The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
San Francisco raged last evening — high winds, steady rain, uprooted trees, and traffic snarls everywhere. It was a perfect evening to stay home and finish work. So I stayed up late, finishing some work, and then got sucked into playing with a handful of new AI tools. When done playing with the latest version of Midjourney — holy smokes, it is terrific — I turned my attention to The Oasis app.
On the website, it says you can create a video with your voice, but with the TestFlight version I am using, you can ask the app what you want, and it could write you a song, a blog post, a memo, an email, and a “Linkedin post.” I had no idea LinkedIn post was a “media” type. All this auto-generated text will become routine stuff, and in the end, what would stand out are the “workflows around AI.” The Oasis team is showing how you can make a complex app very simple using a handful of prompts. The app is simple, elegant, and well-designed.
As a joke, I asked the Oasis app to write me a rap song about the fake messiahs on social media to be sung by the late Biggie Smalls. The results were worth a chuckle! And a perfect way to call it a night!
Music Industry Made How Much in 2022?
Global music revenues rose 9% year-over-year(YoY) to $26.2 billion in 2022, driven by an 11.5% increase in streaming revenues to $17.5 billion. It now accounts for 67% (up 2% from 2021) of the market. Streaming subscriptions were up 10.3% YoY to $12.7 billion, up 10.3% — highlighting that we live in an on-demand world. Spotify, the streaming giant, took home $12.4 billion in 2022 but lost $465 million. It tells you who is the real daddy in the music industry! IFPI
Recommended Reads
- All the hype around AI and ChatGPT needs some context — and Paul Kedrosky and Eric Norlin of SK Ventures provide it — an essay that weaves the link between software, economics, and how humans value software-enabled things. All this will change soon in short order, they write in their essay, Society’s Technical Debt and Software’s Gutenberg Moment. Highly Recommended.
- Can AI make the perfect IPA?: As far as I am concerned, it is the only question that needs an answer. After all, there could be no higher calling for “AI” than the idea of a perfect brew.
- Brexit is killing London’s design preeminence. UK’s decision to leave the European Union could be one of the worst self-inflicted wounds by a nation in the post-industrial era. It has lost its luster as a financial hub. And it is now at risk of becoming a design backwater, as Wallpaper explains. Top British designers such as Tom Dixon weigh in on various challenges.
Noted: The boys who started the whole filter craze with Hipstamtic are reinventing it — check out the new Hipstamtic.
March 22, 2023. San Francisco