Don’t Let The Machines Do The Living | Culture Study Get more from Culture Study on Patreon

My take on AI use

1) It's making it harder for people to learn *how* to learn

2) If you can't do everything you think ou should be doing without resorting to it — then you're doing (or being asked to do) too much

www.patreon.com/posts/149942...

The latest publication is something I submitted revisions for in 2022 and is apparently about to come out this fall or next year 😂 Meanwhile, here I am in tech working 3 week sprints

Did not think I would still be updating my CV in 2026. I left academia 10 years ago, but academia won't leave me

Was really challenging to participate in this, but I think I was able to pen something real, important, and personal to my experience in AI. Remember that GenAI is not *all* of AI nor all of what it should be.
www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/15/1...

HBOMax has started showing a 'remastered' 4K Mad Men and they’ve messed things up so during Roger’s oyster vomit scene you can now see the crew men with the vomit hose on the right

LLMs destroy context. You used to be able to tell a crank website from a good source partly by its style.

But now we have a tool that puts careful research, incoherent garbage, and intentional shitposting through a kind of grammatical instagram filter, presenting them all with the same credibility

Like it or not this technology is here to stay and if you don’t use it you’ll fall behind in your industry

Product placement in Nobody Wants This is basically up to kdrama levels this season

That’s the other thing that baffles me about AI and creative writing, actually.

The work IS the joy for me. I don’t want to be able to snap my fingers and have a completed “product.” I want to be transformed by the process. I’m an author but I do this because I enjoy the rigor of being a writer.

“Fuck AI”

— Guillermo del Toro

🎥 Vanity Fair

Groundhog sitting on a tree branch probably 20 or 25 feet high

This changes everything I thought I knew about groundhogs

Mailer that reads: Molly, Seasons may change, but the need for blood is constant.

slightly ominous mailer from the Red Cross

A bear in the wild, smiling and posing coyly

I guess this has probably already gone viral somewhere but I am simply dying at this picture of a bear that looks like it hired a photographer to do a glamour shoot

Love to be in a meeting about meetings

The Real Demon Inside ChatGPT AI chatbots strip language of its historical and cultural context. Sometimes what looks like a satanic bloodletting ritual may actually be lifted from Warhammer 40,000.

I wrote about how AI chatbots strip cultural and historical context away from language. What remains is merely a ghost in the machine, and it's repeatedly making people confused and scared www.wired.com/story/chatgp...

Exactly! Also, encountering frameworks or perspectives you hadn't initially considered is invaluable for making connections and breakthroughs

How many times do we have to remind people: the chatbot *cannot* admit to *anything*. It *doesn't know*. When you ask it about itself, it generates its answer the same way it generates your request that it write an email. It takes what you tell it and responds in way to sound plausible.

People think they have amazing stories about ChatGPT. And they tell them all the time. You just don’t register them as amazing if you are a normal ish adult human being because it’s mid shit like, “it told me to eat brisket!” or “it wrote twenty emails no one wants!”

It is tremendously rude that you basically have to keep working out forever.

You can also just not buy from Amazon

Ugh, Netflix strikes again

‘Sinners’ on Max Will Include a Black American Sign Language Version Max will debut Sinners in the U.S. on Friday July 4, when viewers will be able to watch it two ways: by 1) streaming the exact theatrically-released version, and 2) choosing Sinners in Black American Sign Language (BASL). It’s the first time a streaming service has interpreted a film into BASL, Warner Bros. says.

‘Sinners’ on Max Will Include a Black American Sign Language Version

A few episodes into The Bear and I care so much more about Ebrahim's spreadsheets than Claire-bear

Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad?

i just find this so bizarre. searching through texts and doing the reading for myself is how i actually think through ideas! trying to put together a sentence is how i figure out what i actually want to say!

Sleeping tuxedo cat with her head angled back so you can see the underside of her blep

Rare underblep sighting

Surprise surprise

Thinking about devastating cuts to NSF: US gov-funded science has been the engine upon which most of the tech wealth was generated. But the oligarchs (currently hoarding much of that $) think it’s their own brilliance & not the accident of standing close to the scientific engine that made them rich.

Say it after me: Chat GPT is not a search engine. It does not scan the web for information, it just generates statistically likely sentences. You cannot use it a search engine, or as a substitute for searching.

Now. Please never use an LLM for information searches ever again.

Just bums me out when people advocate for the Plagiarism Machine That Lies. Announcing to the world that you like abdicating your brain to the world's shittiest machine. Have an ounce of self-respect