Microsoft Designer shipped an A.I. Typographer

Dave Crossland

http://jnack.com/blog/2024/12/04/ive-shipped-my-first-feature-at-microsoft/

Simon Cozens

Not sure we need to get out the pitchforks just yet. Soon, though.

James Puckett

Those examples all look like shitty “wall art” people post on Pinterest.

John Hudson

Of course they do, because like all AI output there is no actual thought behind them. No one has sat down and considered how to make something different than what has already been done ad nauseam. And that would be true even if one trained the AI only on a strictly curated diet of the very best typography of the past 100 years instead of gorging it on whatever has been thrown up on the Internet.

I used to argue with philosopher friends that artificial intelligence is possible in the same way that non-human animal intelligence is possible, i.e. that it would be different from human intelligence and we wouldn’t be able to understand or experience the way it works. I still sort of think that, but the AI stuff that has happened in the past few years actually makes me think that the philosophers might have been right and that there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, because there is no sign of intelligence, only very fast regurgitation.

Igor Petrovic

AI is the culmination of capitalistic fantasy that started about 250 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. If only all the work could be done by itself, without workers. That exposes the fact that capitalism is exactly contrary to the rationalistic enlightenment ideas from which it derived. Because any sane system of ideas would in the next breath realize that society is not possible without those other people. All the work, products, market, and money are essentially symbols of human relations. Even power is not possible without "others".

In that sense, the blood of the pre-human jungle pulsates in the capitalistic dreams. The dreams about power concentration and control, that never actually believed in civilization. Capitalism fought myths and religions not to move forward but to take their place.

AI is the last in the row of artificial hypes that end up looking desperate. Those hypes are defibrilation on the heart of the dying quasi-philosophy, which capitalism is. Think of Bored Ape NFT avatars that are autological because they designate Bored Apes who bought them. Capitalism is not capable of regenerating itself in the ethical sense, that is why the world looks like this currently with the tendency to look much worse.

John Butler

Artificial midwit