MerzFiles #02: Friend-Links
My dear 35!
Gratis culture versus quality.
In an alarming essay “The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies are Free” Nathan J. Robinson enunciates The Big Issue of our connected times. In order to survive, big Publishing houses (New York Times, Washington Times, Harper’s) raise paywalls around their qualitative contents. At the same time, the doubtful polarizing sources like Breitbart or Infowars provide their texts for free.
A reader, who would like to orient in nowadays’ tumultuous reality, makes often an easy choice — from the economical aspect or out of convenience. So the fake news and conservative messages are spreading across the folks while educated sources remain to be received by the obvious target group. The auditory is still divided. Enlightenment doesn’t go this way.
On the other hand, “all free” content consumption doesn’t really support the writer.
There are middle ways, like Substack — a 1:1 reader-writer experience where a reader subscribe to a writer and get exclusive content. A good example is https://txt.substack.com/, the blog of AI Creativity Pioneer Ross Goodwin.
His Series “Adventures in Narrated Reality” (Part 1 and Part 2) were an eye-opener for me: AI is capable of creativity. The third part can be found at Substrack — and it’s an inspiring read.
Another way is — Medium and Friend links. Even if I’m mostly writing behind the “wall”, all of you, my dear subscribers — and followers on Twitter, I always publish “friend-links” to my article.
You don’t need to pay anything, just follow me. I don’t write for a living. I live for writing.
Merzmensch writes.
This week I had a lot to do. So just a couple of articles.
Empty Room (September 2020)
The stage play, created by Artificial Intelligence (GPT-3).
You remember my AI-driven movie “Empty Room” — the screenplay, music, voices, and visuals are AI-created (here are my instructions, how to do it by yourself).
The absurdity of the plot was intended (and written by GPT-2 — in best traditions of Beckett and Ionescu). Now, what if you rewrite the scene with GPT-3, which is POWERFUL.
I did it and I don’t regret anything.
Evil Johannes Gutenberg (in: Towards Data Science)
Another perspective on technological progress.
Everybody blame AI for everything. And yet the most important aspect uses to be skipped — the human factor!
Weather rebooted.
Part 2: eaibohportsualC rehtO dna rehtaeW ehT.
You probably know my forbidden passion: to purchase old postcards and to read/write the story along. I call it “Inspiring Voyeurism”.
The last postcard was pretty ridiculous and boring — talks about the weather… Till we’ve discovered, it had ANOTHER MESSAGE.
That’s all folks…
Besides my GPT-3 experiments on Twitter (I’ll write about it, so you are the first to get these insights!):
- I tried GPT-3 to describe phenomena using art movements. It failed in some ways. Instead, it took various writers and let them describe things using art movements. (!?!)
- Imagine the year 2027 — and me(rzmensch) is holding TED talks. I know what’ll be about: GPT-3 already wrote my text:
- What do McDonald's and Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” have in common? GPT-3 revealed the truth.
- Finally, here is an American Way to make art:
Follow me a be a witness of further weirdnesses.
Thank you for reading.
Write to me. I love you all.
Yours, Merzmensch
