AI is still boring and also bad and also expensive

There’s a lot going on in the world of AI right now. OpenAI launched GPT‑6 Astra earlier this week. Which is, idk, better at stuff than OpenAI’s previous models. Apparently one thing it’s very good at big-dogging mathematicians and possibly lifting their research! Meanwhile, Meta launched a personal AI agent called Muse yesterday. Which Mark Zuckerberg is so excited about that he decided to steal the @Muse handle from the band Muse and relegate them to @Museband. I think Muse (the band) is annoying so I’m actually fine with that.

Oh, also, one guy on X used ChatGPT to synthesize “a new selective M4 muscarinic receptor agonist for treating schizophrenia.” Excited to see how sick he gets from this.

To add to the hysteria, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon took to X this week to announce he was resigning from the company. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote. This, understandably, scared a lot of people. Luckily, Evan Hubinger, a lead researcher at Anthropic, tried to calm things down by writing on X, “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Oh, uh, nevermind.

Though, maybe we should be freaking out about AI. Apparently Bill Gates is concerned enough about it to start blogging. Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong in The Atlantic also weighed in on our current moment, writing, “The defining feature of this moment is a loss of control. Panic emanating from AI researchers, resentment felt by average Americans—all of it is part of the AI crunch.”

Talking about the “AI crunch” is not exactly easy, unfortunately. It’s increasingly clear that there are several coordinated and paid anti-AI and anti-data center campaigns in play online right now. German theoretical physicist (and YouTube creator) Sabine Hossenfelder claims she was recently offered money to make content about the existential threat of AI development. Not to get too tin foil hat here, but many of the groups offering influencers money to scare people about AI are either publicly or privately endorsed by the CEOs of the very tech companies they’re warning you about!

If you’re getting confused thinking about all of this, The New York Times, in a piece earlier this week, once again asked, “how scared should we be of AI right now?” The piece is largely about the cult of the rationalists, the AI doomers who believe we are hurdling towards the end of the world, many of whom are completely fine with that and working night and day to make sure it happens. This whole dynamic was recently summed up pretty succinctly in an X post that read, “We have to build AI that murders us, because if we don’t, China will build it first, and I don’t want to get murdered by a computer that speaks Chinese. That would be ridiculous.”

All of this is to say that the AI industry wants us to keep talking about AI like this. With every new, incremental model release, every new gimmicky agent rollout, they shriek harder and harder at us that we must embrace their AI before China’s AI is forced upon us. That we need to support American tech oligarchs building a machine god (and owning it) before China does. And it’s why prominent venture capitalists and Big Tech leaders have been so quick to blame China for all the backlash against AI we’re seeing right now. But I actually don’t think any of this matters! At all!!

Every argument for — or against — AI, data centers, and a future powered by artificial general intelligence pre-supposes that this technology works properly and will get less expensive over time and get good enough to replace human workers. It pre-supposes our electrical grids can keep up with development of data centers and that if, like earlier this week, there’s a massive outage or if one of these companies go out of business, that humans will scramble to get back to their AI chatbots. And it pre-supposes that people will want or even tolerate a world frozen by automation, wrapped in surveillance. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

Even the worst, dumbest thing a human could do is more interesting than the most sophisticated AI attempt at the same thing. And I’ll prove it to you. This week, the streamer N3on, whose livestreams we previously described as, “an unceasing portal into a desolate Other America dictated by Bang Bus physics,” launched a fully AI-generated stream earlier this week. I genuinely think he makes some of the worst content I’ve ever seen and I hate watching it, but it’s lightyears better what the AI came up with. And if this technology can’t even replace a N3on stream, then none of those other big questions they want us all fretting about really matter.

I figured that by going to the thread and reading the post, all the updates, and the comments I would have a better sense of what the hell is going on here. But, honestly, I am left with only more questions.

We will have a special issue tomorrow all about it, but we want to hear from you, dear reader. What do you remember from that day? What are some Kirk edits and memes you’ve seen over the last year? What’s your relationship with it, in general? Is it something you even think about?

Let us know! @ me in the Discord, DM us on Instagram, leave a comment on this post, or reply to directly to this email.

I am unclear exactly how well-known the dreaded “pivot to video” concept is among civilians. But for those of us who work in media, it pops up every three-to-five years and basically wastes everyone’s time and results in a whole bunch of writers getting laid off. As far as my own career goes, we are currently in my fourth pivot to video. There are signs that it’s already wrapping up. But, first, let’s break down the ones I’ve already suffered through.

These are broad strokes, of course, but that’s basically what happened. As for why I think our current era is ending (which would mean another one is coming to be clear), well…

Amelia Dimoldenberg is ending her long-running show Chicken Shop Date after more than a decade. YouTube has drastically changed what their front-facing metrics track — but not what they pay for you! Basically, opening a YouTube video now counts as a view, even though they’re still only paying you for “engaged views.” MS Now will soon be airing Crooked Media “podcasts,” which are really just talk shows. YouTube channels are simulcasting on Netflix. And I’m hearing from a lot of short-form creators lately that that entire realm is basically over if you want to make any real money.

As for what’s next, my prediction is a complete hollowing out of the video middle class, as it were. Professionally produced studio shows and random people talking into their phones and basically nothing in between.

ConnorEatsPants is a Twitch streamer and someone I also consider on the vanguard of “dark woke” lol. He has a show every week called “Fortnite Friday,” which California Gov. Gavin Newsom was on last year, funnily enough. Last week, Nick Shirley, the right-wing YouTuber that kicked off the ICE siege of Minneapolis last year, was on the stream and it didn’t go super well.

Benjamin Weiss, a reporter for Courthouse News, has a very handy X thread full of standout moments. My personal favorite was when Shirley was asked to spell the word “discipline” and couldn’t do it.

I recommend clicking through because it’s a genuinely interesting thread and ConnorEatsPants hammered Shirley pretty hard over his “journalism.” Oh, also, Shirley is very bad at Fortnite.

Channel 5, formerly known as All Gas No Brakes, is a independent media company run by Andrew Callaghan that is very popular with a certain kind of young man online. The kind of young man online that doesn’t care that Callaghan was hit with sexual misconduct allegations back in 2023.

Channel 5 surprised their audience this week when they posted a notes app pre-apology, explaining that they gave Hunter Biden access to their mailing list?

If you care, and you probably don’t have to, Biden is launching a cryptocoin called $LAPTOP. Get it? It’s already crashed in price.

In a follow-up post, Channel 5 wrote, “Emails from Hunter’s team have not gone out to any of our public subscribers, we were able to get all info completely removed from list before blast was sent.” So I guess this was meant to get out in front of whatever Biden was planning to do.

Oh, and, according to 404 Media, giving Biden the email list at all was probably illegal.

P.S. here’s one more good Dolly Parton post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***