Another Sunday, Another Naive Weekly — Observations From The Internet Wilderness.
Good morning,
Today is father’s day in Denmark. I plan to spend it running down hills, eating ice cream, and make marble tracks. It’s a joy to experience the world with Uno and to watch him grow. He is kind and empathic and laughs at my silly attempts at being funny. Thank you Uno and Ana and far.
With care,
Kristoffer
Ps. I’m revealing Codename WFC next Sunday.
ROADSIDE FLOWERS
System explains how anything in the world is related to everything else.
See something new shows you an image you have never seen before and will never see again.
Ode to eggs is an experiment by Shen (hi Shen).
FIELD NOTES
Discovering the Secret Language of DALLE-2
During the past few days, I’ve spent a significant amount of time playing with Midjourney, a generative image tool with an active Discord server full of people writing text prompts for their bot. It is addictive to witness thousands of humans interact with the AI while getting inspired by each other, and it is clear that it is an art to write good prompts. Speaking of which, how fascinating is it that DALLE-2 seems to have developed its own gibberish language?
K Allado-McDowell
Staying with the question of authorship, I enjoy reading and listening to interviews with K Allado-McDowell. They are a writer, speaker, and musician, who also established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. In the linked interview, they talk about their two novels co-written with GPT-3. Where in the first book, they use a different typology to show if the text is generated, they blur it all together in their second book. I’ve yet to read any of the books, but I’m conceptually intrigued.
Value Beyond Instrumentalization
To end the field notes on a different note, I’m including this pondering about the importance of not reducing technology to a means to wealth. It is written by Jasmine Wang, editor in chief at Kernel Magazine, and is part of five short essays assembled under the catchy title “Letters to a Young Technologist.”
COLLECTIONS
Sentences from Wikipedia pages that accidentally form Haiku.
The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group: A Database of Synthetic Taxonom.
I’m happy to receive submissions for collections at kristoffer@naiveweekly.com
Hi, I’m Kristoffer and you have just read Naive Weekly — Observations from the Internet Wilderness.
Last week this letter was sent to 1061 people. Twentyeight are crazy enough to chip in every month/year to support me making time to write. Logo by Studio Hollywood. Print by Luka. Postcard by me. Photograph by Ana Santl.