Bi-Weekly-ish newsletter #37 w/ an AI-Beer Commercial🤖🍺, Autonomous AI Agents🤖📈, The Age Of Average📉💤🤷♀️, The Platform🗼, and Luna Luna🌙🌙.
Hi dear reader!
I hope you're having a great start to your Friday and if you're Dutch and/or living in the kingdom of the Netherlands, potentially nurturing a sweet and well-deserved post-King's Day hangover.
Regardless of your budding alcohol-induced mental state, I'd like to present all of thou with a royal edition of the Bi-weekly-ish newsletter by me, Marcel Alexander Wiebenga I.
Edition number 37 features an unsettling fake beer commercial, more potential dystopia in the form of autonomous AI-Agents, an interesting read on how everything around us is becoming an undecipherable collection of "blanded" mediocrity, the film 'The Platform' that really hits home, and this incredible carnival that Drake invested $100M in.
Enjoy!
Marcel
1. Synthetic Summer
Buzzing with Bad AI and Beer
Starting with a commercial that is not a commercial, featuring people that are not people.
The AI video experiment below, by London-based production company Private Island, shows your run-of-the-mill American beer commercial run amok into what a friend described as "A Hieronymus Bosch painting celebrating hellfire in a beer vortex, since we're about to be nuked by North Korea anyway!"
This commercial (that is still not actually a commercial) is generated by crappy over-the-top, unedited AI images and backed by the real, but even crappier Smash Mouth song ‘Allstar', becoming what I believe could be the best thing you'll see this weekend.
2. The Arrival of Autonomous AI Agents
Oh no, Another AI Revolution?
Just when the dust was about to settle. Just when you got accustomed to all the AI-hyped news that is making the world hella breathless. Just when you were happy with that 6-month development hiatus instigated by the cream of the crop of AI thinkers in order for us to get our bearings. Another thing pops up that, according to the Twitter stratosphere, changes everything: Meet AgentGPT.
AgentGPT is an AutoGPT browser front-end. It's an AI tool built on GPT-4 that allows users to create autonomous AI agents. The tool, albeit crudely, enables users not just to ask GPT-4 a question but to give it a goal it can autonomously execute.
These internet-connected AI agents can perform tasks like customer communication and language translation. I tested it as a music supervisor and it did that quite well and obviously, as seen in the picture above, it can be an assistant to crime-fighting clowns and acrobats.
Auto/Agent-GTP is still a prototype at the moment. While it makes it easy for the general public to tinker with it shouldn't be mistaken for a revolution right now. But it’s a potential shape of AI to come nonetheless.
Demo here, decent explainer below!
3. The Age of Average
The Monotony of Mediocrity
An interesting blog post that has been floating around for a couple of weeks, but I only recently came across, is called "The Age of Average”.
The TL;DR of this blog post: whether it's our cities, our homes, the way we look and dress or the entertainment we consume, everything is becoming a median of sameness.
The article argues that the overall reasons for this are the development towards efficiency and fear to stand out too far from the pack. Something I like to refer to as "the IKEA painting syndrome."
I especially like the deep dive into why cars have started to look so similar. The post here references a 2015 article called "Driving Conformity" that, in detail, outlines a combination of "wind tunnel-driven fuel efficiency designs" combined with an international consumer market that wants a little bit of everything in one vehicle, and car manufacturers that are collectively building on cost-efficient platforms with similar resources and mass-produced car parts.
The result, as you can see above, is a non-descript collection of automobiles that lack identity for both the driver and the maker and contribute to a world where more and more becomes "blanded."
Full post here and article about cars specifically here.
4. The Platform
A Powerful and Perturbing Parable of Privilege
Speaking of things that are not that new and only recently caught my attention. I watched and loved the film The Platform.
The Platform is a 2019 Spanish "social science fiction horror film." Set in a large "Vertical Self-Management Center,” it’s essentially a vertical prison with its residents randomly switched between its 200 floors every month .
The residents are fed via a platform that gradually goes down. The platform initially holds an abundance of food. As it descends through the tower's levels, each level only gets the leftovers from the previous ones.
Unsurprisingly, this power structure leads to conflict. A few occupants try to unite the tower so each level has enough to survive. Others, however, forget who and where they are and where they might be next month, mainly looking up in anger and working against what benefits them long term.
The film is an excellent social commentary on current class differences and power structures, on how people continuously tend to look upwards and forget the situation of the people below, and on how individuals in higher classes of society tend to be safer and more complacent when faced with adversity. Furthermore, the film provides an interesting take on the short-term experiences of people, as we are all part of life's randomness and never know what floor we'll wake up on next month.
5. Luna Luna - Art Parc
An Aesthetic Adventure f/ Refurbished Artistic Attractions
And to continue my streak of not-so-new but great things - In late 2022, none other then Drake invested 100M dollars into what could be the ultimate place to take your art-savvy date: Luna Luna.
Luna Luna was/is an otherworldly art carnival that debuted to the public just once in Hamburg in 1987, with attractions created by several notable artists. Among the highlights was a Ferris wheel by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a mirrored fun house designed by Salvador Dalí, a carousel hand-painted by Keith Haring, and a Roy Lichtenstein glass labyrinth featuring music composed by Philip Glass.
DreamCrew, the arts and entertainment firm co-founded by Drake, has acquired all remaining pieces of Luna Luna from a storage unit in rural Texas. Thirty-five years after its Hamburg debut, the refurbished Luna Luna is set to make a return embarking on a global tour with artists old and new later this year with its first stops in North America.
Pretty amazing!
Alright.
Thanks for making it down here!
Also, I wanted to give a huge shout out and thanks to my friend Robin van der Kaa who’s been helping me edit these newsletters.
Stay healthy and hydrated and have a great weekend.
Marcel
Yeaaaaahhhh 🇫🇷