PJH Studios

Tag: AI

  • AI teaches college English

    A long but insightful article where a college English professor allowed students to use ChatGPT for assignments. What makes the usage interesting is that he encouraged to evaluate and compare human centered writing versus the AI output. In the end, still began to critically evaluate how to use a technology.

    There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce. There are also reasons I consider less valid (detailed in a despairing essay that went viral recently), which amount to opportunistic laziness: if you can get away with using AI, why not?

    It was this line of thinking that led me to conduct an experiment in my English classroom. I attempted the experiment in four sections of my class during the 2024-2025 academic year, with a total of 72 student writers. Rather than taking an “abstinence-only” approach to AI, I decided to put the central, existential question to them directly: was it still necessary or valuable to learn to write? The choice would be theirs. We would look at the evidence, and at the end of the semester, they would decide by vote whether A.I. could replace me.

  • 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.