Broken, but not beyond repair
First Thing Monday, edition #125
Hey friends,
Relaxing long weekend over here, so I am actually writing this thing on a Monday.
Flirty AI assistants
This past fortnight has been wild. Flirty AI assistants are launched onto the world by Open AI, who then get into a beef with Scarlett Johansson, who once played a flirty AI assistant in a movie. What a ride.
All that said, I strongly encourage you to watch some of the Chat GPT 4o demos that came out. (especially the flirty one). They’re incredible. We can now have hyper-realistic conversations with computers now.
But have we thought this through? The social implications of this are enormous. We seem to be hurtling towards a “Her” future. Sam Altman confirmed that. But did he actually watch the whole movie?
The end of the internet?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this article ever since i read it …
The death (again) of the internet as we know it
It’s an excellent, albeit depresssing summary of the state of the web, and how the early days of the internet are gone, replaced by:
A minefield of ads - The internet was supposed to be a place for connection and exploration, but now, everywhere you turn, someone's trying to sell you something
The enshittification - a term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the race to turn every great app into a money-making machine, while the user experience takes a backseat.
The algorithmic takeover - Curated content is gone, replaced by AI-driven, algorithmically determined feeds. The algo decides what you see, when and how often you see it.
AI-Generated Slop - Mediocre, pointless content that is turning the internet into a garbage dump.
Deepfakes and Misinformation - It's becoming harder to distinguish between reality and AI-generated lies.
The internet, once a wild frontier of possibilities, is now a land of broken promises.
The internet is broken, but it's not beyond repair.
I was joking with work colleagues recently about our Geoocities and Myspcae pages. Reminiscing about a time when the web was creative and free. But also wondering, can we get back to that?
I've been taking lots of photos latelty. And more and more I'm choosing the Foto app over instagram. It’s a new photography ap with no ads, no algorithms. it’s reminding me of the early internet years of sharing images on Flickr.
If you dig deep enough, the internet is still a bustling place to find creativity from real human beings. I’ll leave you with a few links that inspired me this week.
I stumbled upon Duolingo's Character Design Illustration Guidelines earlier today. A thing of beauty.
An Outlaw Country Cover of ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ by The Smiths.
This video has made me rethink everything about OnMouseDown.
I’m loving the playful photography of Dudi Ben Simon, who turns everyday objects into clever compositions.
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Anyway, thanks for reading. You should probably go outside now. I'm going to.
Ben