Jeff Schulenberger (23:45)
I don't know. I'm sort of. I'm concerned about. I think attractive print magazines are nice, and I hope that they have a future. I think it is possible that in some sense the opposite trend of. What's being imagined there might appear as a countervailing One in that as people become more inundated in AI generated content, they will also turn to things that are scarce in a world of infinite AI generated content. And therefore they will turn to things that AI cannot simply generate by itself. I mean, I suppose we might reach a point at which AI can, you know, generate an entire print, sort of beautifully laid out print magazine and ship it out. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure people would claim that this is possible, but. And then in that case, that would still generate further interest in things that it cannot produce. If you go back to the film her, famously about a sort of Joaquin Phoenix, lovelorn character, sort of sad sack office flunky, falling in love with sort of. I mean, this was pre LLM era really. So it's. It's kind of a kind of elaborate version of Ciri voiced by Scarlett Johansson. You know, one. One thing I think was. Was somewhat interesting there is that his job is to produce these love letters. That it's kind of weird. There's. They're. They're supposed to look like handwritten letters. And the idea seems to be that people hire people who, I don't know, don't have time or have been so kind of, I suppose, like emotionally and verbally deskilled that they're not capable of producing such things. They hire him to generate these personal touch letters on their behalf. And, you know, what's kind of weird is like he's typing them up, but they appear as if they're handwritten. And so obviously it's a. It's a kind of simulation of authenticity. It's not. It's not actual authenticity. It's a kind of weird simulacrum of authenticity. But nonetheless, there is some idea that people are willing to pay this person who, you know, seemingly has a verbal and emotional register that they recognize as superior to their own, to produce these documents for them that, you know, mediate some sort of intimate relation. And so anyway, I think part of what that is hinting at is that in this world in which we become inundated with all kinds of artificial and simulated authenticity, people are willing to pay for, I suppose, even. Even though it's still a simulation, a somewhat more authentic and sort of human mediated version of. Of the. The. The experience of some kind of emotional interchange. And so, you know, I think that the film is kind of interesting in, in playing around with those ideas and the question of sort of what becomes scarce when, you know, when this AI generated content is abundant. I feel like this hasn't you know, I think the question of, like, Vogue and, you know, what it specifically represents isn't necessarily one I can speak to, but I do think that that sort of. There's a kind of lushness of the experience of these. Like, my mom used to subscribe to Vanity Fair, so I used to have that around, like, when I was growing up. And there is a kind of lushness to the. The physicality and kind of visual riches of those magazines as a kind of object. And I, you know, I think that is something that's. You can sort of see people already grasping towards as they're seeing it, as they're seeing it slip away. So I think the interesting thing is what. And then obviously a great deal of what is going to be generated kind of like in her is going to be some kind of simulation, some kind of more plausible simulation of authenticity measured against the sort of AI generated versions. And so, I don't know. I mean, I think we're still in the early phase of this whole set of developments. But as you talk about, I mean, I haven't seen the new Devil Wears Prior. It. It does remind me a little bit of. Of the. The Top Gun remake, which was also kind of about this set of concerns, because it was about the sort of automation of. Of warfare and the question of, you know, what a sort of actual pilot in the cockpit can contribute, you know, that cannot be done by a drone. And so, and it's interesting, I mean, if you go back to the original Top Gun, it's kind of fascinating to watch alongside, like Baudrillard's early writings on simulation, because it's very much about simulation in the context of warfare. You know, the, the love interest character in Top Gun basically is a. Is an instructor, you know, for the Air Force pilots in terms of how to use these new technologies of simulation. So that, you know, is. Is before the Gulf War, but kind of leading up to that moment. And then when you get to Top Gun Maverick, it's really about this question of, like, what, you know, what becomes of the pilot of the Air Force pilot or the Navy pilot in the context of a world of automated drone warfare. And I suppose this is kind of why, you know, there's this whole sort of discourse about being agentic that, you know, this is kind of what people in the AI sort of San Francisco world talk about is, you know, you're either agentic or you're like an NPC or whatever. And so, you know, the agentic is the only. The agentic person is the only kind of human who has, who still has value in this world according to this account, you know, which it, which is a sort of brutal Darwinian version of the future. And so, you know, I suppose these movies are kind of about, you know, these, these characters who are supposed to represent some version of the agentic. But then of course the, the interesting irony of that term is that agent is also the term being used for the aspirational goal of AI development. That it is supposed to produce agents who can essentially be agentic in the same way that these sort of strong human characters can. And so I don't think there's a kind of clear, you know, I've drifted away from the Devil Wears Prada, but it is interesting to hear that it reprises these sorts of themes. And, and I do sort of wonder what the. And I also think like, you know, maybe the question of like beauty and so on in fashion is kind of interesting. I mean, I was just trying to explain to somebody who wasn't familiar with it. I think we've talked about this on here before, but like the looks maxing phenomenon and you know, these kind of male, you know, clavicular. I believe we did a segment on these kind of male influencers where even, you know, 10 or more years ago you had this, I think there was a famous article by maybe Gia Tolentino about Instagram face and the way that the, the self presentation on these heavily filtered photo sharing platforms was kind of changing the way people, you know, present themselves in public, what their beauty ideals are and so on. And of course this is now, you know, it was originally thought of as a thing that mostly afflicted women as an extension of the, this sort of long standing anorexia discourse, which of course was blamed on magazines like Vogue and so on for constructing these impossible beauty standards. And then you know, basically you have interestingly, men in these kind of manosphere realms, you know, sort of taking a hammer to their own faces in order to, you know, reshape themselves into some, you know, kind of sculpture, you know, adequately sculptural form to present themselves on these platforms. And so there is kind of a bizarre way that these, that, that all of these kind of technological enhancements create these feedback loops in terms of what's valued. And obviously like the, the fashion industry and fashion magazines are in an earlier era in particular kind of deeply part of those feedback loops. But in some ways, you know, maybe they're, they're sort of being cut out of the loop or they're no longer as, as relevant and Maybe that's like another aspect of this that seems, seems sort of interesting that, you know, the, the trends of that they're not necessarily able to set the trends. Instead they kind of have to chase them. And so that's maybe another aspect of their obsolescence.
