the return of mass memes et cetera

The Return of Mass Memes or Ghiblification

Max Read writes:

Among the longstanding arguments of this newsletter is that the main or highest function of the current generation of generative-A.I. apps is entertainment…

I wholeheartedly agree.

I’m not going to give a full rundown of the recent spate of ChatGPT-generated Studio Ghibli memes. Max does an excellent and thorough job of it at the link and avoids the hysteria that colors the digital debate surrounding AI and art. No ChatGPT has not ‘democratized’ art. And no ChatGPT is not making artists ‘obsolescent.’

But I do have a few high level thoughts that I haven’t seen shared yet, so this week I will add my voice to the take-of-the-week churn we like to call discourse:

This is the first mass meme I have seen in quite a while. Last fall, I made the claim that the full migration of pop culture to the internet is now complete. I call this set of cultural products Internet Cool i.e. they are ‘cool’ in the sense that they do numbers. They are popular.

The fact that this meme began as a cutesy-but-super-advanced Instagram-style filter underscores the broad appeal:

My friends were using it to do fashion month round-up posts and my mother was requesting I help her transform some family photos so she could show them to her friends at work. I can’t remember the last time I saw a meme with this broad of appeal.
AI memes become super-charged when safety parameters are removed i.e. when they aren’t censored. Part of the reason, Ghiblification exploded is because for some reason, ChatGPT will generate images that OpenAI’s predecessor image-generating software, DALL-E will not. When I first tried to create a Ghiblified image, I asked DALL-E to remake an image of the Seine with the Eiffel Tower in the background—anodyne. I was confused because on X, I was seeing Ghiblified photographs from Abu Ghraib. If you want to see the extreme images that have been Ghiblifed watch the megamix here. Appropriately, it’s set to Death Grips “I’ve Seen Footage”.
AI discourse remains totally removed from general audiences and the creatives who theoretically should be most upset about OpenAI’s “appropriated” training data. It’s an OpenSecret for those paying attention that the training data—images, text, sounds—should be more properly understood as drawings, novels, and music created by sometimes dead, but oftentimes living artists. And that the legality of using these works to train AI is dubious at best.

Unfortunately for artists and creatives seeking legal recourse, it seems unlikely that public will share their outrage. Most of my culture industry friends are ambivalent about how this technology was created. I think this is because people view the outputs as parody and satire, and the technology itself as a toy.

And that’s because:
AI art is not thought of as art by the public. Sorry, OpenAI. No one thinks you have democratized art, because no one share’s Silicon Valley’s definition of art. Art must have an aura. It must have a creator. It must have a provenance. Random images you chuckle at once, forget about, and at best, chuckle at again because you are scrolling through your photo library simply don’t cut it.

Zero-Click Search or “Google doesn’t work”

This study by SparkToro corresponds to my experience. I would estimate my current use of Google is mostly muscle memory. And when I find it useless, I use ChatGPT to source links. (NOTE: I do not just ask ChatGPT questions, it hallucinates too much to be trustworthy for that.)

Nilly Patel at The Verge:

There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” — my name for that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside of its search engine to third-party websites.

It seems we’re already there. Or have been for some time.

Interestingly, the decline in quality wasn’t an accident. @arcotherium summarized a longform piece on the changes to Google’s algorithm, “The Man Who Killed Google Search” by Edward Zitron thusly:

Apparently, Google Search sucking isn’t just an SEO and censorship issue. Prabhakar Raghavan, Google head of ads and then search and former head of Yahoo Search [lol], deliberately made it worse so that, by making more queries to try to find things, users would see more ads.

Art’s Not Dead but creative careers are…

A depressing round-up of stories from artists who ‘sold-out’ to work in more commercial creative industries and now see those industries in decline.

Chris Wilcha, film director:

The cruel irony is, the thing I perceived as the sellout movie is in free-fall.

Post-Institutional America or our low-trust society

The Financial Times has some startling numbers on under-30 Americans’ trust in institutions. The trans-national poll from Gallup ranks the United States alongside Greece and Italy in the top three slots for many of the survey questions.

It’s my hypothesis that young Americans voted for Trump in record numbers and still support him—at least according to the last approval ratings I saw) despite the controversy surrounding Musk and DOGE because they believe the government is staffed by self-dealing crooks and hypocrites.

It’s easier to vote for a presidential candidate who has been convicted of a felony if you believe everyone in Washington is a criminal-who-hasn’t-been-convicted-yet.

I don’t know what the answer is here. Historically, the United States has been a high-trust society. Developmental economist have spent decades trying to figure out how to take low-trust societies and transform them into high-trust societies to little avail.

Rotting as Resting or “Dumbphones, unstacked”

An incredible anecdote from Brendon Holder:

Recently, a friend shared an itinerary he’d received for an upcoming bachelorette party in New Orleans. We were stationed in the corner of a Basque restaurant, catching up over gildas and bomba rice, when he slid his phone across the table to show me the flyer that the bride-to-be had prepared.

The itinerary detailed NOLA’s usual suspects: Bourbon Street, booze, and beignets. However, on the second day of the schedule, wedged in between a swamp tour and a “pizza-pool party,” was an activity I had never seen explicitly listed on any group trip. The activity seemed essential for a weekend this meticulously planned to function, and yet its scheduling—so blatant, and in writing—was surprising. It felt strangely compassionate, signaling an acute understanding of what the attendees would need at that particular moment: post-swamp-tour, pre-pizza-pool-party, in an Airbnb of 17 people.

The scheduled activity was “screentime.”

This inclusion acknowledged that for guests to manage a high degree of social activity, they would require downtime. But what does it say about us that “screentime” and “downtime” have become synonymous?

Announcement: I’ve been feeling out scheduling and decided to move the first post of the week to Mondays and the second post of the week to Fridays. Office hours will remain on Tuesdays.