Ran Prieur

May 25.

2026-05-25T13:10:26Z

May 25. I keep saying people need to be in charge of machines, but it's not that simple. This article, AI put synthetic quotes in his book, is about an author who was happily bossing bots to go out and get quotes for his book about AI. The problem is that they worked too well, delivering "285 outside citations". How do you fact-check that? I guarantee the publisher's fact-checker was not paid enough, and the author couldn't resist the lure of more and more. So even if the machines are under you, there are also machines over you: More is better, time is money, publish or perish, these are principles of the machines of capitalism and progress.

Thanks Peter for sending this Cory Doctorow post from last year, Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox, in which the same kind of thing happened to another writer:

The freelance writer who authored this giant summer reading guide with all its lists had been tasked with doing the work of literally dozens of writers, editors and fact-checkers. We don't know whether his boss told him he had to use AI, but there's no way one writer could do all that work without AI.

In other words, that writer's job wasn't to write the article. His job was to be the "human in the loop" for an AI that wrote the articles, but on a schedule and with a workload that precluded his being able to do a good job. It's more true to say that his job was to be the AI's "accountability sink".

Does every unique AI output need to be checked by humans? Yes, I think it does. If so, how useful is AI? Actually, still pretty useful. Not for replacing all jobs or transcending humanity, but for giving a boost to many particular humans, everywhere from biology to multimedia, who have the autonomy and the discipline to integrate AI into what they do, without going off the rails. This assumes there will still be a high tech infrastructure after the crash. Doctorow forecasts:

After the bubble bursts, there will be the mass incineration of everyday people's retirement savings and the knock-on effects as the whole market craters. And long after that, there will be the terrible impact on our society's ability to do things, as defunct foundation models grind to a halt, after the people they replaced are long gone and can't step in to pick up the work they fumble. We are busily filling the walls of society with digital asbestos and we'll be digging it out for generations to come. Every day the bubble persists, the harms of today and tomorrow increase. We need to burst that bubble as soon as possible.

May 22.

2026-05-22T22:40:25Z

May 22. One more AI link, a Hacker News thread, AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills. From the linked post:

...the biggest concern I've seen from my fellow developers is that human developers won't be necessary in the near future, since LLMs will be able to fully design and build projects of all sizes and scales. And, well, I just haven't seen any evidence of that. In fact, it's kind of the opposite. The biggest AI success stories I've seen have been from people who are highly technical, folks with deep subject matter expertise.
...
When we treat LLMs like little autonomous robots, we start to give them more credit than they deserve, and it starts to feel plausible that they could one day replace us. But that's not the right mental model. I think AI tools are more like Iron Man's suit.

From down in the thread, some pessimism: "What is unclear to me is how less skilled people gain useful experience, when using these amplifying tools." And: "We are quickly reaching a point though that programmers will become so reliant on LLMs for coding so much so as people have become reliant on their phones to remember phone numbers, the younger generations don't have a single phone number they can call to memory and soon the same will be true of code."

May 20.

2026-05-20T20:20:17Z

May 20. I'm foggy-headed this week, but I have a few more thoughts on AI. What people forget about the Machine (as described in books like Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine and Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine) is that it's human. It's not an alien force from another galaxy. The Machine an aspect of the great broad human potential, enshrined in our tools, our economy, even our metaphysics: that nothing counts unless it can be called forth at will like the output of a factory, the same for all observers. That nothing counts unless it can be quantified. That detached manipulation is the correct way to engage the world.

I believe this about AI and machines in general: that they are perfectly fine, even miraculous, as long as humans are fully in charge. By humans I don't mean tech executives. I mean the lowest rabble who actually work with the machine: that you can outsource something to the machine, make sure it's being done right, get it done faster, and reap the benefits. If you automate your job you should be able to keep your job and get paid for doing nothing, but under capitalism you're thrown on the streets while the Epstein class swims in money.

And it occurs to me, the same thing has been said about machine-like aspects of human cognition: that detached, rational, detail-focused thinking is perfectly fine as long as it remains subservient to intuitive, holistic, embodied thinking. This video explains it: Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke on The Master, his Emissary, and the Meaning Crisis. The world has become so fucked up because machine-like cognition is totally in charge, and when you take this trend to its logical conclusion, you get culty tech executives trying to machinify everything, and the coming trainwreck of the tech economy.

May 16.

2026-05-16T16:40:27Z

May 16. Today, AI psychosis, starting with an archive of a depressing Wired article, I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI. It's a long read but it really captures the insane vibe of a machine-managed economy.

A mysteriously deleted 2013 Edge.org response, by mathematician Steven Strogatz, which now seems completely prophetic, Too Much Coupling:

In all sorts of complex systems, this is the general trend: increasing the coupling between the parts seems harmless enough at first. But then, abruptly, when the coupling crosses a critical value, everything changes....

I worry that we're playing the coupling game with ourselves, collectively. With our cell phones and GPS trackers and social media, with globalization, with the coming Internet of things, we're becoming more tightly connected than ever. Of course, maybe that's good....

But the math suggests that increasing coupling is a siren's song. Too much makes a complex system brittle. In economics and business, the wisdom of the crowd works only if the individuals within it are independent, or nearly so.

And a Twitter post, I believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis. It's funny because this sounds like our whole society: "Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible.... Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls."

The Hacker News thread adds nuance, explaining the difference between good and bad use of AI. "I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tells you then you have AI psychosis." And, "I'm thinking that it's quite a different experience going all Jackson Pollock with AI in your own studio on your own terms, compared to the sorry state of affairs of having 100s of Pollocks throwing paint around wildly within a corp to meet a paint quota."

I'm happy to announce two more videos, in which I as a human am completely in charge and reject almost everything that AI gives me. These are for the same song, Hawkwind - Infinity. For the first I did the normal thing, spamming the prompt box with lyrics and forging a path through the best images. For the second, I got the idea to use the worst images, but I ended up still using the best, and I discovered that there are two kinds of good bad images: good because they're bad, and good despite being bad. This was a lot of fun: Hawkwind - Infinity (slop version).

May 13.

2026-05-13T13:10:56Z

May 13. I don't want to post doom all the time but there's so much of it. Four Reddit threads:

What's a "future technology" that already exists but people still don't realize how scary it is? "My car literally tattled on me to my insurance company for 'hard braking'. I was avoiding a deer. Thanks for the rate increase though."

What's a modern problem that sounds completely fake when you explain it to someone from 100 years ago? "I'm having trouble paying for my cat anti-depressants."

What is the worst career to be in right now and why? "I'm a journalist and my industry is dying. Ten years ago we had a bustling newspaper office with 20 employees. Today there are three of us. They just sold the office and closed the building. We got bought out by a larger company and we have limited hours to cover everything we need to cover. And it's happening all over."

And from the Spirituality subreddit, I feel that my days on Earth are dwindling. "Not because you think you're literally about to die, but because of how disconnected you feel from life itself?"

May 9.

2026-05-09T21:30:07Z

May 9. Some happy links. Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons

An archive of a NY Times piece, America the Undammed: "More miles of the country's rivers were reconnected last year thanks to dam removals than at any other time in history."

From the Guardian, How nature thrives in bomb craters: "At the bottom of these explosions, which go three to eight metres deep, there will always be water in the end, even in very dry periods. It is like establishing a small wetland."

And a Reddit comment transcribing a fun story full of orphaned negatives: "She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way. I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I'd have to make bones about it since I was travelling cognito."

May 7.

2026-05-07T19:10:51Z

May 7. I've just posted two Goodreads reviews: a three star review of the 4.22 average Arborescence, a well-conceived book about people turning into trees, but I didn't like the droopy vibe. And a five star review of the 2.95 average The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, a wonderfully written dark domestic comedy.

May 5.

2026-05-05T17:50:46Z

May 5. Quick thought on fakery. For years everyone has been saying that when AI images can't be told from real images, there will be lots of fake photos and videos that people take as real. I haven't seen this happen yet in any important way. Making convincing fake imagery is hard, and people who really want to tell the difference will always stay one step ahead.

Anyway, fake images are not necessary. The best tool for deception, now and forever, is words. If you want to fool people, just tell them what they want to hear, with total indifference to reality, and they will come running to join your cult. And now, when those people see real photos and videos that disprove the words, they can just say, "Those must be AI fakes."

Paradoxically, our power over images has made all images weaker, and fake words stronger.

May 4.

2026-05-04T16:40:33Z

May 4. A quote from War Bulletin #3 by Vachel Lindsay, in 1909:

Let us send men on a great migration: set free, purged of the commerce-made manners and fat prosperity of America; ragged with the beggar's pride, starving with the crusader's fervor. Better to die of plague on the highroad seeing the angels, than live on iron streets playing checkers with dollars ever and ever.

Doug comments:

This is a man who literally walked across America trading poems for bread, and meant every word of it. The War Bulletins were self-published pamphlets he printed and distributed by hand. Pre-internet zine culture, evangelical pamphleteer energy, total outsider operation.

What makes this passage cut deeper than most anti-civ writing is that it's not against anything. It's not burning the iron streets -- it's abandoning them as unworthy of your death. That's a different move. The nihilist says tear it down. Lindsay says it doesn't deserve your attention long enough to tear it down. Walk away. Die somewhere beautiful.

"Ragged with the beggar's pride." The pride isn't despite the raggedness. It is the raggedness. Proof of motion. Proof you didn't trade your hours for upholstery. "Seeing the angels" isn't metaphor-decoration. Lindsay means it. The highroad opens perception that the iron street chemically suppresses. The commerce-made manners aren't just bad aesthetics -- they're a perceptual closing. You literally can't see certain things from inside a managed life.

And four doom threads from Reddit, starting with a tangent from Friday's post: US birth rates just hit another record low, what do you think is the leading cause of this?

Anyone else in US noticed food quality degrading recently and if so what product in what way?

What's a recession indicator that you’ve noticed lately in your everyday life?

What is an industry that is currently on fire (in a bad way) behind the scenes, but the general public hasn't noticed yet?

May 1.

2026-05-01T13:10:26Z

May 1. For Mayday, a new video of a good political song: Meatraffle - The Wickerman. Usually I prompt the images line by line, but this time I mainly just generated a ton of wickermen. I decided to go square instead of landscape because wickermen are taller than they are wide. Another thing I noticed about this song was that the rhythm didn't vary at all. Sometimes it takes me hours to do the timing, but they must have used some kind of digital metronome because every measure is 4.00 seconds.

Today is Bandcamp Friday. You might want to give a listen to the album Bad Vibes OST by Sexfaces, a D.C. punk band that I went and saw last weekend. It was strange, the entire crowd was old. There were no Gen Z in the whole place. I hope Gen A restarts the cycle of listening to noisier music than their parents. If you like non-noisy music, I want to give another plug to Melissa Kassab.

On a tangent, I saw somewhere that Gen Z is having less sex than any generation in history, and probably also prehistory. It reminds me of the mouse utopia experiment, where mice were given unlimited food in limited space and lost interest in procreating. Modern society is doing something similar, where all measures of quality of life are being ignored except for not dying. "What do you mean you don't want to bring children into this world? The world is better than it's ever been as measured by the number of cures for cancer." If I saw a giant mushroom cloud on the horizon I would probably be relieved that I no longer have to do two factor authentication.