2025-08-14 03:47:27
One thing I like about K-Pop Demon Hunters is that there’s so much stuff in it that I hate.
I can’t imagine that there were a lot of discussions during the making of this movie where they were trying to figure out how best to make it appeal to childless white American men in their 50s1, but there was still a lot for me to latch onto, making me want to find out what all the buzz was about.
I’m a big fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and a modern spin on fighting demons will never fail to interest me. I’m far too ignorant of Korean culture to know exactly what is informed by traditional art and mythology, and what was created for the movie, but the designs of the demons are awesome. And there are a magical tiger and three-eyed (six-eyed?) magpie with an awesome hat, that certainly feel like they’re referencing something far older.
Plus, Sony Animation has been absolutely killing it for several years now, cranking out movies that hit exactly the right balance between artistically masterful and distinctive, and solid, accessible storytelling.2
But no matter how much I’ve tried, I’ve never been able to get into anime or manga beyond the predictable, universally beloved entry points like Cowboy Bebop or Escaflowne. And beyond the “not my thing, but whatever” aspects, K-Pop Demon Hunters comes right out with a lot that’s on my “actively dislike” list:
So I was kind of primed for this one to throw me off, to hit the one false note that made it feel insincere and factory-generated, or the one flourish that made it feel as if it were just capitalizing on a popular style instead of being an authentic expression. And it just couldn’t lose me. It’s simply too fun, too charming, and its characters are too appealing that it feels near impossible not to enjoy it.
One of the recurring images that I like a lot is when the movie would cut to reactions from super-fans of the main band Huntrix. It would almost always include a tight-knit trio of aunties or grandmas, and a separate trio of young men freaking out over the band.
So much of the plot revolves around the band’s popularity, with the idea that their popularity is how they get their power, so I thought it was a cute gag to show how universally beloved they’d become. It wasn’t just the girls and young women you’d expect, but everybody loves Huntrix.
But as the story develops, the idea is shown to have a little more nuance: it’s not just the popularity that’s giving them power, but the genuine connection with their fans. This is made more and more explicit as the story goes on; the rival boy band that’s become popular not just because of their surface appeal, but because their music feeds and then feeds off of the audience’s negativity. Angering Huntrix into making a diss track that doesn’t feel right3, and later taking advantage of listeners’ insecurities, self-doubt, and self-loathing.
And we see reactions from the elderly women and the young men throughout, and it drives home that distinction between shallow fandom — “I like this because I’m supposed to” or “I like this because it’s in the category of stuff that’s made for me” — and genuine connection.
I’m a big fan of accessibility and approachability in art and entertainment, and I’m always banging the drum of art that meets people where they’re at. The obvious risk is that art that doesn’t challenge your preconceived notions, and doesn’t demand that you put real thought into analyzing what it’s saying or how it works, will leave you with no opportunity to grow or change or expand how you see the world and see yourself.
But as it turns out, there’s more than one way to challenge your own preconceived notions, and even a fairly simple and straightforward story can expand your horizons a little bit. Just by inviting you to engage with it, completely ignoring any silly questions like “is this even meant for me?”
2025-08-13 01:00:00
Love Story came out the year before I was born, and it was extremely popular, so I’ve been hearing its theme song for most of my life. It was so ubiquitous, in fact, that I just started thinking of it as shorthand for “schmaltzy elevator music” and stopped paying attention the second I recognized it.
I even forgot that it has lyrics. Shirley Bassey’s version does the thing she does the absolute best, which is make any lyrics, no matter how insipid or shallow, sound as if they are the most profound and powerful poetry.
But because I never paid attention to the lyrics, I just assumed what the gist was from the title: being so deeply in love with someone that you can no longer tell where you end and they begin. (Or vice versa).
As it turns out, it’s more prosaic than that. More “I’m so much in love with this dude that I don’t know how to even start talking about it.” Which I guess is less codependent, but is a little disappointing after spending so long thinking it was more existentially romantic.
So I think ultimately I prefer the Chemical Brothers’ take on “Where Do I Begin.” Which could be an account of an existential crisis, or it could just be about waking up with a hangover after a one-night stand. Either way, it builds to a pretty spectacular drum break. And love means never having to say you’re sorry for appreciating a good drum break.
2025-08-12 11:09:48
Book
Heads Will Roll by Josh Winning
Synopsis
The star of the popular sitcom We Love Willow has been canceled for a careless message she posted on Twitter. Now she’s lost her job, her fiance, her home, and on top of all the vitriol she’s receiving from the press and online, she’s getting personal death threats. She checks herself into a retreat in a secluded area of upstate New York, a kind of summer camp for cutting off from the outside world, with a strict policy of no phones or any electronic devices. But there’s a local urban legend about a woman who was decapitated by a priest and still stalks these woods, looking for revenge and hoping to find herself a replacement head. When guests start disappearing from the camp without a trace, it seems that the legend might have inspired a real-life killer!
Notes
This one is squarely in summer-reading category, and it has zero pretense of being anything other than an early 2000s-era self-aware slasher movie in book form. It is relentless with its references both to movies and to social media and internet culture in general — maybe not Ready Player One-level relentless, but still often distractingly so.
I was a little surprised to see how hard it goes in its anti-cancel culture statement. It’s a sentiment I ultimately agree with — because it makes a point of distinguishing between actual campaigns for accountability like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, with the gossip-driven bullshit hate campaigns that are usually passed off as being righteous for “punching up” — but it was still odd to see a book like this taking such a hard stand.
Also, and this is a very mild spoiler, but we do eventually find out what was in the tweet that got our protagonist canceled, and it was almost laughably harmless. The idea that something so innocuous could result in such a hate campaign was less believable than anything about the murders.
As for the slasher story: it’s fine. It’s engaging and readable, and it’s vaguely nostalgic, which is exactly what the target audience for this kind of book is going to be looking for. I switched to this after abandoning a “better” book that I’d been trying to slog through for a couple of weeks, and it was nice to just jump back into a story that had me curious as to how it all ends. Everything does end up fitting together, even if it’s not in a particularly surprising or even satisfying way.
Verdict
Definitely more along the lines of I Still Know What You Did Last Summer than Scream, but it’s a pretty quick and easy read, and it does deliver on the modern slasher movie vibes.
2025-08-12 04:28:43
I saw a video interview with Zach Cregger where he lists some of the movies that inspired him while making Weapons. I haven’t seen most of them, but they’re going on the to-watch list, some with enthusiasm, some begrudgingly.1
Cregger doesn’t mention it as a direct influence, but while praising the Coen Brothers he does call out Raising Arizona, specifically the way it starts out with a cold open that doesn’t hit its yodeling main theme and title card until several minutes in. “I was like, ‘they can do that? This is amazing!'”
Which really connected with me, because there have been several times (including during the opening and throughout just about every Coen Brothers movie) where it’s felt like a scene reached into my brain, futzed around with some wiring, and dramatically changed my thinking of how movies work and what they’re capable of.
These aren’t necessarily my favorite scenes or my favorite movies (although there’s considerable overlap, of course), but just the scenes that made me realize, in the moment, “oh yeah, this is what movies are about.”
(And apologies to anybody who felt like my featured image is a bait and switch; I don’t remember anything about Cinema Paradiso apart from that I liked it and it made me cry exactly when it wanted me to).
I don’t even like this movie overall, and I’m aware that Jean-Luc Godard specifically and French New Wave in general did this kind of thing all the time, but this was the scene that stood out to me.
There’s a bit where our protagonists drive to a kind of rest stop on the side of the highway, a minor argument gets heated, things escalate, and then they escalate to an absurd/surreal degree. If I remember correctly, there’s a fist fight and guns fired? In any case, it turns into chaos, and our protagonists jump into their car and flee the scene.
The next scene starts with a title card that reads “Fauxtographie,” and then just consists of the entire cast of the previous scene standing together in a group photo pose, smiling and waving at the camera. It was mind-altering for me to see that kind of goofy fourth wall breaking2 in a movie that had been introduced to us as a significant art film.
This is one of those movies I don’t want to go back and rewatch, because I’m afraid it won’t live up to my memory of it. But at the time, I adored it.
The scene that had a peculiar impact on me is one in which mobsters are scoping out Sean Connery’s corner apartment. It starts out with the corner seen from a distance, with Connery clearly visible in the window, and the frame is wide enough that you can see the entire apartment. It makes his character feel shockingly exposed and vulnerable to Capone’s goons.
For all I know, it says more about the fact that I was raised in the suburbs and spent little time in cities than it does about the thought that went into that scene, but it was meant to show how the Untouchables weren’t safe anywhere, and it absolutely worked for me. It actually shifted how I think about conceptual spaces vs physical ones; I always thought of my home as being more or less impenetrable, but this one scene — and how it was deliberately set up to be outside looking in — made me realize that the only thing separating my safe space from the open world was a few thin walls and windows.
The movie spends a lot of time talking about Toontown, but we never get to actually see the place itself until Eddie works up the nerve to drive back in for the first time since his brother’s murder.
The payoff is amazing. Curtains within the tunnel open to a cartoon sound effect, and suddenly he’s driven into a cartoon, where everything is alive and singing “Smile, Darn ya, Smile.” I think I’m a heretic for not really liking Richard Williams’s animation that much; most often, I feel like it’s so meticulous and so full of stuff that it’s distracting. Moments don’t land for me, because I feel like it’s too difficult to focus on what’s important.
But here, that kind of overkill and excess works perfectly, because it makes everything feel overwhelming.
The “Good Morning” scene is why people love musicals. Part of it is that it’s got three movie stars who were exceptional even back when movie stars had to be good at everything. But more than that, it’s how the scene just turns into fantasy.
Ostensibly, it’s the capper to a scene that was advancing the plot, but really, the scene exists as a showcase for its stars, and it doesn’t even act like there’s anything wrong with that. The camera silently pulls back farther than it’d be able to in a real space, and then it tracks the leads as they head through an unattached doorway into an impossibly huge living room. This had just recently been a “real” space for the story, and now it’s a stage set for a spectacular dance number.
This is a movie about making movies, and it’s constantly quietly switching between cinema and stage production, using sets that are sometimes supposed to represent real places and sometimes meant to suggest movie sets, all with a quiet assertion that the distinction doesn’t really matter, since it’s all spectacle.
I was never a fan of the franchise, and I don’t think I ever saw any of them in their entirety, so I had no expectations from what was essentially a sequel to a movie that had come out 30 years earlier. But it bludgeons you over the head with unapologetically over-the-top bad-assery from its title card onwards.
I was enjoying the movie at a level 8 or 9 for a while, and the moment that knocked it up to 20 for me was the introduction of the Doof Warrior. I’m hard-wired to like taiko drums, so they already had my attention, but then the camera panning around to the front of the vehicle was the perfect introduction: a wall of amplifiers, a masked guy on bungie cords wearing a union suit and playing a double-necked electric guitar, and then the guitar shoots a jet of flame.
Oh right, I’d actually forgotten that movies can do whatever the hell they want to do, and that is incredible.
My sense of humor wasn’t yet fully-formed by 1986, so I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Big Trouble in Little China for most of its beginning. Is it just another cheesy action movie? Is it a sincere attempt to bring martial arts/Hong Kong style action to an American production? Is it a satire on those movies? Is it a flat-out comedy?
It took me a while to realize the answer was “yes.” I’d been wondering if it were trying to be a real movie and not hitting the mark, or if it were trying to be a B movie and overperforming, and I kept going back and forth until the showdown in the alley in Chinatown, and the first appearance of the three storms.
I think it was the first time a movie had so forcefully told me to just shut up and watch. Movies have the potential to show you anything someone can imagine, so why try to force them into doing only the things that you expect?
Between 1977 and 1980, I (along with the rest of the world) had become obsessed with Star Wars. The only thing I wanted from a sequel was more Star Wars. For all I know, I would’ve been just as happy if the sequel had been that unambitious.
But apart from the obvious swap from desert to ice planet, the one scene that made me truly realize I was watching something different was seeing the AT-ATs on Hoth. Those iconic images of the walkers stop-motion trudging towards the Rebel trenches, and then the snowspeeders flying in to defend.
These are some of the most over-analyzed movies in history, so of course this isn’t an entirely new idea, but the thing I’m only now really appreciating about this scene is how much everyone reacts as if this is just a thing that happens in this universe. In Star Wars, there are frequent comments about how huge and singular the Death Star is, to make it stand out from all of the fantastic things we see elsewhere in the movie. In Empire, these huge, lumbering, armored transports are treated like they’ve all seen this kind of thing before. It’s such a core part of what’s unique about Star Wars world-building that it’s easy to forget how deep it goes.
Of course, it’s the scene where Lisa gets caught by Thorwald snooping around his apartment. I’m sure entire books have been written about this movie and this scene in particular, but it’s just a masterpiece within a masterpiece.
It incorporates all of the sense of being exposed and vulnerable that’s in the above scene from The Untouchables, with shifts in angles when the same action is viewed through a zoom lens instead of from a distance, and the peaceful music coming from a different apartment that’s dissonant against the tension.
But the climax is when Lisa shows Jeff that she’s managed to take away a ring, and then when Thorwald notices, he looks directly into the camera. I’ve seen this movie dozens of times now, and it still makes me gasp.
It’s the “Magic What We Do” scene. What seems like a cinematic flourish at first — see, this character appears to represent how the blues ties these characters back to a far older tradition of expression through the arts and holy shit is that a Funkadelic guy on an electric guitar?! It just keeps building and expanding its idea until it seems to encompass the entirety of human artistic expression.
I think it’s literally impossible to adequately explain to someone how a piece of music makes you feel, but this scene comes closer than anything I’ve ever seen to capturing exactly how and why music, and the blues music that runs throughout the movie in particular, is so meaningful to the characters and the filmmakers.
Kind of like with Raising Arizona, it’s an extended cold open that leads into a title sequence. But here, it’s Jon Polito’s speech about ethics, which is completely engrossing because of the arrogance that’s immediately evident in his performance, the camera and staging putting all the focus onto the apparent significance of what he’s saying, and then the thing that carries through all of Miller’s Crossing: the language.
On top of all the dialect that the Coens supposedly made up for the movie (conslang?), it’s a very specific rhythm and idiom that makes it feel like this movie takes place in a fantasy world. Kind of like Shakespeare, where everyone talks in iambic pentameter, but here, everyone talks in gangster movie banter.
And while you’re still processing all of it, the title sequence, with its beautiful music and the image of a hat blowing away in the wind. Nerds like me have been interpreting the symbolism ever since the movie came out, no matter how hard the Coens tried to shut us down by saying it’s just a hat. I feel like the larger message is another case of “shut up and watch.” The entire opening sequence made me feel like I was about to see something I’d never seen before, and it was correct.
2025-08-10 03:49:24
I was going to try and be circumspect when talking about Weapons, describing the core of what I found so impressive without spoiling anything that makes it work.
But I quickly realized that my experience while watching Weapons was that it was constantly expanding, going off in directions I hadn’t expected. I honestly can’t identify which details would spoil the magic. I avoided reading too much about the movie beforehand, and I still wonder whether I’d have enjoyed it even more had I known absolutely nothing about it.
So I’ll say that I thought it was excellent, and in fact I can’t come up with a substantial complaint about it, a single moment that didn’t land exactly like it was supposed to. I absolutely recommend it to anyone who enjoys horror and suspense movies.
And I recommend seeing it not just unspoiled, but in as large an audience as possible. I saw it in IMAX on an afternoon on its opening weekend. The big screen didn’t add much1 but the crowd absolutely did. It was so satisfying hearing dozens of people around me gasping, groaning, or laughing at exactly the right moments. I’m often so clinical when watching movies that it’s such a pleasant experience to be surrounded by people still capable of being vocal when they’re enjoying something.
Everything after this is a potential spoiler!
My favorite aspect of the movie is the way it was structured: split into chapters, each showing basically the same time period but from the perspective of a different character.
And my favorite standout image of the movie (in a movie filled with some pretty great imagery) is the front door of the house where the climax takes place.
That door is shown repeatedly, and I’d swear that it’s most often shown with the exact same camera setup: seen from a distance, with the door in the exact center of the frame. And there are multiple shots that show the exact same thing: the door opens, revealing nothing but pitch blackness behind it.
The reason that stands out to me so much is because it seems like it should be the oldest trick there is, and yet it’s still tense and primally unsettling every damn time. It seems like it would stop being creepy after being used so many times, and yet the movie does something surprisingly different — and often funny — each time.
(Straying off the “one thing I like” idea to talk about how one scene is just so good. It’s when Justine is watching that door from inside her car across the street. The way the whole scene is shot and edited is pure suspense movie perfection. Especially having the attacker stride out of the door and then right past the car, and then while the camera stays locked on Justine, we hear the car door open. My crowd was laughing and screaming at the same time. It was fantastic).
The movie’s overlapping story structure is the reason that same shot can keep working and keep being surprising over and over again. Because the movie is constantly re-contextualizing things we’ve seen before, letting some ideas and mysteries hang out unresolved in the audience’s mind while resolving others and introducing new ones, we’re actively engaged in piecing the story together and never allowed to fall back into the simple, predictable rhythm of a horror story.
Most impressive to me from a screenwriting perspective is that the individual “scary door” moments happen out of order chronologically, but are still presented to the audience in the familiar order of foreshadowing, suspense, escalation, escalation, and climax.
And it also plays with that dynamic at the core of a great horror movie, where there’s a disconnect between what the audience knows, what the characters know, and what the filmmakers know. Weapons is excellent at anticipating exactly what the audience is thinking at any given moment, and then confirming it, subverting it, or stretching out the suspense.
When I heard that Weapons was written and directed by Zach Cregger, the writer and director of Barbarian, I came in with a whole set of expectations. And when I saw how addict James’s storyline was playing out, I expected it to be essentially a repeat of Justin Long’s segment in Barbarian: clueless guy blunders into a murder house.
So I was happy to see that it was much less of a jarring tonal shift than it was in Barbarian, but it still played with the same idea: a character who’s completely oblivious to the fact that he’s in a horror movie. In Weapons, it feels less like a sudden comedic interlude distracting from the protagonist’s story, because the entire movie is structured as overlapping stories. And the main character in each is barely aware of everything that’s going on in the other characters’ stories.
I kept being reminded of Poker Face, which typically uses the same structure of going back in time at the beginning of Act 2 to repeat the events of Act 1 from a different perspective. It plays off that same idea of a disconnect between what the audience knows vs what the characters know, but there, it’s to show how Charlie pieces together clues to solve a mystery where we already know the solution.
There’s a glimmer of the same thing near the beginning of Weapons, while the audience is still being subjected to a barrage of intriguing mysteries to be solved. Justine’s car gets vandalized, and the question of who did it is left unanswered. Later we see Archer outside Justine’s house, and he happens to have two cans of red paint in his truck.2 It’s ultimately a meaningless mystery of no real consequence, but I hadn’t even realized that it was planting an idea in the back of mind as foreshadowing for what would happen later. Until the movie was over, I hadn’t consciously made the connection between the witch hunt persecuting Justine, and the fact that a literal witch was causing all the problems.
And maybe I’m being too generous to myself, but I don’t think it’s just a case of my missing obvious details. I think that Weapons does so much clever stuff with pacing, foreshadowing, and especially misdirection that it encourages you to actively engage with assembling the pieces of a story while also discouraging you from second-guessing or over-predicting everything.
There are several excellent individual scenes in Weapons, with some unforgettable imagery and masterfully-executed suspense scenes (like the one with Justine sleeping in the car). But if it had been presented chronologically, even if it had saved Alex’s story for last and gone back for one long expository flashback, it probably would’ve felt like a solid, well-performed, but still B- movie about a witch, a suburban neighborhood, and a little boy who’s really bad at feeding people soup.3 And it certainly couldn’t have lived up to the level of intrigue raised by its opening, with the little kids running into the darkness, arms outstretched.
I think there’s kind of a problem with “horror movie inflation” where the stakes have been raised so much that things that would be pants-wettingly horrific in real life barely even register as scary in fiction. You either have to keep showing ever-increasingly horrific images in the climax, or reset the audience’s expectations so that creepy stuff is really, really scary again.
I still say that The Blair Witch Project is one of the best executions of this, even though I don’t care to ever see it again. Its last image is one of the all-time best in horror movies, even though it’s not at all scary out of context. It only works because it’s spent the entire movie making you tense, annoyed, and uncomfortable, to the point that you’re primed to jump out of your skin at any creepy sounds or sights in the night.
Which isn’t to suggest that Weapons doesn’t allow itself to go over the top, of course. A couple of the kills are genuinely horrific, and the climax is tense and bonkers.4 But they feel impactful, instead of just being “killing off side characters on the way to the climax,” because of the way the story structure stretches everything out and shows us moments out of order.
The principal’s attack at the gas station, for instance, is a scary, unexpected jolt, even if you remembered it from the trailer. We first see it during Archer’s story, where it ends that chapter with a climactic cliffhanger. It furthers the intrigue around the mystery of what’s going on (it’s still happening, and it affects adults too?), and it fills us with dread later on when we see the beginning of it play out, knowing how it ends.
In fact, I was struggling to think of any criticism I had of the movie, any bit that didn’t land, and the closest I could come up with was that the principal’s partner was camping it up to a level that felt out of place in a movie where most of the performances were more grounded. But I quickly took a step back and realized I was bringing my own prejudices to it. I’m so primed to look for negative stereotypes that I didn’t consider that they’re simply a cute couple, with their matching Minnie and Mickey T-Shirts. Which makes what happens later really horrifying, instead of just shockingly violent.
Weapons feels expansive instead of straightforward because ideas are seeded in the audience’s mind and allowed to linger, making you wait for the resolution. But it doesn’t feel frustratingly delayed, because there’s always a story in the works with unanswered questions that you can chew on. What’s the deal with the cop’s relationship with his wife and father-in-law, and how does it play into the larger story? How are the junkie’s needles going to come back to have significance later? We’ve seen Justine be both persecuted innocent and reckless alcoholic who has a history of “inappropriate” relationships; is there more to her story? What’s the deal with Archer having a dream about a giant assault rifle floating over a house?
After I saw Weapons, I finally let myself read reviews of it without fear of being spoiled, and I was genuinely surprised to see the recurring complaint that it wasn’t “about” anything, or that it suggested social commentary but failed to deliver on it. Several people wanted it to be an indictment about suburban America, or some kind of story about the horror of school shootings.
I guess I can see where that’s coming from; I know I often go into movies in cinema studies mode, looking for symbolism and demanding that everything have some deeper meaning. That’s what makes a movie smart, right?
Maybe there is a level of satire in Weapons that I simply missed, but my main takeaway was that what makes this movie smart is that it’s a masterfully-executed horror story, manipulating all the tools of cinematic storytelling to deliver on moments that are intriguing, horrifying, or comedic, sometimes simultaneously.
We see a kid has run directly towards a broadcast tower in the distance — is there some kind of sci-fi government conspiracy? Is Justine playing the victim while she’s secretly a witch? Is there some dark force hiding out in the woods? I thought Archer’s dream wasn’t intended to be symbolic, but another bit of weird misdirection, forcing us to think about what it “means” when it was actually (if I remember correctly) just an image from a poster on his shitty kid’s wall.5 I mean, when he wakes up from that dream, his first words aren’t “a-ha! A clue!” but “What the fuck?!”
2025-08-09 13:49:21
On her AI Weirdness site, and in her book You Look Like a Thing And I Love You, Janelle Shane has been sharing her experiments with various machine learning models, pointing out the most humorous failures, and then explaining how application of this technology without being mindful of all of its potential and actual, proven pitfalls can do serious harm to society.
Her posts have been less common lately, because the technology (and its ubiquitous mis-application) has advanced to the point where it’s no longer funny. Which depressingly sums up how I feel about it at this point.
This was prompted by an online conversation about AI, but it’s not just a response to that, because it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. This is just a lament over the spectacular failure of something that could have been genuinely ground-breaking and useful technology.
I’m most interested in its applications to computer vision. As someone who started programming on a Commodore 64, it’s still almost preposterously magical that a freely-available system can do accurate hand tracking (and considerably less accurate but still impressive full-body tracking) from a photo or single camera feed. And that’s a somewhat simple case that’s a few years old; other models have already gone beyond that. It’s equally magical that you can run object recognition models on a computer as small as a Raspberry Pi.
It also could’ve been extraordinarily useful to computer programmers. Yes, programming is an “art” as much as a science, but the bulk of the tasks that most programmers are going to be doing day-to-day is implementing new solutions to already-solved problems, and fitting existing libraries or methodologies together to solve a new problem. What if you had a tool that could take a natural-language explanation of the problem that you’re trying to solve, and respond with an (often) functional piece of example code?
Or in other words: what if Stack Overflow was actually useful, instead of being overrun with poorly-socialized assholes who refuse to answer your question and instead either call you stupid, or tell you to RTFM even though you clearly already have?
But even a clear-cut example like that, an application that should’ve been a no-brainer, is so fraught with grossness that it can’t overcome the LLM stink. No, it’s not asking computers to be creative, or even to reason at any meaningful level, but it’s hollowing out and devaluing institutional knowledge.
One of the most common defenses of “AI” is that it’s “democratizing,” but it’s anything but: it treats entry-level positions as easily-interchangeable generators of easily-interchangeable boilerplate code for already-solved problems. It’s short-sighted, because it doesn’t treat the entry-level positions as longer-term investments. It doesn’t appreciate that being able to understand and deduce the solution is what turns entry-level programmers into the type of seasoned veterans who can be assholes on Stack Overflow.
It should be obvious that applying generative AI to creative roles is even worse. Should be obvious, but since when has that ever stopped a rich person from getting dollar signs in his eyes, or the countless sycophants online who will fall over themselves for the chance to publicly defend them?
People like to point to the nauseatingly horrific images generated by early versions of Google DeepMind, and compare them to the nauseatingly uninspired, same-looking, inartistically lit images generated by current models, and insist that this is a technology that is improving without limit. Which is like suggesting that if Usain Bolt had just kept on training, he would’ve eventually achieved flight.
You can understand why that idea is appealing to people whose accumulation of wealth depends on the notion of lines going ever up without limit. People who have millions or billions of dollars, but still believe they don’t have enough, are not the people you want in charge of making sane and reasonable assessments of the capabilities and applications of technology.
But instead, they point to the examples of genuine advancement, but completely dismiss or outright ignore the most obvious fundamental problems. They insist that the people online are dim-witted luddites for pointing and laughing at how generative AI can’t replace artists because they can’t even get the number of fingers right. Then they say that everyone who questioned them was a fool because look, this model can do five fingers, and also we’ve eliminated or outsourced all of our illustrators.
It’s like opening a new Jurassic Park and saying that we can ignore all of the criticisms of the previous ones, because you see, these dinosaurs have feathers.
The whole limitless potential/line goes up hype draws obvious comparisons to cryptocurrency, especially since we’ve got the same arrogant dipshits (often, the exact same dipshits) saying that anybody who’s critical of the hype is just too non-technical or just plain dim-witted to understand it. At least that was immediately recognizable as a pyramid scheme, though. And whatever genuine applications of blockchain technology that might exist are so narrow that it resisted attempts to shove it where it doesn’t belong.
Something remarkable about the current “AI” hype is that it runs so deep, it uses criticism as part of the hype. The people publicly talking about these systems will call errors “hallucinations,” or make other similar attempts to anthropomorphize what is essentially an extremely complex predictive text generator.
The page for OpenAI’s “Sora” project to generate video clips has a section with failed videos, including a particularly unsettling one with a woman failing to blow out candles on a cake, with people in the background trying and failing to clap or control their hands correctly. The description OpenAI includes describes it as a “humorous generation” instead of a horrific freakshow. In another, it says that “Sora fails to model the chair as a solid object, leading to inaccurate physical interactions.”
This strikes me as particularly sinister, because it disguises itself as transparency and objective criticism, when it’s actually just more hype. It’s always carefully worded to suggest two things: 1) that these are just bugs that can and will be worked out of systems that are continuously improving without limit, and 2) these systems are actually thinking. If you call a “failure” a “hallucination” enough times, you eventually get people to think of these things not as ML models but as brains.
So on top of the obvious complaints about unethical training data, egregiously inappropriate application of the technology, destroying jobs that executives see as replaceable, degrading search engines and customer service experiences, and the numerous well-documented environmental concerns, it’s all just so disappointing. The applications that could’ve really benefited from this technology have been irreparably tainted by overhype and misuse.
You’ll often see people online pointing and laughing at generative “AI” failing to correctly answer the most basic of questions, for good reason. The most recent one I’ve been seeing is easily-reproducible and repeatable examples of ChatGPT being unable to count the number of the letter b in the word “blueberry.”
“AI” apologists are quick to claim that this is irrelevant, because that’s simply not what these systems were designed to do. But this attempt at a defense just shows how far things have gone off the rails. If you have a software system that gives unpredictably bad results, that’s a broken system. It’s ludicrous to the point of offensive to suggest that known failures of the software are actually just user error. “You’re doing it wrong.”
Also absurd: “Look at all the things it can do, and you’re complaining about this?” It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what tools are for. A tool has to be trustworthy before you can insist that people everywhere use it. Apple found out after they abandoned Google Maps for their own solution that it’s unacceptable to be correct most of the time. Many people found the experience so unreliable that they never went back, and they still don’t trust Apple’s version. (For what it’s worth: I prefer Apple Maps now, and I use it a lot).
And crucially: it’s recklessly arrogant to present “AI” as a replacement for technology that it doesn’t actually build on or improve on. It’s overkill to ask Wolfram|Alpha to do basic arithmetic, but at least it can do it. Tech giants have replaced previously functional tools with unreliable “AI” systems and responded to obvious errors with just a shrug and a “shit happens, yo.”
I’m grossly simplifying complex and varied systems into what is essentially pattern-matching, mostly because I only have a layman’s understanding of how they work. But it does strike me as particularly offensive that a multi-billion dollar effort doesn’t even bother to fall back to tasks that could easily be handled by grep. It says a lot about the people behind this “AI” push is that they have a system that will generate pages of confident bullshit instead of simply acknowledging “I don’t know.”
Obviously it’s a huge waste of resources to request a complex ML system to do something as simple as counting the number of letters in a word, but that’s not just some random “gotcha” that online luddites have come up with. It’s a huge part of the problem. Using tons of resources to inject “AI” generated text into every Google request is wasteful. Using tons of resources to generate seconds of video that could’ve been made by skilled 3D artists is wasteful. It’s most often just an extremely expensive and resource-intensive solution looking for a problem that’s already been solved.
While looking for an image for this post, I just entered “why can’t we have nice things” into Google, and below is a small portion of the page-long response the “AI” generated for me.
It gives an unnecessarily long explanation of the idiom, and then includes a link to a Taylor Swift video that I didn’t ask for. Then there multiple paragraphs with bulleted lists claiming to discuss the expression and its implications, along with another link to the same song, for some reason. At the end is a very small disclaimer saying “AI responses may include mistakes.”
This isn’t going to get passed around as a meme, because it’s not incorrect enough to be interesting. Technically, it’s not incorrect at all. It’s just all completely, depressingly, unnecessary.
It’s all delivered in the style of a BuzzFeed post, or the text at the beginning of an online recipe: it’s probably all grammatically correct, and it’s not egregiously counter-factual or anything, but it simply doesn’t say anything. I can’t imagine how any of it would be useful to anyone. At least, anyone who wasn’t trying to generate filler text to pad out a word count. It is no more and no less than “content.” The best you can say for it is that it takes up space.
I used to be optimistic about how all of this stuff was going to play out. The novelty would wear off, the bubble would burst, and people would eventually realize they’d been taken in by smoke and mirrors. Maybe we’d end up with sane and reasonable applications for machine learning that could be trained ethically and run efficiently.
Now, though, it depressingly seems like the reason people find generative “AI” so appealing is because they’ve devalued not just artists, writers, and programmers, but because they’ve devalued original thought. The people yearn for filler.