This is an essay I wrote in 2022, inspired by Kyle Chaka’s 2016 viral essay, “Welcome to Airspace”. After seeing an excerpt from Kyle’s new book on the front of /c/Technology, I thought y’all might be interested in reading this piece of mine, which is less about the design of physical spaces, and more about The Algorithm™'s influence on creative practice in general.
This is a conversation I can have a million times, so I hope you enjoy.
And now we accelerate the process with generative AI, resampling data into “new” content for profit. But I can’t shake the feeling this will be an undoing, like it somehow devalues the collated data becauce it becomes so abundant (and synthetic).
Totally agreed. In fact, I’ve written about almost exactly that.
Fantastic read, shared at work and now following on mastodon. Also had this thought in regards to my own work:
There’s probably another article to write about this, I would title it: “Generative AI won’t solve your Cynefin domain problem”
Couldn’t agree more! We shouldn’t outsource planning the world that we want to make to oversimplified heuristics, including “whatever is cheapest.”
That’s well documented already. The near-instant proliferation of AI generated content on the internet means that in short order, AI’s are ingesting data from earlier, more crude implementations of AI. The AI doesn’t know that one source is better than another, so as it scrapes the internet, and the internet becomes more full of AI content, the content produced begins to slowly become useless as more and more AI-generated content becomes the source for the AI to generate content.
AI is an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail.