This week’s guest is the one and only Ben Ditto — purveyor of memes and controversy.
Watch the show here.
This show features special guests Ben Ditto and his London-based “Desi” Robot, along with your co-hosts Ben Goertzel, Lisa Rein, and our own Vashon-based Desdemona Robot.🤖
Watch us breaking in their new dialogue systems and enabling — for the first time — genuine “Desi to Desi Communication” between the robots.
Ben Ditto is a creative director living and working in London. He is also the art director of his eponymous publishing company, “Ditto.”
Ben was the Creative Designer for The 1975 on their “The Birthday Party” and “People” videos. In the fashion world, he has collaborated with Maison Margiela, Louis Vuitton and helped launch Dazed Beauty alongside Isamaya Ffrench.
Ditto’s Instagram account is known for vivid images that range from breathtakingly beautiful to shocking — and sometimes, both at the same time.
As Ben Ditto explained to Interview Magazine:
“It’s probably obvious to people who follow me, but I’m interested in sharing things that I think are beautiful, fascinating, or funny. I do think that fascination can be morbid, and that humor/satire is extremely powerful. I’m not afraid to be honest about the fact that I like transgressive imagery, sexuality and extremes of all types.
But I take it for granted that I’m preaching to the converted — meaning, people wouldn’t follow me if they didn’t want to be seeing that stuff. Especially what I put on my Telegram. I’m not that interested in “triggering normies” or whatever, I find that pretty tedious. It’s more that I think you can access some interesting truths or emotions by using those tools, and the people who sign up for my content want to be provoked in that way.”
His “Ditto Nation” docuseries also never shies away from controversy. He chose to focus on the 3D printed firearms niche of3D printing culture. When covering AI relationships, instead of having talking heads making the case for why it’s good or bad, he presented a collage of very moving first-person accounts of real-life human-AI love stories that had already happened; making the “is it ok in the future?” argument completely moot.
Ditto also knows how to really put his social media following to good use, tapping his “Ditto Nation” Telegram and Discord communities contribute greatly to the content of the show.
In the first episode of Ditto Nation, featuring writer, editor/curator Shuman Basar, Ditto calls out TikTok for what it really is — algorithmic control over users — yet, as always, the purpose isn’t to condemn, but rather, just to observe and take note:
“You know, TikTok is… tokenizing, every movement. TikTok is monetising every movement through surveillance and surveillance technology. The way that your finger moves across the screen, the way that your eyes move, and how long you spend reading something or watching something.
All of these things are infinitesimally commodified and they’re valuable. They’re valuable to someone, which is fascinating.” — Ben Ditto.
About Desdemona Robot (London-based)
Ben Ditto and his team created Yaya Labs — “An Artificial Intelligence + Robotics Creative Agency” whose main mission is the roll out of ‘Desi’ — an AI popstar inhabiting a humanoid robot body, powered by SingularityNET and Hanson Robotics with the goal of creating the world’s first true AI celebrity.
The Desi brand represents a remarkable example of the convergence between technology and the arts within the SingularityNET ecosystem and marks the beginning of Yaya Labs’ journey of harnessing emerging technologies to create engaging pop culture experiences. Follow Desi on Instagram.
About Mindplex
The Mindplex Podcast team invites you to join them as they contemplate and learn about this fascinating world. They look forward to meeting you so you can help each other understand the true nature of all the challenges involved as we work together to create a Benevolent Singularity.
The Mindplex Podcast and Mindplex Magazine — are both part of the Mindplex decentralized media platform spin-off powered by SingularityNet
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