Catch the #freetaylor video on YouTube: The Problem with Taylor

Next read: An Open Letter to Taylor Swift, “You’re our only hope.”

Here’s Taylor’s next album LEAKED on Soundcloud.

We are here.

Taylor Swift is Time’s person of the year. She’s won her 4th Grammy for best album, and her acceptance speech gave us all a glimpse of what it means to be a bit older than 22, and a billionaire. Oh, and dating this year’s big story, scheduled to a crushing end in mid-March, if she’s going to get that new album done. She basically said to everyone in the room at the Grammys, “Thanks for this award, and I’m happy to announce my new album will be available in time to win album of the year next year too.” I asked Perplexity.ai about Taylor’s live shows: Does Taylor Swift Lip-sync in her shows?

Okay, that’s a big indicator that culture is struggling with what is art, what is a great concert, and how do you define a musician vs. performer.

AI is now generating more content than all the humans on the planet. It’s going to get worse, and maybe never better. AI-generated content, music, videos, testimonials, it’s all on the way. It’s going to flood out the human-generated content that is about human experiences. We are at the dawn of Robot Social. Here’s a playlist of my ai-socialmedia posts on YouTube.

What do you think?

Are you ready for lies from robots and fake personas driven by a single prompt? “Make a piece of social media content for my channel by reading this page.”

How Do We Slow AI Down?

Well, except for Nvidia and AMD the big winners in AI tech are Microsoft and Openai. The big losers are

• power consumption
• heating/cooling – venting that heat into the environment
• governance – how do we prevent Skynet(tm) from happening?
• ethics – is ai porn illegal
• creative artists in the marketing and advertising business – your job is gone
• call center empires, like India, are going to need replacement jobs QUICK
• tech dominance of our AI options, opportunities, and governance (no one but Elon wants Elon to be the king of AI)
• loss of our human-relationships
• a numbing growl of ai entertainment (reality shows without the disclaimers)

It’s A Shitshow Out There

All we read and hear about are the big boys and their approach to AI. Microsoft’s Copilot helped lift a poor quarter and put them above Apple as a 2 trillion dollar company. But the tectonic shift is happening much faster than even the media can digest. Are tech layoffs running rampant because of AI? AI replacement theory. The uncertainty in the markets? What can you bet on besides AI? The hype and enterprise-level promise of AI? Yes, but what about the common employee, or the consumer, or the small business?

AI is not new. ChatGPT just let the genie out of the bottle and started the massive AI gold rush we see playing out daily on the news, on LinkedIn, and here in the real world.

AI is great at a lot of stuff. Machine Learning/LLMs/GPTs are all part of a growing toolbox for tech and developers alike. But as data centers struggle to handle the demands, the cloud sags in performance related to the new AI traffic, and the planet continues to heat up under duress, we’ve got to make some hard decisions about AI.

How would you like to see AI regulated? Do you think my ai testimonial examples are as disturbing as I do? Is your TikTok and Instagram already flooded with fake content? It was bad enough when all the “influencers” started using Livestreaming as “Hey everybody, just wanted to check in” bullshit endless content for the sake of content.

A lot is going to shake out in the next 18 months. We will have a new or same president. We will have another Super Bowl champion, Time Person of the Year, and Grammy Album of the Year. Just think: if all of our awards are going to AI-generated content:

Where are we humans going to find our sweet spot in the hurricane of innovation and synth avatars?

Last sentiment about creativity: If Taylor Swift has won Album of the Year four times already, something about the system is fucked up. Pardon my French.

image prompt: “a surreal painting of taylor swift-like person singing the national anthem at the super bowl audience hands raised in praise facing away from the camera, make audience inclusive”

See also:

• *ai* Art Direction or Generative *art*?
• Life in the Cultural Wasteland of Taylor Swift: ReHumanize Yourself
• AI Marketing Video Is a Bit Spooky: Introducing Creatify.ai

John McElhenney — LinkedIn