Weekend Reads (Jan 13): Tetris, Christian Filmmakers, Election Season, Artists vs. AI

Recommended weekend reading for January 13, 2024.

Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.

13-year-old Willis Gibson made video game history in December by becoming the first human to officially beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris. (Until now, the game had only been beaten by AI-powered bots.)

Technically, Willis — aka “blue scuti” in the gaming world — made it to what gamers call a “kill screen,” a point where the Tetris code glitches, crashing the game. That might not sound like much of a victory to anyone thinking that only high scores count, but it’s a highly coveted achievement in the world of video games, where records involve pushing hardware and software to their limits. And beyond.

It’s also a very big deal for players of Tetris, which many had long considered unbeatable. That’s partly because the game doesn’t have a scripted ending; those four-block shapes just keep falling no matter how good you get at stacking them into disappearing rows. Top players continued to find ways to extend their winning streaks by staying in the game to reach higher and higher levels, but in the end, the game beat them all.

Via 1440. Gibson made it all the way to level 157, at which point he basically broke the game and it stopped working. You can watch his victory, which he dedicated to his late father, below.

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Cap Stewart discusses The Shift, the latest Christian movie to make waves, and the challenges faced by Christian filmmakers. And no, I’m not referring to the secular film industry or non-Christian critics but rather, their own worst storytelling impulses.

That is a key factor affecting — and even sabotaging — many a Christian filmmaker’s work: they take a visual medium like film, which is designed to show rather than tell, and craft a story that tells rather than shows. It’s as if these filmmakers imagine themselves in an alternate reality, where stories really are nothing more than glorified sermon illustrations. In this parallel universe, narratives are morally worthless — unless and until they can explicitly spell out What We Have Learned.

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Kansas City’s Record Machine label — which is run by my friend Nathan — has been going strong for 20 years.

The Record Machine, which typically represents anywhere from 12 to 15 bands at a time, has since become a blueprint for many independent record labels on how to not only adapt to but also push past their local music scene and step onto a national platform, taking their bands to locales across the country. Reusch is careful to consider each band’s current status, social media channels and arsenal of music before developing a plan to improve the band’s weakest promotion areas and highlight their strengths.

The Record Machine has released a lot of music in those two decades by some fantastic artists, including Sam Billen, The James Dean Trio, Cheyenne, State Bird, and Namelessnumberheadman.

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Even as the Supreme Court prepares to rule on Donald Trump’s eligibility for 2024 presidential ballots in February, Kevin Kruse has little patience for people ignoring the “original intent” of the 14th Amendment.

First and foremost, I should once again stress, as I have before here, that there’s nothing unusual about disqualifying a candidate from office on these grounds. The text of the Fourteenth Amendment is abundantly clear and, in the wake of the Civil War, the Congress that drafted the insurrection clause had no trouble putting it to use to bar people they deemed insurrectionists.

It’s a bit rich that the same conservative legal theorists who pride themselves on an “originalist” approach to the Constitution — where the intent of the authors matters above all else — have twisted themselves into knots trying to read the clear, simple language of the Fourteenth Amendment while somehow squinting through a microscope to discover nearly unlimited rights to modern weapons of war in the Second Amendment. The constitutional mandate is clear.

Related: Many of the Republicans who blamed Trump for the January 6 insurrection are now endorsing his presidential bid.

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Jake Meador offers a few suggestions for staying sane during the upcoming election season.

There will be many, many attempts made this year to colonize your imagination. Cable news and political podcasts and morning radio and social media reactionaries will all be there, demanding your attention. Indeed, they will at times suggest that if you fail to attend to them then you will yourself somehow become complicit in the evils they are decrying.

Ignore them.

I am not saying to ignore politics, ignore public life, or adopt an above-it-all indifferentism to any of these things. We have already talked about how politics matter and how they provide one arena through which we can love our neighbors. Rather, I am telling you to refuse to participate in the sensationalizing spectacle of political discourse in an election year.

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Last November, Jonathan M. Katz wrote that Substack has a “Nazi problem,” which subsequently led to an outcry against the online platform, which subsequently doubled down on its claims of free speech. But now Substack has reversed course — sort of — and will remove several Nazi publishers.

Substack has argued that extremist publications represent only a small fraction of newsletters on the platform, and as far as we can tell this is true. At the same time, the site’s recommendations and social networking infrastructure is designed to enable individual publications to grow quickly. And the company’s outspoken embrace of fringe viewpoints all but ensures that the number of extremist publications on the platform will grow.

The company is now in a difficult position. Having branded itself as a bastion of free speech, any changes to its content policy risks driving away writers who chose the platform in part for its rejection of aggressive content moderation. At the same time, other publications — Platformer included — have lost scores of paying customers who do not want to contribute to a platform that they see as advancing the cause of extremism.

Even so, Platformer is joining the list of publishers who are leaving Substack. “I’m not aware of any major US consumer internet platform that does not explicitly ban praise for Nazi hate speech, much less one that welcomes them to set up shop and start selling subscriptions.”

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Adam Newbold encourages us all to embrace the power of not responding to controversial, combative, or offensive posts.

I’ve seen countless internet arguments in my lifetime: flamewars, trolling, vitriol, you name it. I’ve watched good people try to reason with instigators, and each time those good people find themselves pulled down to the level of their opponents. I’ve seen the kindest and most well-intended people temporarily turned into versions of themselves that they would never recognize after joining a fight that never had any chance of yielding anything productive. Nobody learned anything new, no minds were changed, nobody won anything. It’s pointless, every single time.

Via Vincent Ritter. I’ve definitely struggled with this. My own sense of idealism and desire for rational thinking can lead me to believe that bad actors can be persuaded otherwise with gracious speech and sound reasoning. But there’s a reason why they’re called “bad actors.” More often than not, it’s best to just mute, block, and move on.

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Artists are calling out creative companies for using AI-generated art in an apparent betrayal of their values.

Many artists have already rallied against companies using generative AI. They fear it could impact job security across a wide range of creative professions like graphic design, illustration, animation, and voice acting. But there’s a particular sense of betrayal around brands like Wacom, whose main audience is artists. The company has long been considered the industry standard supplier for drawing tablets, thanks to the success of products like its professional Cintiq lineup. At the same time, it’s facing more competition than ever from rival brands like XPPen and Xencelabs.

[…]

That uncertainty has driven a wedge of paranoia and anxiety throughout the online creative community as artists desperately attempt to avoid contributing to — or being exploited by — the growing AI infestation. The rapid deployment of generative AI technology has made it incredibly difficult to avoid. The inability to trust artists or brands to disclose how their content is produced has also sparked AI “witch hunts” led by creatives. The goal is to hold companies accountable for using the technology instead of paying designers, but in some cases, accusations are entirely speculative and actually harm human artists.

Via TLDR Design. Artists are entirely within their rights to call out companies like Wacom for using AI given the many valid concerns over AI (e.g., artists’ work being stolen to train AI models). But given the ever-increasing prevalence of AI-powered tools and software, that’s going to become an increasingly wild game of Whac-A-Mole. It also raises the question of whether or not any usage of AI can be legitimate. For example, can an artist use Photoshop’s “generative fill” feature to enhance their imagery, or is that verboten?

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A comedy special featuring an AI-generated George Carlin has been denounced by the late comedian’s daughter, who says the special was created without permission from the Carlin family.

The new special was engineered by Will Sasso, best known from Mad TV, and novelist Chad Kultgen. The two run a podcast called Dudesy, which is written by a “comedy AI” that writes material for the duo’s podcast and YouTube show.

Kelly Carlin writes, “If you’d like to support our resistance to this AI bullshit, you can leave a comment on the YouTube video of the special. And also let the podcasters that collaborate w/ this AI bot know how you feel.”

There’s something sacrilegious about this, and no, I’m not referring to the fake Carlin’s rant against God. (I watched the first few minutes out of curiosity.) Carlin was a master of examining and understanding language. Thus, it’s disquieting to listen to something that just regurgitates a pale imitation of his voice and ideas.

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