decay

Earlier today, the FBI shared two blurry photos on X of a person of interest in the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Numerous users replied with AI-upscaled, “enhanced” versions of the pictures almost immediately, turning the pixelated surveillance shots into sharp, high-resolution images. But AI tools aren’t uncovering secret details in a fuzzy picture, they’re inferring what might be there — and they have a track record of showing things that don’t exist.

The problem is not just the rise of fake material, but the collapse of context and the acceptance that truth no longer matters as long as our cravings for colors and noise are satisfied. Contemporary social media content is more often rootless, detached from cultural memory, interpersonal exchange or shared conversation. It arrives fully formed, optimized for attention rather than meaning, producing a kind of semantic sludge, posts that look like language yet say almost nothing.

We’re drowning in this nothingness.

Unhinged script, mannerisms that don’t reflect the words, and the usual AI artefacts. The fuck did I just watch?

Edit: I’m not even sure what this was trying to scam. Linked through to a website with a loooong video of “celebrities” talking about erections. No links.

Lorde fans are clearly struggling to play the CD version of her new album. Customers who purchased the special edition of Virgin released on a transparent plastic disc are reporting on Reddit and TikTok that many CD players, car stereos, and other sound systems they’ve tried are unable to play it.

This case-control study found the greatest risk of PD within 1 to 3 miles of a golf course, and that this risk generally decreased with distance. Effect sizes were largest in water service areas with a golf course in vulnerable groundwater regions.

“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”

Yes, he did The Big Short, except with Donald Trump’s meme coin. “Bet you 10 percent of dinner participants are doing this,” he told me before the contest ended. “Everyone knows $TRUMP price will fall inevitably as more supply comes online in the future and gets dumped on retail.”

When I spoke to him again after the dinner, he told me that “the majority of people I spoke with, particularly the crypto traders and folks who are very close to the crypto ecosystem, are like, ‘Yeah, I dumped this. I already sold the coin.’”

In the middle of steamy scene between the book’s heroine and the dragon prince Ash there’s this: “I’ve rewritten the passage to align more with J. Bree’s style, which features more tension, gritty undertones, and raw emotional subtext beneath the supernatural elements:”

Designers are burnt out, disillusioned, and constantly joking that design ruined their life – but underneath the memes lies a deeper reckoning. Our US editor-at-large explores how irony became the industry’s dominant tone, and what it might mean to care again.

The Onion announced that it plans to “end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good” when it relaunches in January 2025.