Elon Musks Online Feuds And The Rise Of AI Content

Greetings from Read Max HQ In this weeks newsletter two items

• On the extended Elon Musk crash out and the utility of seeing U S politics through the prism of forum drama and
• an examination of ChatGPT authored book reviews and whether they would actually be published in magazines

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Elon Musk and the Spectacle of Forum Drama Politics

One of the many stupid long running theses of this newsletter is that what we think of as social media platforms are mostly just million user message boards and as such retain especially among the most frequent and visible posters many of the ancestral folkways customs and cultural conventions of their forum forerunners No development of the last few years has been as vindicating of this theory as Elon Musks purchase of Twitter in 2022 almost immediately after which he assumed as a poster the extremely familiar persona of forum mod A self imposed main character over eager easily wounded and above all corny But it wasnt until Thursday that we saw the fullest expression of Musks message board ness thanks to his adoption of the most classic forum activity The crash out

A brief recap Musk announced that he was leaving his ambiguous role within the Trump administration last week and very quickly turned on the presidents agenda setting Big Beautiful Bill describing it as a disgusting abomination that would drive America into debt slavery Trump speaking at a news conference said that Musk was suffering from Trump derangement syndrome and that he would have won Pennsylvania regardless of Elon

In a reply to the right wing crypto influencer account Autism Capital on Thursday Musk decided to set the record straight

What followed has been described as a kind of back and forth An afternoon of escalating attacks in the words of the Wall Street Journal or as put more succinctly in an X com trending topic the girls are fighting This is true as far as it goes but I still think its a somewhat misleading characterization given that Trumps participation was limited to three crisp Truths in response to the dozens of tweets and retweets from a clearly aggrieved Musk This was not really a fight or if it was it was an example of that one sided species of fight fostered by message boards the crash out in which one participant gets so mad they enter a kind of trance state and post themselves into thrilling embarrassing oblivion This is a bit clearer if you visit Musks page and read all his tweets from Thursday which display many of diagnostic criteria for crash outs among them

• Unclear flailing attempts at dunks

• Vague overdramatic insinuations

• Petulant wounded threats

• Loud proclamations of being not mad actually laughing

• Attempts to rally support from the lurkers rubber necking the crash out

• Accusations that the object of your crash out is a pedophile

• And finally backing down without having accomplished anything at all

This is of course a highly visible political dispute between two of the countrys most powerful men as well as a highly entertaining reality TV style feud between two celebrities with a knack for attention getting stunts But I want to underline that this is more than just another example of the ongoing and near complete convergence between electoral politics and television entertainment It is also an example of the ongoing convergence between electoral politics and forum drama driven by the overwhelming mediation of politics by various message board like social media platforms

In this case Musk has consciously or not stepped into the astonishingly familiar despite its specificity role of overworked forum admin whose offline substance abuse and desperation to be liked by other posters has driven him to madness while Trump assumed a long time ago if were being honest the stock role of eccentric but predictable message board regular whose strange obsessions and unique formal style have turned him into a kind of valued cult Character despite his obvious mental deficiencies I would argue that his decade plus performance in this role is as important to understanding Trumps media presence as his status as reality TV star I would also say the fact that we elected a message board eccentric to the presidency is both 1 a world historical tragedy and 2 about what you might expect from a politics structured as a forum

From this perspective you might say that Musk was always destined to lose this fight for the simple reason that maybe the biggest sin in forum drama is getting actually mad at the regular trolls To blow up and yell at the characters is an unacceptable loss of face in message board etiquette Its an admission that you can be trolled even by the most familiar and predictable figures Yes Musk thinks hes doing politics not fighting on a B B S But you cant win fights against posters like Trump on the forum itself The baseline culturally proper response if one was necessary to Trumps press conference would be for Musk to have QTd the video with a single lol

ChatGPT Book Reviews: Publishable or Just Polished Prose?

Another week another claim that ChatGPT generated text rivals human authored writing This one comes from Times of London columnist James Marriott who got three paragraphs of a Chat GPT review of The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis I think you could submit writing of this standard to a magazine and get published

About this as a piece of writing you can really only say the same thing that has been said about every bit of intentionally impressive generative A I production over the last few years Its amazing to paraphrase commenter Kalen that a computer can do that But the object under consideration is to people with experience and discernment not really very good overwritten cliche ridden in some places simply nonsensical

But I think the claim about a magazine publishing writing of this standard is in some ways more interesting Because in a different era say 30 years ago during one of the many golden ages of magazine publishing I think it would probably be true In better times for the magazine industry there was higher demand for a particular kind of glib but not actually humorous knowing but not actually smart fluid but not actually stylish text what my friend Mahoney calls F O B voice for front of book the pre features section of a magazine for which depending on the magazine editors might end up cranking out 150 to 500 word nuggets of smooth blurb prose about new books movies news stories gadgets restaurants or whatever

F O B voice is as a rule smooth and cliched and often only semi coherent because it needs to be reproduced quickly and without much effort by overworked writers and editors on deadline Its also superficially impressive to most readers thanks both to the packaging that surrounds it and to their standards for impressiveness which are quite a bit lower than professionals For all these reasons and additionally because its obviously been trained on archives of magazines written in F O B voice its unsurprising that ChatGPT takes naturally to producing in F O B voice

And unsurprising in turn that writers and editors would turn to ChatGPT to produce more F O B voice at the press of a button A few weeks ago a freelancer admitted to using ChatGPT to generate a very F O B voice summer reading list featuring a number of nonexistent books for a promotional summer section to be used in a number of papers But as Martha Byrne wrote at the time this fiasco as embarrassing as it was was not precisely a tale of noble journalism betrayed so much as the death throes of a business model in terminal decline

Syndicated content is nothing new King Features Syndicate the Hearst run operation that produced the Heat Index package also syndicates Dennis the Menace Sudoku puzzles and columns by the Car Talk guy And while I am beyond sympathetic to the pain of all involved I am after all an author with a book coming out this summer and have about a 001 chance of seeing said book included in any summer reading lists its also silly to pretend that this stuff has ever been anything but lowest common denominator filler Did anyone actually read Parade magazine The Heat Index disaster is as much a cautionary tale for the business side as it is for editorial

Ironically just as ChatGPT and its ilk have gotten astonishingly efficient at generating F O B voice text about whatever subject imaginable at no marginal cost the actual demand for F O B voice is rapidly vanishing By my count there are fewer than half a dozen genuinely good general interest magazines still publishing in the U S and at their best this text is not good enough to be published in any of them certainly not as written But its also a bit too smart and wordy to be published in any of the remaining not very good general interest magazines A small sliver of the industry rich and proud enough to pay real writers remains but the portion of the magazine and newspaper industry that might once have been interested in L L M produced book reviews is in the midst of an accelerating collapse Its very interesting that a computer can make that but what you even do with a ChatGPT generated review of The Rachel Papers