"Expensive karaoke"

"I am not here to prosecute Michael Jackson or Michael the film (I won’t be seeing it), but it has driven me to once again say: we need a moratorium on musical biopics. ...

"In recent years we’ve seen biopics about Bob Dylan, Elton John, (two about) Elvis, Robbie Williams, Bruce Springsteen and Amy Winehouse. In production currently are FOUR Beatles biopics, with a separate feature film planned for each member. As with a lot of these movies, the conversation tends to revolve around who is playing the character, how much they look like them or not, how much they sound like them or not (anyone remember months of conversation about Austin Butler’s Elvis voice?), whether the movie is true to life, and so on.

"The main characters of biopics are so familiar to us that the discussion and viewing experience often centres on comparison over content. These are people we are already familiar with, stories we already know, performances we’ve already seen the real versions of. The worst result is essentially expensive karaoke.

"Aren’t we tired? Wouldn’t it be a good time after four individual Beatles movies to have a break from this genre? ... At least Robbie Williams tried something new by making himself into a monkey. ..."

~ Rebecca Shaw from her column 'Please stop making music biopics. We need a break from this tired genre that is essentially expensive karaoke'

"All this might not be so bad if musician biopics weren’t so fake. The whitewashing of Michael Jackson is just another example of the phoniness. I’m now old enough to watch films of this sort where I knew personally some of the people portrayed onscreen, and the gap between the film and reality is wider than Snake River Canyon—and way too wide to jump if you care at all about the real artists and real history behind these films."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Hottest Musician in 2026 Is 'Problematic' Michael Jackson'

"So welcome to the lovely new economy where being human actually matters."

 

"This is the new secret strategy in the arts, and it’s built on the simplest thing you can imagine -- namely, existing as a human being. ...

"You see the same thing in media right now, where livestreaming is taking off. ...

"This return to human contact is happening everywhere, not just media and the arts. ... I see it myself in store after store. People will wait in line for flesh-and-blood clerks, instead of checking out faster at the do-it-yourself counter.

"But this isn’t happenstance -- it’s a sign of the times....

"As AI customer service becomes more pervasive, the luxury brands will survive by offering this human touch. ...

"Even tech companies [like Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and QoBuz] are figuring this out. ...

"Welcome to the new world of flesh-and-blood concierges and curators. That’s now the ultimate status symbol. ... In fact, the Silicon Valley elites forcing tech down our throats will only make us hate cold, sterile tech more than ever. And they won’t fix that problem by training AI to pretend to be human. That just adds insult to injury.

"This might even be the hot new career path -- readymade for curators, concierges, caregivers, conversationalists, and other people who love people. As the old pop song anticipated, they might just end up being the happiest people of them all.

"So welcome to the lovely new economy where being human actually matters. Go ahead, try it out. Be cool -- be a human. All the bots in botdom will never be able to take that away from you."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The New Cool Thing: Being Human'

"This is [is this?] the sound of a bubble popping."

"Mark Zuckerberg had exciting news to share yesterday. His company Meta had finished a great quarter—and would continue to increase spending on AI.

"He said that yesterday afternoon. But when the market opened this morning, Meta shares dropped more than $80. That’s $200 billion in market cap wiped out in an instant. 

Meta’s share price this week 

"Why don’t investors like AI? Only a few months ago, companies saw their shares skyrocket when they made AI investments.

"In September, Oracle’s stock shot up 36% in just one day after announcing a huge deal with OpenAI. The share price increase was enough to make the company’s founder Larry Ellison the richest man in the world.

"But then investors changed their mind. Since that big day, Oracle shares have fallen $60. Larry Ellison is no longer the richest man in the world.

"This is [is this?] the sound of a bubble popping."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Bubble Just Burst'

"Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is spending untold billions on infrastructure and top talent for its AI ambitions.

"In fact, the CEO announced during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday, Meta will be spending between $70 billion and $72 billion on AI this year — up from its previous estimate of $66 billion to $72 billion, as CNBC reports.

"Unsurprisingly, that cash bonfire isn’t going over well with investors. Meta’s shares slid by more than 11 percent on Thursday, indicating widespread skepticism about the company’s ability to stop bleeding billions of dollars as it races to keep up with the AI industry’s ever-escalating expenditure commitments.

"That’s particularly striking because the drop comes in spite of Meta’s revenues exceeding Wall Street’s estimates. In other words, out of control AI spending is starting to rattle investors. 'The total dollar spend is just kind of what hangs us up a little bit,' [said one]...

"The AI industry is seemingly approaching a major inflection point, with Meta competitors Alphabet, and Microsoft tripling down on AI by increasing their planned spending to even loftier heights, fuelling fears of a growing AI bubblethat could take down the entire US economy with it if ever pops."

~ Victor Tangermann from his post 'Meta Stock Plummets as Investors Horrified at How Much Zuckerberg Is Spending on Misfired AI'

The dawn of the post-literate society (and the end of civilisation?)

"If you’ve ... been concerned with the decline of reading as a leisure activity, or you’re wondering what happens if a culture abandons literacy, this is a conversation for you. ... ranging from the rise and fall of literacy, the causes behind it ..., and what this could mean for politics. ...

"[S]tatistics, which show pretty consistently—... and virtually everywhere—that reading is in quite severe decline. ... [A] third of UK adults have given up reading for pleasure. ... UK reports shocking and dispiriting falls in children reading for pleasure. Researchers .... found a 40% drop in reading for pleasure in the last 20 years in America. [A]n OECD report at the end of last year found rates of literacy were falling or stagnating across the developed world ...[P]ublishing’s been dying for 100 years. But ... even college graduates have by and large abandoned reading for pleasure after they leave university. ... And the most talented and the most ambitious students [themselves] now read almost the same as the least talented students who have often not really read that much. ...

"[I]f we were to abandon literacy, you might expect some devastating consequences, or at least the world would be quite different than the world we’ve become used to living in, especially in the last 500 years when literacy became a widespread phenomenon. ... if writing transforms consciousness, how does television or broadcast transform consciousness? What do we lose when we move towards rapidity and breadth over slowness and depth?"

~ from an interview with Jared Henderson and James Marriot on 'The Post-Literate Society'

RELATED: 1. Marriot's post on The dawn of the post-literate society ...

 

RELATED: 2. Conversely, author Jonathan Rose reflects 20 years later on his book, first published in 2001, uncovering which books people read, how they educated themselves, and what they knew; from the preindustrial era to the twentieth century:

'If I today had a chance to rewrite [my book] The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes ["the classic book about auto-didacticism, especially in the UK"], would I revise anything? I have changed my mind about one important issue. In 2001 I assumed that the autodidact tradition died out after 1945, but it is today very much alive and kicking. Twenty-first century book clubs – untold thousands of them in the UK and US – are the successors to the nineteenth-century 'mutual improvement societies.' These are seminars without professors, where students democratically select their readings and educate each other.

"The Internet is, for all its flaws, the greatest machine for self-education ever invented, and it does far more good than harm. The fact that the powerful and wealthy want to control and censor it is a testimonial to its immeasurable social value. When economic inequality is breaking all records, when the media is concentrated in ever fewer hands and deeply complicit with corporations and governments, when universities create vast bureaucracies devoted to shutting down debate, when Western liberals have abandoned liberalism, online discussion groups and websites must be preserved as islands of free thought and individual self-direction."

 

"The single biggest reason why social media is now a dead-end for musicians is that people can’t remember the names of artists or the titles of songs they like."

"The single biggest reason why social media is now a dead-end for musicians is that people can’t remember the names of artists or the titles of songs they like. ...

"Many will blame GenZ for this disturbing passivity. And even the youngsters admit that the music they hear on TikTok and Instagram is mostly chosen by algorithm, not their own active engagement. But social media platforms are driving these behaviour patterns—and are the real root cause of our threatened culture.

"These platforms aim to control behaviour with their algorithms. They encourage passivity. This is all by design. ...

"In a sane universe, the major record labels would fight against this anonymity and ambivalence. But, instead, they have embraced TikTok—assuming that it will create the next generation of superstar artists.

"I fretted about that in a blistering 2022 article entitled “Record Labels Dig Their Own Grave. And the Shovel is Called TikTok.” I wonder if they have figured that out yet.

"I fear they might still be digging."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'Listeners Can't Remember the Names of Their Favorite Songs and Artists'

Never trust a lawyer ...

 ... even when they're (supposed to be) on your side.

Ted Gioia has the breaking news:

Authors win a big lawsuit against AI—but the judge says they may not be able to trust their own lawyers. 

He explains that the high-tech plagiarism modus of these "large-learning models" (LLMs) simply means that the models are "trained" on thousands of books, and millions of articles and blog posts. All written by an actual person. A person holding copyright in that work.

So when authors, in a class action, won an ironclad case again AI company Anthropic for violating their copyrights ...

 "some thought that this might result in “more than a trillion dollars in damages.” That would put Anthropic in bankruptcy and send a message to the entire AI industry: Don’t mess with creators!

Yay! 

But ...

Instead the lawyers negotiated a quick deal for $1.5 billion—and Anthropic didn’t even need to admit wrongdoing. But the penalty was so light that the judge has refused to accept it. Instead he expresses concern that the settlement will be forced “down the throat of authors.”

How is this possible? Their own lawyers negotiated the deal.

But listen to the judge. He admits that class members often “get the shaft” in situations like this. And he adds: “I have an uneasy feeling about hangers-on with all this money on the table.”

Simply put, lawyers want their commission more than they care about their clients. Or their case.

This is the sad reality of copyright litigation to protect human creators. My copyrights as an author have been violated and I don’t want a cash settlement—I want the stealing stopped. I want a Napster-style shutdown, and there’s legal precedent to support this. But what lawyer can I trust? They make money on a cash settlement, not on stopping AI use of my book.

Expect to see similar settlements in music copyrights. A few people will get a nice payday, but nothing else will change.

"This is called failure. There’s no other name for it."

"2025 has been the year of garbage culture. ...

"But something has changed in the last few days. ...

"[P]eople are disgusted, and finally pushing back. And they are doing so with such fervor that even the biggest AI companies are now getting nervous and pulling back. ...

"I’m focused here on AI’s destructive impact on culture, but there are other signs that growing AI resistance is now forcing companies to reconsider their bot mania.

"'An IBM survey of 2,000 chief executives found three out of four AI projects failed to show a return on investment, a remarkably high failure rate,' reports Andrew Orlowski. 'AI agents fail to complete the job successfully about 65 to 70 percent of the time, says a study by Carnegie Mellon University and Salesforce.'

"He also shared the results of a devastating test that debunked AI’s status in its favorite field, namely writing code. This study reveals that software developers think they are operating 20% faster with AI, but they’re actually running 19% slower.

"Some companies are bringing back human workers because AI can’t deliver positive results. Even AI researchers are now expressing skepticism. And only 30% of AI project leaders can say that their CEOs are happy with AI results.

"This is called failure. There’s no other name for it."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'We Are Winning!'

TRENDWWATCH: The Collapse of the (Existing) Knowledge System.

"Would you believe me if I told you that the biggest news story of our century is happening right now—but is never mentioned in the press?

"That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?

"But that is often the case when a bold new worldview appears. ... We are living through a situation like that right now. ... a total shift—like the magnetic poles reversing. But it doesn’t even have a name—not yet.

"So let’s give it one.

"Let’s call it: The Collapse of the Knowledge System. ... The knowledge structure that has dominated everything for our entire lifetime—and for our parents and grandparents—is collapsing. And it’s taking place everywhere, all at once. ... Let me list ten signs of this collapse. 

(1) Scientific studies don't replicate. ... [and]  fake studies get cited more often than reliable ones. ...

(2) Public distrust of experts has reached an intensity never seen before. ...

(3) The career path for knowledge workers is breaking down—and many only have unpaid student loans to show for their years of training and preparation. ... Art history majors now have an easier time finding a job than computer engineers. ...

(4) Funding for science and tech research is disappearing in every sphere and sector. ... corporations that fund their own research programs are now investing in AI data centers, not scientists. ...

(5) Universities have lost their prestige, and have made enemies of their core constituencies. ...

(6) Plagiarism is getting exposed at all levels from students to corporations—and all the way to Harvard's president. But the authorities just take it for granted. ... It’s even embedded in the dominant technologies and institutions. ... 

(7) AI is imposed everywhere as the new expert system. But when it hallucinates and generates ridiculous responses, the authorities (again) take this for granted. ... And they never, ever apologise. ... 

(8) Science and technology are increasingly used to manipulate and exploit, not serve ... [and we] now see actual degradation in every sphere of technology. ... 

(9) Scandals are everywhere in the knowledge economy (Theranos, Sam Bankman-Fried, collapsing meme coins, COVID, etc). ... nobody is shocked anymore. They lost trust in knowledge tech industries long ago. ... 

(10) We hear constant bickering about “fake science”—from all political and ideological stances. Nobody talks about “true science” ...

"Let me point out that despite all the manipulations, hallucinations, abuses, and dysfunctional excesses of the digital life…

"…Despite all of these, symphonies sound as majestic as ever. Philosophy is more necessary than ever. Paintings are still glorious. Great architecture does not collapse. Nature warms the heart. As do poems and epics and myths.

"Jazz still swings. Heroes still prevail. The soul is stirred. And one lover still reaches for another.

"I’m not sure what exactly will replace the cold, dying knowledge system. But I suspect it will recognize the value of these things. And will prevail for that very reason. ...

"I’m not suggesting that you can replace tech with a poem. But tech now desparately needs what can only be provided by the humanities and human values.

"The new knowledge system will be built on these human values. Technology will be forced to serve it—or it will get locked into a losing battle with the new 'softer and gentler' knowledge system."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The Ten Warning Signs'

The role of experts

DOUGLAS MURRAY TOOK OVER Joe Rogan's podcast recently to call him out for platforming "revisionist, amateur historians who inflate their own importance while disavowing any expertise." In other words, ignoramuses on the very topic of their alleged speciality.

I wouldn't know if Rogan fits that bill because I've never listened to his podcast. But I do know it's widely influential. So bullshit begun there and in similar fever swamps elsewhere ('Hitler was right,' they might nod sagely, while laughing that 'the Holocaust never happened') spreads far and wide. So he's right to criticise these non-experts who swing their dicks in total ignorance of their topic — as if it's their ignorance, rather than their expertise, that demands they have a hearing. 

This problem is everywhere right now. Just take a look around, and you can see the crisis playing out in real time.
There’s plenty of noise and spin. But people want something rock solid, and as reliable as a Swiss watch.
But where can you find it now? Who can you really trust? Who do I really trust?

Yes, there is a role for those with expertise in a subject. But as Ted Gioia asks, Who Are the Real Experts Now?

Q: Do you distrust experts?

TED: No, the exact opposite is true. I respect expertise. But I think that some outsiders have more expertise than insiders. ... I never make distinctions on the basis of titles and degrees. Sometimes they correlate with expertise, but many times they don’t.

We all know that. Don't we. 

Here’s an interesting fact—if you made a list of the Stanford and Harvard students who have had the biggest impact on technology, at least half of them would be dropouts.

Expertise doesn't necessarily come wrapped in a degree. 

Th[is is] how the world should work. Your expertise should be your credential. Instead we pretend that your credential is your expertise.

There’s a huge difference between those two approaches. And I’m a firm advocate of the former. ...

Many of the intellectuals who shaped my own thinking were outsiders without PhDs. Consider the case of Susan Sontag, who never got her doctorate, but was the most celebrated literary critic of her generation. The same is true of Northrop Frye and Edmund Wilson, both of them critics of immense stature.

C.S. Lewis is still another example. ... He taught at Oxford for 29 years, and was famous all over the world. But his title was just tutor. ...

Consider the case of George Steiner—one of the most illustrious polymaths of my lifetime—but his doctoral thesis was initially rejected at Oxford.

He turned it into a famous book, The Death of Tragedy, and eventually received his doctorate, but he never really got accepted by insiders. Even after a half-century of publishing and lecturing at the highest level, he faced intense hostility from professional academics.

I think it was due to envy. ...

Steiner was an intellectual superstar—an expert at the highest level.

Expertise is the credential. The credential is not the expertise.

Gioia's own insights come from a lifetime shared between jazz ("I didn’t have a music degree. But I had ability, and I could back it up.") and corporate consulting.

I learned a big lesson from [consulting]. I learned that positional power is not the same as true expertise. And expertise always earns respect, even if it doesn’t come with a fancy job title.

I believe that is true in every field. There are experts who don’t have elite credentials—but everybody trust them. And, if you ask around, you will find out who they are.

Let me blunt. People with the highest level of expertise are very rare. So they stand out, even if they lack an impressive degree or prestigious institutional affiliation.

So you need some expertise to find the genuine experts. Gioia suggests five ways to judge the reliability of what he calls "indie experts" — that is, folk who aren't just talking their book, who don’t have institutional overseers or gatekeepers controlling what they say. They could be outsider academics, bloggers, or even big-mouthed podcasters.  But they first and foremost need a grip on reality. And then:

• Pay attention to which indie voices correctly predict the future. 
• See which ones identify key issues before others notice them. 
• See which ones tell you truths that insiders won’t mention. 
• See which people offer coherent explanations of situations that others find confusing.
• And, finally, see who is willing to speak out bravely in the face of powerful embedded interests.

When you find people who do that, you are in safe hands. They are the real experts.

It's unlikely they're going to be supporting, or promoting, Holocaust denial. 

"What we have here is (mostly) a failure to communicate"

 

"Below are 40 journal entries on the current state of public discourse.
    "Like the captain said in 'Cool Hand Luke', what we have here is (mostly) a failure to communicate.
    "But we’re now failing to communicate in totally new ways.

"1. All digital communication is reverting back to primitive ways. The emoji is like the hieroglyphic. The meme is akin to the cave painting. The text message is a throwback to the telegraph.
    "So it’s no surprise that people are scrolling on their phones. I can almost hear the rustle of the papyrus.

"2.Why do I see all these homemade videos of people talking into the camera while sitting alone in their cars?
    "They’re not even driving—just standing still. They’re literally going nowhere.
    "Is an empty automobile the new town square? ...

"3. Alexander Graham Bell would be shocked. The phone is now a device you use to speak into the void. You talk to nobody at all.
    "But we still keep talking.

"4. The most popular social media platforms will be those that allow people to avoid responsibility for what they say.
    "Every society has institutions of this sort. In ancient times, it was the bacchanalia. For us it is online shitposting and the burner account.

"5. Consider the etymology of the word ‘dictator’—from the Latin dictare (which translates as ‘to say often’). It thus designates a person who talks obsessively—repeating the same thing over and over.
    "It’s curious that dictators aren’t defined by their deeds, merely their monotonous talk. The assertion of power through repetitive speaking eliminates the needs for listening, or (at an extreme) even for action."

~ Ted Gioia from his post '40 Observations on Public Discourse'

We are living in the Age of Slop

"A century ago, the creative world was buzzing with exciting artistic movements. Everything was fresh, new, and vital:

• You could be a Surrealist or a Futurist or a Post-Impressionist or a Cubist. 
• You could align yourself with Art Deco or Dada or Bauhaus or Fauvism. 
• You could proclaim your allegiance to Imagism or Verismo or the Harlem Renaissance—and dozens of other creative movements.

"And what about today? …..

"Instead of aesthetic manifestos, we get web platforms. They have machines to make big decisions—and the machines have invented the dominant art style of our day.

"It’s called Slop. And it’s everywhere.

"There’s Slop music and Slop visual art and Slop video. There’s Slop enough for all of us—because the machines Slop nonstop. ... It’s easy: Just find an AI bot, and give it a prompt—the goofier the better.

"So I created this image of Vladimir Putin and Taylor Swift on a motorbike, with teddy bears celebrating the couple’s impending nuptials.

"Yes, I am deliberately creating something ridiculous. But that’s the essence of Slop. ...

"AI image generation is boring unless the results are stupid. That’s the consensus view. And it’s why AI artists are in a race to make the most abominable Slop they can extract from the bots.

"People collect and curate these images. Entire social media accounts are devoted to stupid Slop. ... The supply is endless—because AI never sleeps.

"We have come a long way from the days of Impressionism and Naturalism and all the rest. Those were serious movements. They happened because of dedicated artists committed to their craft.

"Slop is the opposite.

"It’s the perfect aesthetic theory for twelve-year olds with no artistic sensitivity—but possessing a crude sense of humour and lots of pop culture detritus in their heads. ...

"[N]one of this happens by chance.

"AI does not possess a self. It lacks personhood. It has no experience of subjectivity. So any art it creates will inevitably feel empty and hollow.

"Any human quality it possesses will be based on imitation, pretense, and deception. None of it is real.

"AI doesn’t even have a direct sense of objectivity—its knowledge of objects is all secondhand, assimilated through data. This results in a lack of depth or felt significance in any artistic work it creates.

"That why Slop is inevitable in an Age of AI.

"But this will not stop it from dominating the aesthetics of our time. ...

"In a previous day, people who got rich quick but lacked good taste were called vulgar. I don’t hear that word much anymore. But maybe it should have a comeback."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The New Aesthetics of Slop'

"People want reality—with all its energy and messiness. And that’s the one thing Silicon Valley cannot deliver."

"We are now a quarter of the way into the digitised 21st century, and screen interfaces no longer feel fresh or new or enlivening.
    "People want reality—with all its energy and messiness. And that’s the one thing Silicon Valley cannot deliver."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'Live Music Is Coming Back!'

You won't have time to read this ...

... because who has time for reading when there's a new Tik Tok to upload!

Sure, some of us still read things longer than a text. But the "hot trend" these days, observes culture critic and "Honest Broker" Ted Gioia, is compulsive activity. Distraction.

Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.
    The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.
    It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.
    TikTok made a fortune with fast-paced scrolling video. And now Facebook—once a place to connect with family and friends—is imitating it. 'So long, Granny, hello Reels.' Twitter has done the same. And, of course, Instagram, YouTube, and everybody else trying to get rich on social media. ...

And you thought artists had it tough back in the day?
    Even the dumbest entertainment looks like Shakespeare compared to dopamine culture. You don’t need 'Hamlet,' a photo of a hamburger will suffice. Or a video of somebody twerking, or a pet looking goofy.
    Instead of movies, users get served up an endless sequence of 15-second videos. Instead of symphonies, listeners hear bite-sized melodies, usually accompanied by one of these tiny videos—just enough for a dopamine hit, and no more.
    This is the new culture. And its most striking feature is the absence of Culture (with a capital C) or even mindless entertainment—both get replaced by compulsive activity. 

His answer to this is surprising. It's ritual. Being there.

Genuine ritual is always embedded in a time and place, and cannot be uploaded or downloaded. Go ahead, get married online, [attend a funeral online], or conduct your graduation ceremony via Zoom, but these experiences will feel hollow. The virtual world creates a hunger for real ritual in an actual physical community of human beings. No website or app can satisfy this hunger on its own.What can you do about it? Gioia's answer? Ritual.

'Cos there's nothing like being there, is there ...

"If you’re serious about an education ... the cumulative impact of this is life-changing"

Barockhaus (Library) Görlitz, Germany

"What you learn in classrooms is irrelevant, and sometimes even worthless -- you must take responsibility for your own education. ...
    "[M]ore than 90% of my education came on my own. ... That’s a useful skill—teaching yourself. Maybe the most useful ...
    "[B]ack when I was a teenager I decided I wanted to possess genuine wisdom. You can laugh at that if you want. The very word wisdom seems tainted nowadays. ... And along with it, I wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. That seemed urgently important to me as a teenager. It still does today. ...
    "I spent a lot of time reading -- I mean Orca-sized time blocks.... I read for mind-expansion, not entertainment, and seek out challenging books... This has always been my pattern. If books were my drug, I always was taking the big intense dose that offered the greatest out-of-body experience. ...
    "If you’re serious about an education, you should read at least one or two long, challenging books each year. When other people pick up light beach reading for the summer, you ought to grab Thucydides or Gibbon or Musil or Woolf or Schopenhauer.
    "When I was 18, I tackled War and Peace. When I was 19, I did Don Quixote. The next year, I read The Brothers Karamazov, and after that it was Moby Dick and The Tale of Genji and The Magic Mountain. And I’ve kept doing this for decades.
    "The cumulative impact of this is life-changing...."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'My Lifetime Reading Plan'

"Our culture [has] shifted into a darker, more pessimistic phase

Source: Chris Dalla Riva

"Songs are a cultural indicator... Sadness is so widespread among youngsters (especially teen girls) that the Centers for Disease Control is now tracking it. So we shouldn’t be surprised that music and cultural indicators reflect the same reality.
    "Even the candidates for song of the [northern hemisphere] summer are filled with quiet despair—so much so that Spotify declared it the 'bummer summer.' ...
    "So what songs do sad teens want to hear during a bummer summer?
    "'The most obvious feature of a sad song is the tempo,' explains music psychologist Michael Bonshor. 'It tends to be fairly slow ... ' ...
    "So we have an odd situation. The slow tune is no longer dreamy music for couples, but sad, lonely music for the isolated and depressed. ...
    "Another telltale sign of sad songs is the minor key. This rise in minor key songs has been dramatic. Around 85% of songs were in a major key back in the 1960s, but in more recent years this has fallen in half....
    "This is an enormous change—and supports my view that our culture shifted into a darker, more pessimistic phase during the late 1990s and early 2000s."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'Why Is Music Getting Sadder?'

"Consumers aren’t taking AI's bait"

That lovely moment when Bing AI was asked if it were sentient

"A huge amount has been invested into AI but consumers aren’t taking the bait....
    "Who is buying all those AI-written books? Who prefers AI-made songs to human music? Who wants to rely on AI journalism to keep up on the news? Who trusts AI in any mission critical job?
    "I don't know anybody doing this.
    "On the other hand, I see plenty of people relying on AI for scamming, spamming & shamming. Those are the real markets....
    "With every passing day, OpenAI looks more like Napster or the many defunct piracy platforms—it relies on the creativity of others to make a buck. And there are plenty of laws against that....
    "Back in February, I wrote about the total meltdown of Bing AI—when over the course of 72 hours it did the most alarming things, including fall in love with a 'New York Times' reporter and try to get him to break up with his spouse.
    "And now, six months later, we can see that the real tech story of 2023 is NOT how AI made everything great. Instead this will be remembered as the year when huge corporations unleashed a half-baked and dangerous technology on a skeptical public—and consumers pushed back."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'Ugly Numbers from Microsoft and ChatGPT Reveal that AI Demand is Already Shrinking'

"People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true."

"People keep telling me that we’re living on an Information Superhighway. But that’s not true.
    "The flow of information today is more like a river. A very polluted river.
    "Folks have been dumping their crap into our information flows for a long, long time....
    "Some of them do it just for kicks.
    "It’s gotten worse lately. A whole lot worse. Just look at the polluted streams of information in your own life, and try to find a single safe space where the data stream is fresh and clean.
    "Some of us have stopped even trying....
    ""In the last 12 months, the garbage inflows into our culture have increased exponentially. As a result, nothing is harder to find now than actual information—which I define as 'knowledge based on demonstrable or reliable facts.'
    "The result is a crisis of trust unlike anything seen before in modern history.
    "Do you think I’m exaggerating?
    "Let me ask you a question. If your job was to destroy access to reliable information in our society, how would you do it?
    "You would start with the 30 steps outlined here: '30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse.' ... Consider [it] as a checklist to determine the health of your own information sources....
    "The gold standard is trust, not information. A single trustworthy voice is worth more than ten thousand bot-written articles.
    "Our society as a whole hasn’t figured this out yet. But nothing prevents you from taking prudent steps on your own. Find those trusted voices—nurture them, support them, and spread the word.
    "They are our cleansing agents. They are the pure streams in a polluted ecosystem. They are our emerging counterculture—still fragile now but gathering momentum. Soon enough, others will join us. In the meantime, don’t swim in those dirty waters."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post '30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse'

"There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under attack."

"The scarcest commodity in the world is trust. Nothing else comes close....
    "[But e]verybody is trying to kill it—criminals, technocrats, politicians, you name it. Not long ago, Disney was the only company selling a Fantasyland, but now that’s the ambition of every tech empire.
    "The trust crisis could hardly be more intense.
    "But it’s hidden from view because there’s so much information out there....
    "It has reached crisis proportions, and is getting worse. Compared to the trust deficit, all other shortages—eggs, toilet paper, vinyl albums—look modest in contrast....
    "Years ago, technology made things more trustworthy. You could believe something because it was validated by photos, videos, recordings, databases and other trusted sources of information.
    "Seeing was believing—but not anymore. Until very recently, if you doubted something, you could look it up in an encyclopedia or other book. But even these get changed retroactively nowadays....
    "There’s an ominous recurring theme here: The very technologies we use to determine what’s trustworthy are the ones most under attack.
    "Tell me what source you trust, and I’ll tell you why you’re a fool. As B.B. King once said: 'Nobody loves me but my mother—and she could be jivin' too.' ...
    "How hard is it to speak forthrightly and frankly? You would think that’s an easy thing to achieve. And maybe it was in the past, but not in the current moment."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'The Scarcest Thing in the World'

 

"My conclusion isn’t just that ChatGPT is another con game—it’s the biggest one of them all."

"ChatGPT, the AI bot, [is] the hottest thing in tech right now.
    "Judging by my Twitter feed, ChatGPT is hotter than Wordle and Taylor Swift combined.
    "It’s even hotter than its predecessor Sam Bankman-Fried, who was doing something similar 12 months ago. ChatGPT is just better than SamFTX in every way. It can’t even be extradited—because it’s just a bot.
    "People love it. People have confidence in it.
    "They want to use it for everything—legal work, medical advice, term papers, or even writing Substack columns [like mine] ....
    "Instead of offering up my opinions on this, I’ll just share some tweets from knowledgeable observers who are starting to suspect the con.
    "I’ll let you decide for yourself whether this measures up to a confidence game....
    "My conclusion isn’t just that ChatGPT is another con game—it’s the biggest one of them all. Microsoft even wants to hand over its entire search engine to this AI bot. Premium subscriptions are already available.
    "Some of you will tell me that I’m making a hasty judgment. ChatGPT will get better, they say. It will get smarter.
    "That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. The ethics code should have been inserted at the ground level—but it wasn’t. At this point, incremental improvements only make it better at its confidence game.
    "But in one way, it’s all so fitting. The con artist always gives people exactly what they want. And in a post-truth society, nobody does this better than AI. So I predict great things for ChatGPT—at least in economic terms. It will certainly live up to Sneaky Pete’s standards:
    "'I give people confidence. They give me money.'"

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'Introducing the Slickest Con Artist of All Time: Or ten tweets about ChatGPT'

"...but that doesn’t mean that AI won’t put a lot of human musicians out of work."

"Duke Ellington once said that the blues was the 'music of romantic failure'—and just consider how many hit songs are about that particular way of falling short of expectations.
    "But can a machine ever even begin to understand such matters? Will AI [Artificial Intelligence] ever have a broken heart? Will AI ever grieve the death of a loved one? Will AI ever know about the music that helps Alzheimer’s patients or Parkinson’s sufferers or war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder? Will an AI ever sing a lullaby to its child? Will an AI ever need to pick a song for the first dance at its wedding reception?
    "And consider even more trivial uses of song, far beyond the experience of software, no matter how smartly designed. Will an AI ever need a [sea] shanty to help it hoist the sails on a ship? Will an AI ever embarrass itself at karaoke? Will an AI ever sing in the shower, or along with the radio during a daily commute?
    "These are limitations that the robot can never overcome. The human element in music will always be beyond its scope—and that’s a large part of what songs are all about.
    "It’s just like the Tin Man from Oz. What’s missing is the heart.
    "But that doesn’t mean that AI won’t put a lot of human musicians out of work. And the more those flesh-and-blood performers simplify their songs, the more likely they are to lose their jobs to the robot. The less they play from the heart, and the more they rely on formulas and stylised poses, the easier they will be to replace.
    "There’s a lesson there, for those human musicians savvy enough to learn it."

~ Ted Gioia, from his post 'How I Got an AI Theme Song for My Substack'