PJH Studios

Tag: AI

  • AI ruined lo-fi music

    AI tools are making it easier to create generic, meditative music. Kieran Press-Reynolds at Pitchfork explores lofi, music, landscape, and the impact of AI.

    Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI breeding ground, crammed with hourlong mixes full of soporific dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped them unlock their true potential in life. Multiple channels repeat the same sentence structure like, “I don’t want much! I just want the person reading this to be healthy, happy, and loved!,” suggesting they’re AI-generated.

  • Have AI attend that meeting for you

    AI bots are attending meetings in people’s stead.

    Some of the AI helpers were assisting a person who was also present on the call — others represented humans who had declined to show up but sent a bot that listens but can’t talk in their place. The human-machine imbalance made Sellers concerned that the modern thirst for AI-powered optimization was startingto impede human interaction.

    “I want to talk to people,” said Sellers, who runs a content agency for entrepreneurs out of Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t want to talk to a bunch of note takers,” he said — before adding that he hasoccasionally himself sent an AI note taker to meetings in his place.

  • The Way of Code by Rick Rubin

    I’m not sure if this is sincere or satire: The Way of Code by Rick Rubin, inspired by Lao Tzu. It contains 81 koans about programming, each accompanied by a AI generated gif.

    The artwork above was created by vibe coding, generated based on the themes of each chapter. You can add prompts to change the images to your liking. You ultimately get to shape each of the art pieces.

    This is how art creation always happens.

    It starts with a prompt, a seed. It can be several sentences or something you notice on a walk. Anything can work as a first prompt. Only you can decide that.

  • This band doesn’t exist

    Velvet Sundown, a band with 350,000 monthly listeners, most likely doesn’t exist–a growing phenomenon enabled by AI.

    Though they’re not yet dominating the charts, disturbingly realistic AI songs are slowly but surely creeping into our headphones – and you may even be listening to them without realizing what you’re hearing. Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams.

    One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. (“There’s not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed,” as one Redditor put it.) While we can’t confirm that the band’s music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough to persuade even the least skeptical observer.

  • AI and creativity

    Two complementary articles about AI’s ability to create art that arrive at the same conclusion: it won’t be able to create new things from unexpected connections.

  • AI can’t have my em dash

    A supposed tell that something was written with AI is the use of the em dash—signifying a pause for a related thought. But really, it’s proof of what AI was trained on.

  • Mary Meeker covers AI trends

    For the better part of the 2010s, Mary Meeker’s trends report was a must read for anyone working in technology. 2019 was the last edition, but she’s returned, delving into AI.

    Venture capitalist Mary Meeker just dropped a 340-page slideshow report — which used the word “unprecedented” on 51 of those pages — to describe the speed at which AI is being developed, adopted, spent on, and used, backed up with chart after chart.

    “The pace and scope of change related to the artificial intelligence technology evolution is indeed unprecedented, as supported by the data,” she writes in the report, called “Trends — Artificial Intelligence.”

  • Flooded with AI slop

    The ability of AI to near instantaneously churn out paragraphs of text is being weaponized to overwhelm well meaning officials.

    One morning in October of 2024, Fredericton city councillor Margo Sheppard received an email with the subject line: “The Real Policy Crisis: Prioritizing ‘Nature’ Over People.” It was polished — almost algorithmically smooth — and it calmly urged her to reconsider Fredericton’s net-zero policies. 

    Over the next month, a flood of similar emails followed, all aimed at getting Fredericton to abandon global climate targets. Sheppard is used to emails from organizations on all kinds of issues, but not this many, not on this issue — and not so well crafted. She grew suspicious.

    “If we’re getting them in Fredericton,” Sheppard thought, “councillors all across the country must be getting them too.” 

  • The best DeepSeek explainer

    Stratechery with the best DeepSeek AI explainer. It’s broad in describing the general applications and industry impacts, as well as parsing the technical bits of what they did.

  • A network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America”

    Nieman Labs reports that “a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America.” All run by one person.

    It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”

    We need to add AI generated awareness to the media literacy skill set.