The weekend after the Google I/O presentation has been dizzying. Most of the time when they drop shit like this it's a bunch of tech demos - systems in search of a use case, let alone an end product. Naw. We're fucked. They have put a stick in their own spokes so many times on the way to this moment, and have now arrived at the point where they can just do a kickflip on the grave of the worker. I wonder if they just asked their Devil Engine, in the end. I suspect the version they have is perhaps less circumspect than the ones we are allowed to play with.

It's getting to the point where the majority of the videos I see on TikTok, which is the platform everyone else is trying to ape, are made by AI. If we add videos that are merely enabled by AI, we reach a plurality of the content pretty handily. This includes the advertisements, which have been an increasing share of the feed particularly since the "removal" of the app. I saw a video about a legal effort to sue solar companies for misleading customers, and the human beings in the foreground were utterly, utterly indistinguishable from real people. Their frustration with the Sun Lords was palpable. It was only when you saw the background details that you could tell something was amiss: a contractor on the roof removed a panel that mysteriously became two panels when he set it down. Another tossed a panel as though it were made of cardboard. Another set of panels weren't uniform in any way, shape, or form, propped up against the house.

By and large our feelings on this kind of thing cohere around our role as "creatives," which is the epithet our masters have chosen to describe the irreducible portion of labor. You get salty when people take your shit to summon belial.exe and then say that they didn't do that or that if they did there's no proof or that yeah we did it, but it's the only way we can make demons. Or they try to make a law that says nothing can be done to restrict it for ten years. Or that they have to take the stuff because if we don't, our wily adversary in The East will dominate us.

Our concerns are ultimately material, but they spring from floofy ideas about aesthetics and humanity. The reality of the situation is that our society is uniquely ill-prepared for a force like this - there's no baseline healthcare, the safety net is moth-eaten. Of course I would love to continue holding forth about my bugaboos, but Jesus. What is the opposite of the Genesis Device?

(CW)TB out.