out your various social feeds. You may have a little project dropping soon, I hear. Yep, that's right. Yeah, for now though, bloodinthemachine.com. That's the book, it's the newsletter. That's where I'm doing most of my stuff right now. Nice, perfect.

Well, thank you everybody for listening. Sorry, this one's a little bit late. We'll see some of you in Edinburgh in a couple short days, and then back to regularly scheduled programming. All right. Bye everybody. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.