The Sorensen Monologues
Archive for June, 2024
Are You Experienced?
At some point, marketers began slapping the words “curated experience” on just about anything. An internet search brings up nice hotel rooms in Nigeria, a visit with coconut shell carvers in the Andaman islands, countless restaurants, event planners billing themselves as “Experience Curators,” advice for realtors on creating curated experiences for their clients (that is, figuring out what they really need)… the list goes on. Today, “curated” simply means that someone or more likely something — such as an AI algorithm — picked stuff, while experience has become so vague that it refers to every waking moment, which isn’t saying much.
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Billionaires Fund Human Intelligence
AI technology has spread into every nook and cranny of digital life with alarming speed. Now Apple has just announced they’re getting in on the game. So much of it feels like gilding the lily, adding unnecessary bloat to things that worked well enough already. I’m not the first to make this comparison, but AI-assisted software reminds me of Clippy, the famously annoying animated paperclip from Microsoft Word who constantly offered unwanted help. And the models are being trained on the stolen work of artists and writers who are already struggling to find new ways of earning a living. While I’m sure there are some narrower areas where AI is useful, much of it seems like Silicon Valley cloaking self-interest in the language of altruism.
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