Content Consumed: White Lotus, ChatGPT, and more

Hello, howdy, hey! Happy Monday. I had a lovely, rather mellow weekend. Ups and downs, you know how it is.

In today’s edition of Content Consumed:
🎬 [Spoiler-free preview] The White Lotus season finale!
🤖 ChatGPT is quite terrifying
⚡️ Elon Musk, David Dobrik, cannibalism, and Elvis
🔪 Book review: These Silent Woods

[No spoilers] The White Lotus finale!

Loved it? Hated it? Overwhelmed, underwhelmed?

I’m on the side of satisfied. I’m satisfied with who died, because it felt right. The season overall ended right, somehow teetering on both the expected and the unexpected.

Read my full review, chock full of spoilers, right here!

ChatGPT scares the shit out of me

“This could put copywriters out of jobs.”

That’s one of the first things I heard about ChatGPT, a new cutting-edge A.I. chatbot that was opened for testing last week, and obviously it’s not fun to hear that AI tech will demolish the future of your career.

I have one friend who uses it to create custom stories to listen to at night and another who says it helps them with their job on a day-to-day basis already. So, I finally decided to give it a go.

And the results were terrifying.

First, I asked ChatGPT to write ten headlines for a brand I’m currently crafting a campaign for at my 9-to-5. And the headlines the AI came up with? Pretty damn good. Like, I’d only have to change a couple of words due to regulatory issues with the brand’s industry. It used buzzwords, it had the lingo, and it was good.

Second, I asked ChatGPT to “write an introduction for a pop culture column called “Content Consumed”, published every weekday.” (Of course, as you know, this column is more than pop culture, but I didn’t want to push the experiment too far yet.) The result:

Welcome to “Content Consumed”, your daily dose of pop culture news and analysis. Every weekday, we will bring you the latest happenings in the world of entertainment and provide thoughtful insights on the hottest topics in movies, television, music, and more. From deep dives on your favorite celebrity gossip to expert commentary on the biggest box office hits, “Content Consumed” has you covered. So sit back, relax, and let us help you stay up to date on all things pop culture.

It’s so impressive, honestly.

But also terrifying.

Like one tech CEO wrote, “ChatGPT is one of those rare moments in technology where you see a glimmer of how everything is going to be different going forward.”

Experiment yourself. The platform is free to use (for now).

Also, the New York Times wrote more about its brief history as a platform (over 1 million people signed up within its first 5 days last week) and what its future looks like. Read it here.

Elon Musk, David Dobrik, cannibalism, and Elvis

I’ve got a lot of thoughts about Internet things swirling in my head so I’m really just going to full Buzzfeed listicle with y’all today.

• Did Elon Musk think he’d get anything but boos after Dave Chapelle introduced him onstage, at a San Francisco show, with “Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world”? Ugh. The only thing Elon really even says, after Dave makes some shitty jokes and harasses the booers in his own crowd, is “I’m rich, bitch” in the most awkward monotone imaginable. The whole exchange is, by definition, cringe.
• I just read this article from Eater, “The Year Creators Took It Offline”, about how YouTube and TikTok’s biggest stars are getting in on owning restaurants. It feels like that thing where someone’s famous/rich for something and as a result, they get to crash into a completely different industry and find near-immediate success due to their following. Like influencers such as David Dobrik have done with many industries, really: restaurants, beauty lines, etc.
• Cannibalism: what a vibe. Yellowjackets, Jefferey Dahmer, Bones And All, A Certain Hunger, the Armie Hammer story. Read this Vogue story about how cannibalism became a cultural trope this year.
• Austin Butler is still, somehow, trapped as Elvis. He told Janelle Monae in Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series that he didn’t see his family for about 3 years while prepping/filming the Elvis movie. Was it worth it?! Doubtful.

Book review: These Silent Woods

Whew, this was definitely a page-turner. Kimi Cunningham Grant certainly has a gift for crafting an intense setting and fascinating characters. The Appalachian forest itself might as well have been a character.

*Spoilers ahead!*

The two (real) main characters, Cooper and Finch, are perfectly defined in their personalities. Finch, a child raised on the land, finding her balance between independence and codependence with her father, whose history she doesn’t truly know. Cooper, constantly risking it all, embodying the traits of a traumatized veteran and passionate father. Scotland, too, our unexpected hero, felt so real.

A note on that: I’m always hesitant to read a book with a veteran as the main character/narrator, because they seem to swerve into either extremely patriotic or extremely disturbing territories. But Cooper, the mess that he is, was so well-written. We read about his experiences in Afghanistan — really bad experiences but still not as shocking as I expected, somehow — and how those experiences impact his life and his personality today. Neither nationalistic nor nihilistic, just realistic.

Marie, unfortunately, felt like she was added in the later drafts. Her motivations weren’t very clear or very practical, so, like the ending, it felt a little too clean. She was willing to drop everything to spend the rest of her life in the woods with two people (fugitives!) she met for a couple of days in a snowstorm…?

In terms of the plot itself, the author did an excellent job seamlessly jumping between past and present, helping us understand who Cooper is and why he takes the actions he does.

But, the ending. It was simply too easy for Cooper and Finch to continue to live the way they had before. How did the police on their property, discovering the dead woman, not end up doing a more thorough search of the cabin and the area after Scotland’s false confession? It didn’t make practical sense.

The saving grace here is the epilogue, in which we find out what happened for the next 10 years from Finch’s P.O.V. instead of Cooper’s. It’s a nice wrap-up to a fast-paced and thrilling novel.

Read more of my reviews over on Goodreads!

And that’s it for today! Thank you for reading. Catch ya tomorrow!

Love,
Casey

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👉🏼 Find out what I’m reading at my Goodreads profile.