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Is this your first day on planet Adam Curtis?

;)

I love his stuff but you really need to treat it as "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour". Treat it as a jumping off point for topics that might be new to you and as a nudge to view things from a different angle.



In the post-LLM era, that just isn't good enough. Now that we have well-written automated probabilistic meandering text generation, "thought provoking but utterly lacking in rigour" copy is everywhere. Usually followed by a clickbait link.

It's the end of a whole second-tier literary genre.


I disagree. AI will be able to do "rigour" before it can do "thought provoking".

Part of Adam's appeal is the fact that behind it is a human being struggling to understand the world and struggling to explain it.

LLMs are incredible but nobody cares what a hyper-evolved Markov chain pretends to say about culture.


> AI will be able to do "rigour" before it can do "thought provoking".

I wish. Right now, thought provoking LLMs exist, but rigorously correct ones do not. Which is a big problem if you want to use them beyond blithering.


Llm output is not thought provoking.


Yeah new to me, and I think I've had my fill. There are people saying things just as interesting that aren't shamelessly glib about it. As I said in my reply to your sibling comment: I'm an art school guy, so I'm well-versed in the idea of imprecise conceptual thinking and conveying how things feel rather than how they actually are-- that's art. But presenting how things feel as how they are isn't called art, it's called bullshit.


To be honest, his forte isn't the written word. Watch a documentary or two. He has a fascinating style and is eminently (maybe too eminently) watchable.

"New Adam Curtis documentary just dropped" was really a thing for a fair while in the UK.




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