It’s always been about context and provenance. Who took the image? Are there supporting accounts?

But also, it has always been about the knowlege that no one… Absolutely no one… Does lines of coke from a woven mat floor covering.

All my heart still belongs to the canon HV20 forum. It taught me how to film, it taught me how to chat to people in an online community.

It was never about a camcorder. It was about connection.

Plus, you could search for stuff on google and the forum results would pop up. Good look with discord doing that.

Well, once again a tech company gives a service I don’t care for an overhaul I don’t want and tries to charge a fee I won’t pay.

I suspect when this doesn’t do the numbers they want they’ll try adding a user fee to oxygen as a retaliation.

“There are no ways to prevent such attacks except when the user’s VPN runs on Linux or Android.”

So there are ways.

Bet you are into NFTs too, huh?

I’m not afraid of AI and I’m certainly not a luddite my friend. I used to lecture about technology in art on several university courses.

I’ve used algorithms to generate work that has been shown on an international stage, and used computers to run massive participatory art shows.

I currently work in publishing, and I can’t express how much AI has already impacted the landscape through generative text. It doesn’t compete with traditional authors, it just smothers them through sheer volume. It clogs up submission processes and it fills open calls… And nearly every one using generative methods thinks they should be called an “author” just because they put a few words into a prompt.

There really is a reason I hold this point if view and it is based on experience and education as well as being part of an industry that this is already having an impact on.

If you want me to take you seriously, I’m going to need some real discussion around the firm that goes beyond name calling and vague statements.

The problem is that most artists make money from commercial clients and most clients don’t want “good”.

The want “good enough” and “cheap”.

And that’s why it is taking artists jobs.

AI art is, by very definition, average.

It’s the best fit line. It’s the most common. The mean or the median.

The best art is exceptional.

What a strange and wonderful beast Vice was.

The very idea of calling a middle class millenial hipster a journalist and sending them off to a war torn country so they could do drugs with a cartel and report back on the underground scene there is pure 2010s.

And when it happened across real journalism, it took it in its stride. This was the competition to main stream media. It was aware and smart.

It was also shockingly platform literate. The video content was just as vital as the written stuff.

The fact it didn’t endure is pretty sad. It’s fairly indicative of where we are going.

I saw this article the same day that I saw Google announce the removal of the news tab from its search results.

Not good times.

Does your dad work at Nintendo too?

(I don’t doubt that this might happen, but you know, going to need some actual evidence, or at least more than random dude twitter stuff)

I’m a little agnostic on piracy. I don’t mind if others are into it, but I use my local library. I watch older films that can be found cheaply. Sometimes I just choose to do something else.

They keep you on this hook, this notion of current culture. The excitement of the new big thing that everyone’s watching, but really your fomo is being exploited, and often that’s also true of people pirating the material. They are still contributing to this very social form of advertising display.

However, I’d stand by pirates who are looking to find films that have been made, deliberately, unavailable in the public space because corporations can see profit in their absence.

It’s that horrible situation isn’t it?

The internet was riddled with adverts everywhere. Intrusive things that ate up our time and our bandwidth.

So we used ad blockers.

It became clear that even the folk that didn’t use ad blockers were worthless. That is, the market decided their attention was worthless.

The bottom fell out of the advertising market, so business moved to a subscription model.

We all supported it initially. Netflix was held up as a brilliant model.

Then the subscription services got greedy and let advertising in anyway. Except that money no longer funds your experience, not does it really fund the creators. It just funds the owner of the streaming service.

Meanwhile, the lack of feedback that advertising gave as a metric means that the services are becoming worse, delivering lower quality product.

And now it’s 2023 and I find myself defending advertising.

You might enjoy this short story.

https://thestatictravelwriter.co.uk/prime-and-mash