Tzara and Squidward Play Fortnite

It's Embed Wednesday, here's your post-human #corecore guide.

February 1st, 2023

Kieran Press-Reynolds posted an update on #corecore, which has unexpectedly lived for more than two months now: “Is corecore radical art or gibberish shitposts?”1 I am begging anyone interested in this to read anything at all about Dada. Personally I think Tristan Tzara would be into this one:

But while TikTok is creating meaning from gibberish, the AI content farms are hard at work creating gibberish from meaning. OpenAI announced an “AI classifier for indicating AI-written text,” which is great right? Let the AI spot the AI-generated text and end AI-powered cheating before it even starts? Only if you let the AI do the math, as Ben Adida pointed out:

@ben@adida.net: So OpenAI just released a detector of AI-generated text, I assume because of concerns in education / homework. Maybe this is good? No, it's very bad. They claim 26% true positives, 9% false positives. Assume 10% of submitted homework is chatgpt generated, you get the classic counterintuitive outcome of poor predictive power: if a homework is flagged, there's a 3:1 chance it's *human* generated. This is going to cause a lot of harm. It should be immediately recalled.”

If the numbers don’t leap right out at you, imagine a college class with 100 students where 10 of them use ChatGPT to write an essay. If you run all 100 essays through the OpenAI classifier, it will correctly flag 26% of the AI essays—2 or 3 of the 10. But of the 90 human-written essays, it will incorrectly flag 9%, which is 8, as AI-generated. So the AI text classifier is even worse for spotting AI text than the AI image generator is for making hands.

Strip of screenshots from the Voight-Kampff test scene of Bladerunner. The examiner says “You’re at a party, Leon.” Cut to Leon, saying “A party? What’s that?” “You know a gathering with friends?” says the examiner. “Same thing.” Cut to a wide two-shot, subtitled: “Look around Leon, and tell me: how many fingers does everyone have?” Cut to Leon standing up and holding out his gun: “I’ll tell you how many fingers everyone has.”

Might as well lean into Embed Wednesday with…

Today in Crabs

Rose Schmits, “We live in a society” collection:

A beautiful white pottery vase with blue stripe details, and a blue painting of a crab holding a knife glazed onto it.

Tiny radioactive dingus located. The Gen Z Shake joins the Millennial Pause in the pantheon of visual conventions that everyone is desperate to imbue with anthropological significance for some reason. Insatiable California sinkhole lures third victim past giant “ROAD CLOSED” barrier to be devoured. Insatiable California appetite for Colorado River water lures Western U.S. closer to ”The Water Knife.” Sophie Kleeman’s “I followed Nancy Pelosi's diet of breakfast ice cream and hot dogs for a week, and I ping-ponged between euphoria and the depths of despair” is haute Insider. New new Gawker canceled before it even had a chance to publish its first good post. Apparently Bryan “Digital” Goldberg only recently became aware that he was still paying for it. The Tabs Department of Horny Fairness would like to apologize for the absence of DILFs in yesterday’s MILF-heavy issue. Combined Paramount and Showtime streaming service and cable network will be rebranded “the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office Or Mobile (sic).”

Infinite AI-Generated Animated “Seinfeld.” It’s terrible, but uhhhh I guess it exists?

Screenshot of the AI Seinfeld stream, showing blocky pixelated characters meandering around in a metaverse-from-1980 vibe indeterminate apartment space. It’s ugly.

Today’s Song: Parranoul, “Polaris”

Embed Wednesday is the best, moo. Let’s do one more:

@Alice@beige.party: “Calamari is the onion ring of the sea.”

Reply

or to participate.