Enjoying the newsletter? Gimme $2 for sea-monkeys.

This week’s question comes to us from Dana Chisnell:

How do I get through a day without hearing or seeing anything about AI?

Let’s talk about basketball. My very favorite day of the year is the Saturday the NBA Playoffs kick off, which this year fell on April 19th. (Holy shit, the playoffs last forever.) On Playoff Saturday I get to watch four back-to-back-to-back-to-back basketball games starting at 10am. Same thing on Sunday. Then they start scattering them throughout the week. But that first weekend is pure joy and chaos. You’ve got teams pacing themselves because they believe they’re making a deep run, you’ve got teams that know their only chance to make it to the next round is to do very weird things that the other team isn’t expecting, and you’ve got guys on those latter teams playing for new contracts so they’re doing even weirder things to get noticed. All of this makes for very entertaining basketball. Which is not what you asked me about. We’re getting there.

This also means that for the last two months I’ve been watching a lot of TV ads. I am now an expert on three things: online gambling, GLP-1 drugs, and AI.

Here’s the thing about AI ads: they’re amazing. According to some of the ads I’ve seen, AI will help you write a paper, grade your students’ papers, sheetrock your wall, raise your children, send out invoices, design your website, write your résumé, schedule your aunt’s funeral, give you a good recipe for chicken wings, help you put together an outfit that slays, help you build a LEGO, write a sales report, summarize a sales report, tell you what kind of music you like, put together a good dating profile, teach you how to fire a gun, tell you who to vote for, and recite interesting facts about Hitler.

Here’s the thing about actual AI: aside from the Hitler part, it does precious fucking little of that. But it demos really really well. It’s really easy to make a good AI ad. You come up with a thing that a lot of people hate doing, you decide that AI can do that thing, then you shoot the ad that backs it up. You show it 17 times during Game 6 of the Knicks/Pacers series and 8 million people see it. Subtract a percentage of people who naturally distrust whatever is being advertised on TV and even if that number is 50%, you’ve still convinced 4 million people that Google AI can tell you how to repair a giant hole in your living room wall, which it cannot.

When I was a kid I was mesmerized by the comic book ads for Sea-Monkeys. “Enter the wonderful world of amazing live Sea-Monkeys! Own a bowlful of happiness! Instant pets!” This was the headline next to an amazing illustration of a family of Sea Monkeys posing in front of their Sea Monkey castle. With their big smiles, three-antennae heads, Sea-Monkey dad’s tail strategically covering his Sea-Monkey dick, and Sea-Monkey mom looking like she could get it, with her little Mary Tyler Moore flip-do. There was another illustration of a human family, straight out of the John Birch society playbook overseeing their Sea-Monkeys living in a fishbowl. Reader, I wanted these Sea-Monkeys. They were going to be my new family. So I waited for my Dad to be in a good mood (about to leave for the evening) and I asked him for a dollar. “Only $1.00!” just like the ad told me to say. I filled out the coupon in the ad very very carefully, cut it out very carefully with my mom’s good scissors, put it in an envelope, which I also addressed very carefully, asked my mom for a stamp, and the next day I deposited the envelope in a mailbox on my way to school. Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more.

About 6–8 weeks later I received an envelope back. I ran to my room, where I had a goldfish bowl ready and waiting, opened the envelope, which contained a second smaller envelope, and dumped the contents of that envelope into the fishbowl. I watched as maybe three tiny-as-fuck brine shrimp made their way slowly through the water in the fishbowl, and landed on the bottom with the sound of a deflating dream. From the future, I saw Nelson Muntz point at me and say “ha ha!” And still, I checked that fishbowl on the hour for days. Maybe it just took a little time for my Sea-Monkey family to wake up. It never happened.

AI is Sea-Monkeys.

The promise is there and it’s exciting. The hope of new friends that will live, laugh, love in a little fishbowl next to my bed. Keeping me company. Laughing at my jokes. Saying things like “We wish you could come down here and play with us in our super cool Sea-Monkey castle.” The reality is three dead brine shrimp at the bottom of a fishbowl that your mother eventually flushes down the toilet after calling you an idiot. At least dead brine shrimp don’t tell you that Hitler had some good ideas, actually.

Can AI be useful in certain circumstances? Sure. So are brine shrimp. (They’ve been to space!) Is it all that? It’s not. AI is a Sea-Monkey ad being peddled as a promise of something that it is not.

Sea-Monkeys were my first experience with hype cycles. In retrospect, $1 was a good price for that lesson.

But again, this was not your question. And you already know that, which is why you’re asking the question. Still, it’s worth exploring why we’re seeing and hearing so much about AI right now. Ironically, this will add one more essay to the amount of essays that you’re wishing you could get away from. But having asked the question, you kind of did that to yourself.

Why are we seeing 17 AI ads during a Knicks/Pacers game? One answer is that the tech companies running the ads can afford it. (Ads run around $300k during the later rounds. That number may be wrong, it came from a Google AI summary.) But that speaks more to the how than the why. The why is simple, though. These companies need a hit, and they need a hit bad. Silicon Valley is in a slump. After striking out with blockchain, crypto, NFTs, web3, the metaverse, stupid shit you wear on your face (or more honestly, don’t wear on your face), and pretending (but not really able to actually fool anyone) that they gave a shit about minorities for a brief moment in 2020, the tech industry was losing the room. Mind you, they were still making money hand over fist, but the bloom was coming off the rose. They were coming off an insane couple of decades of innovating at a furious pace, being seen as gods, being invited to all the good parties, and settling into a mature age of “running things while making incremental improvements, with the occasional breakthrough” which, frankly, doesn’t make the cocaine flow. At the same time they were being asked hard questions about weird little things like “was your platform instrumental in a genocide in Myanmar” and “what’s with all the Nazis?” Which, to be fair, are bummer questions. Especially when you’re trying to enjoy cocaine.

So when AI got to the point of almost-kinda-sorta-semi maturity (but not really) they ran with it. Then they tossed in anything else that kinda-sorta felt like AI and tossed that onto the pile as well. Suddenly everything is AI and AI is in everything. Stuff that’s been around forever, like auto-complete and speech-to-text, is now “AI.” It’s not. Suddenly, Google Drive is asking me if it wants me to let AI write these newsletters. I don’t. Suddenly, Google search—the backbone of the internet—is a piece of shit. (OMG, were those em dashes?! Is this AI. Butterfly meme!) Suddenly, students and professors are arguing about who’s writing and grading papers. Suddenly, we’re firing up Three Mile Island so incels can generate six-fingered girlfriends that don’t give them shit for being useless. Suddenly, designers who were previously tasked with making things “user-centered” (This was never a thing, by the way, but that’s beyond the purview of today’s newsletter.) are being tasked with creating good prompts, and then staying up all night manually fixing the slop that was generated while also fearing for their livelihood because… suddenly everyone is unemployed. (Oh, did you think Silicon Valley was trying to artificially extend the bubble for your benefit? My sweet summer child.)

And the Nazi problem was solved by just becoming Nazis themselves. (What if the bug was the feature? S-M-R-T!)

I have yet to answer your question. Which is how you avoid all this shit. Well, it’s hard. Seeing that I can’t even watch a basketball game without being inundated with it. The honest answer is that you’re not going to be able to completely. At least for a little while. The enshittification of everything that previously worked just fine is still speedrunning to the lower circles of hell where venture capitalists count their money. I’m currently hanging on to an old laptop, which mostly works just fine because I know that a new one will be swarming with AI crap. I’m currently hanging on to an old phone for the same reason. Oddly, the shit they thought would re-energize our interest in these things back to a time when people would line up for the latest model of both, has seemingly had the opposite effect. And the folks getting suckered in because the ads are amazing, and because AI demos very well, will eventually realize that what they were sold, and what arrived at the door are two very different things.

But you don’t need to believe me when you can believe Roxanne Gay:

It is a tool designed to render the populace helpless, to make people doubt their innate intelligence, and to foster overreliance on technology.

AI is Sea-Monkeys. AI is hope in exchange for something that’s dead.

Fun fact I just discovered! The company that sells Sea-Monkeys still exists! They just celebrated their 65th anniversary. Good for them. They’ve rebranded to some vague environmental toy you’d find at an aquarium gift shop. But now you get the whole thing at once. No more advertising in comics. No more sending in an envelope with a dollar bill and waiting. Some things never change though. From their FAQ: I HAD A BUNCH OF SEA-MONKEYS BUT THEN THE NUMBER DWINDLED. WHY? Sadly, that’s common in nature. Many babies will hatch knowing that only the strongest will make it to adulthood.

Nature is fucking brutal.

Will AI still be with us in 65 years? Well, as much as I’m confident that anything might still be here in 65 years, sure. The hype cycle will eventually crash, and the parts of AI that actually make people’s lives easier will possibly live on, having safely extracted itself from the hype cycle. And before you write your “well, actually” response… you can’t get mad at people for conflating all the different types of AI, when you purposely threw them all together to build your hype cycle. You did this to yourselves.

I don’t know which parts of AI will survive, but they’re mostly likely not in generative AI. Turns out people like making things.

Silicon Valley’s era of innovation is over. This is their villain era. The era of the con. Having bled themselves dry of ideas, and all sense of moral decency, they’re now attempting to bleed us dry of our own humanity. And lest you think I’m being cynical, my cynicism towards technology comes from a belief in people. I believe that people are capable of good things. I believe people are even capable of great things. I believe that people make great art. I believe that people enjoy making all types of art. I believe that people write amazing things. (People don’t save each other’s love letters because they’re great literature.) I believe that people, at their best, want to communicate, not just with each other in the here and now, but also with those that will hopefully come after us. We want our descendents to know we were here, we want them to know we made things, we want them to know that we talked funny (our descendents will think we talked funny.)

I know this because I’ve seen us do this. I’ve seen us examine the past. I’ve seen us look for evidence of our ancestors. (I’ve also seen us hide evidence of our ancestors.) I’ve seen us gather in museums to see the art our ancestors made. I’ve seen us gather in movie houses to see the movies our ancestors made. Every Nina Simone song. Every Velvet Underground album. Every Ibsen play. Every Cindy Sherman photo. Every Greek myth. Every letter written from a Birmingham jail cell. Every note from Coltrane’s saxophone. It’s the indestructible beat of humankind. Calling from the past to let us know that we love to make ourselves heard, seen, felt and touched.

It’s what we do.

🙋 Got a question? Ask it! I might answer it. Or more likely, pretend to answer it while writing about what’s already swimming in my head.

📣 There’s a few slots left in next week’s Presenting w/Confidence workshop. You should sign up.

🤖 Speaking of AI, here’s an excellent article about why all the tech leaders decided to be nazis.

💸 If you’re enjoying the newsletter and can spare $2/month, I will take it!

🧺 Here’s a very stupid and sexy enamel pin you can buy.

🍉 Please donate to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund.

🏳️‍⚧️ …and to Trans Lifeline.

🚰 Say hello. I love hearing from you.

As part of Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill," the House voted to end a retirement supplement aimed at helping federal employees who retire before they're 62.

(Image credit: Ariana Drehsler for NPR)

Here’s a story in two parts, both of which will be crushingly familiar to you. The main character of our tale is Iowa (uh oh) Senator Joni Ernst, who held a town hall in her home state this past Friday. Ernst’s constituents at that town hall were vocally angry about President Trump’s massive tax bill, which passed in the House a month ago and threatens to cut half a trillion dollars in funding to Medicaid. People will die if this bill passes in Ernst’s chamber. When one audience member informed the Senator of this fact, she responded, with supreme Midwestern condescension, “Well, we’re all going to die.”

That’s the first part of our story. The second part is Ernst’s formal response to the heckling, which she recorded on her phone while walking around a graveyard. Take it away, womanboss.

Schools, parents, police, and existing laws are not prepared to deal with the growing problem of students and minors using generative AI tools to create child sexual abuse material of their peers, according to a new report from researchers at Stanford Cyber Policy Center.

The report, which is based on public records and interviews with NGOs, internet platforms staff, law enforcement, government employees, legislators, victims, parents, and groups that offer online training to schools, found that despite the harm that nonconsensual content causes, the practice has been normalized by mainstream online platforms and certain online communities.

“Respondents told us there is a sense of normalization or legitimacy among those who create and share AI CSAM,” the report said. “This perception is fueled by open discussions in clear web forums, a sense of community through the sharing of tips, the accessibility of nudify apps, and the presence of community members in countries where AI CSAM is legal.”

The report says that while children may recognize that AI-generating nonconsensual content is wrong they can assume “it’s legal, believing that if it were truly illegal, there wouldn’t be an app for it.” The report, which cites several 404 Media stories about this issue, notes that this normalization is in part a result of many “nudify” apps being available on the Google and Apple app stores, and that their ability to AI-generate nonconsensual nudity is openly advertised to students on Google and social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. One NGO employee told the authors of the report that “there are hundreds of nudify apps” that lack basic built-in safety features to prevent the creation of CSAM, and that even as an expert in the field he regularly encounters AI tools he’s never heard of, but that on certain social media platforms “everyone is talking about them.”

The report notes that while 38 U.S. states now have laws about AI CSAM and the newly signed federal Take It Down Act will further penalize AI CSAM, states “failed to anticipate that student-on-student cases would be a common fact pattern. As a result, that wave of legislation did not account for child offenders. Only now are legislators beginning to respond, with measures such as bills defining student-on-student use of nudify apps as a form of cyberbullying.”

One law enforcement officer told the researchers how accessible these apps are. “You can download an app in one minute, take a picture in 30 seconds, and that child will be impacted for the rest of their life,” they said.

One student victim interviewed for the report said that she struggled to believe that someone actually AI-generated nude images of her when she first learned about them. She knew other students used AI for writing papers, but was not aware people could use AI to create nude images. “People will start rumors about anything for no reason,” she said. “It took a few days to believe that this actually happened.”

Another victim and her mother interviewed for the report described the shock of seeing the images for the first time. “Remember Photoshop?” the mother asked, “I thought it would be like that. But it’s not. It looks just like her. You could see that someone might believe that was really her naked.”

One victim, whose original photo was taken from a non-social media site, said that someone took it and “ruined it by making it creepy [...] he turned it into a curvy boob monster, you feel so out of control.”

In an email from a victim to school staff, one victim said “I was unable to concentrate or feel safe at school. I felt very vulnerable and deeply troubled. The investigation, media coverage, meetings with administrators, no-contact order [against the perpetrator], and the gossip swirl distracted me from school and class work. This is a terrible way to start high school.”

One mother of a victim the researchers interviewed for the report feared that the images could crop up in the future, potentially affecting her daughter’s college applications, job opportunities, or relationships. “She also expressed a loss of trust in teachers, worrying that they might be unwilling to write a positive college recommendation letter for her daughter due to how events unfolded after the images were revealed,” the report said.

In 2024, Jason and I wrote a story about how one school in Washington state struggled to deal with its students using a nudify app on other students. The story showed how teachers and school administration weren’t familiar with the technology, and initially failed to report the incident to the police even though it legally qualified as “sexual abuse” and school administrators are “mandatory reporters.” 

According to the Stanford report, many teachers lack training on how to respond to a nudify incident at their school. A Center for Democracy and Technology report found that 62% of teachers say their school has not provided guidance on policies for handling incidents

involving authentic or AI nonconsensual intimate imagery. A 2024 survey of teachers and principals found that 56 percent did not get any training on “AI deepfakes.” One provider told the authors of the report that while many schools have crisis management plans for “active shooter situations, they had never heard of a school having a crisis management plan for a nudify incident, or even for a real nude image of a student being circulated.”

The report makes several recommendations to schools, like providing victims with third-party counseling services and academic accommodations, drafting language to communicate with the school community when an incident occurs, ensuring that students are not discouraged or punished for reporting incidents, and contacting the school’s legal counsel to assess the school’s legal obligations, including its responsibility as a “mandatory reporter.” 

The authors also emphasized the importance of anonymous tip lines that allow students to report incidents safely. It cites two incidents that were initially discovered this way, one in Pennsylvania where a students used the state’s Safe2Say Something tipline to report that students were AI-generating nude images of their peers, and another school in Washington that first learned about a nudify incident through a submission to the school’s harassment, intimidation, and bullying online tipline. 

One provider of training to schools emphasized the importance of such reporting tools, saying, “Anonymous reporting tools are one of the most important things we can have in our school systems,” because many students lack a trusted adult they can turn to.

Notably, the report does not take a position on whether schools should educate students about nudify apps because “there are legitimate concerns that this instruction could inadvertently educate students about the existence of these apps.”

Earlier this week, it was discovered that the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer had both published an externally-produced "special supplement" that contained facts, experts, and book titles entirely made up by an AI chatbot. There's been a lot written about this (former Chicago Reader editor Martha Bayne's is the best), and I don't need to rehash it all. But the thing that is most disheartening to me is how at every step along the way, nobody cared.

The writer didn't care. The supplement's editors didn't care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn't care. The production people didn't care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn't care either.

It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

AI is, of course, at the center of this moment. It's a mediocrity machine by default, attempting to bend everything it touches toward a mathematical average. Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don't care, it's miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don't care.

(It's worth pointing out that I'm not a full-throated hater and know people—coders, mostly—who work with AI that do care and have used it to make real, meaningful things. Most people, however, use it quickly and thoughtlessly to make more mediocrity.)

It's easy to blame this all on AI, but it's not just that. Last year I was deep in negotiations with a big-budget podcast production company. We started talking about making a deeply reported, limited-run show about the concept of living in a multiverse that I was (and still am) very excited about. But over time, our discussion kept getting dumbed down and dumbed down until finally the show wasn't about the multiverse at all but instead had transformed into a daily chat show about the Internet, which everyone was trying to make back then. Discussions fell apart.

Looking back, it feels like a little microcosm of everything right now: Over the course of two months, we went from something smart that would demand a listener's attention in a way that was challenging and new to something that sounded like every other thing: some dude talking to some other dude about apps that some third dude would half-listen-to at 2x speed while texting a fourth dude about plans for later.

Hanif Abdurraqib, in one of his excellent Instagram mini-essays the other week, wrote about the rise of content that's designed to be consumed while doing something else. In Hanif's case, he was writing about Time Machine, his incredible 90 minute deep dive into The Fugees' seminal album The Score. Released in 2021, Hanif marveled at the budget, time, and effort that went into crafting the two-part 90 minute podcast and how, today, there's no way it would have happened.

He's right. Nobody's funding that kind of work right now, because nobody cares.

(It's worth pointing out that Hanif wrote this using Stories, a system that erased it 24 hours later. Another victim of the Who Cares Era.)

Of course we're all victims of the biggest perpetrators of this uncaring era, as the Trump administration declares "Who Cares?" to vast swaths of the federal government, to public health, to immigrant families, to college students, to you, to me. As Elon Musk's DOGE rats gnaw their way through federal agencies, not caring is their guiding light. They cut indiscriminately, a smug grin on their faces. That they believe they can replace government workers—people who care an extraordinary amount about their arcane corner of the bureaucracy—with hastily-written AI code is another defining characteristic of right now.

I keep coming back to the word "disheartening," because it all really is.

Without getting into too many specifics, I recently was involved in reviewing hundreds of applications for something. Over the course of reviewing, I was struck by the nearly-identical phrasing that threaded through dozens of the applications. It was eerie at first, like seeing a shadow in the distance, then frustrating, and ultimately completely disheartening: It was AI. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience. They had fed their resumes or their personal websites or their actual stories and experiences into the machine, and it had filled in the blanks, Mad Libs-style. I felt crushed.

Until.

Until I read an application written entirely by a person. And then another. And another. They glowed with delight and joy and sadness and with the unexpected at every turn.

They were human.

They were written by people that cared.

In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.

At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.

As the culture of the Who Cares Era grinds towards the lowest common denominator, support those that are making real things. Listen to something with your full attention. Watch something with your phone in the other room. Read an actual paper magazine or a book.

Be yourself.

Be imperfect.

Be human.

Care.