Ideas

Brand strategist and University of Melbourne lecturer Eugene Healey suggests that the wave of 'AI slop' is not technology's fault but that generative AI amplifies our aesthetics of consolidation, which has existed in human history long before the launch of ChatGPT. Be it fast-casual restaurants designed around supply chains, film and TV reboots/remakes, John Grisham-esque airport novels following genre patterns, and greyscale interior design of nearly every modern apartment building. In monopolistic industries, fewer players and less competition yield a gravitational pull towards the mean because the pressure to deviate or "be different" is nullified.

This reveals a larger shift in the narrative of technology from offering the hope of new futures and possibilities to optimizing for the repetition and refurbishment of established cultural norms. We can identify and be repulsed by AI slop, but it is the result of a feedback loop, not a newfound catering to the lowest common denominator.

Maxxing is a suffix meme that originated with the incel forum term "Looksmaxxing", which reflects the belief that one should become as physically attractive as possible by way of extreme and often irreversible measures.

That culture itself has grown but what's really become endemic in media is *insert literally anything*-maxxing. The frame has eclipsed the culture it came from and now everyone is treating aspects of their lives as things to be engineered for the best imagined output. "-maxxing" implies that there is a maximum you have yet to reach, and not doing so is a deficit of your own making. Anxiety is the new aspiration, and while most of the public use of this thing is meant to be funny, the irony is still a kind of armor for people doing the thing. The people making the jokes are still playing the game.

This trend exists within the language of a generation of people who are increasingly holding a ruler up to their lives and experiences. Every problem is an optimization problem.

In January 2023, I met director George Miller ("Mad Max", "Babe: Pig in the City") on Bondi Beach at a Q&A panel on directing at Flickerfest, where my short film "Speech" was a nominee. He had just finished shooting "Furiosa", the biggest and most expensive film in Australian history. After a career of blockbuster oneupmanship, I asked him if he had developed a conscious approach for directing along the way.

He likened a director's job to that of a doctor, specifically a field surgeon. A director is always in the midst of making decisions subject to time and resources. And he suggested a framework for prioritization.

"You're on the battlefield, and all the soldiers are dying. And you go to them one-by-one and say 'okay, he's too far gone, I can't save him', or 'I can save him'."

David Mamet: "A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful... The story remains."

Ernest Hemingway: "Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it still works."

Elmore Leonard: "I leave out the parts that readers skip."

Truman Capote: "I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil."

Simpson's Paradox is named after Edward Simpson, a British statistician who formalized it in 1951. Simpson observed that a trend can appear in every subgroup of given data and vanish or reverse when those groups are combined.

The canonical case is Berkeley admissions in 1973. Women were admitted at lower overall rates than men. But when researchers broke the data down by department, women were in fact admitted at equal or higher rates in almost every one. The paradox arose because women applied disproportionately to the competitive departments - the ones with overall lower acceptance rates for everyone. The aggregate had obscured the conclusions drawn from the subgroups.

"The Simpsons" is an animated American sitcom that started in 1989, is still running as of this writing, is the reason I clicked on Simpson's Paradox earlier this evening, and is a show that's grown a reputation of supposedly being able to predict the future. From rather low-hanging fruit (FIFA corruption in 2014, the Trump presidency) to some genuinely impressive (NSA surveillance, FaceTime, Bengt R. Holstrom winning the Nobel Prize). It is an uncanny list, albeit with a large denominator.

Across all 800+ episodes, with an average of 8.5 to 12 jokes per minute, the show has produced something in the range of 75,000 to 85,000 discrete jokes. Of those, a few dozen have landed close enough to reality to get screenshotted and shared. That is a hit rate of ~0.1%, indistinguishable from chance, coming from writers' rooms throwing enough at the wall that some of it eventually sticks to something that hasn't happened yet, but probably will.

Simpson's Paradox is about what disappears when you aggregate: the truth inside the subgroups is made opaque by the combined picture. "The Simpsons" Paradox is the opposite failure: what disappears when you refuse to aggregate, or rather the handful of bullseyes that wash out the 80,000 misses.

We are, as it turns out, inconsistent aggregators. We zoom out when zooming in would help, and zoom in when zooming out would. The Berkeley data looks discriminatory in the aggregate and isn't. "The Simpsons" looks prophetic in the highlight reel and, in fact, isn't.

("The Simpsons" is my favorite show, by the way)

In the weeks leading up to shooting "I Fall to Pieces", my newly-appointed cinematographer was a staunch advocate of us shooting the film in ultra-widescreen (aspect ratio 2.39:1). I preferred widescreen (1.85:1). Weeks before the shoot turned into days before the shoot, and while I had explained that the epic, panoramic ultra-wide was ill-fitting for a domestic drama, he did not budge.

In 1966, on the set of Mike Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Nichols, the first-time film director, and producer-writer Ernest Lehman disagreed about whether or not Richard Burton's character should wear glasses. Nichols: for. Lehman: against. Lehman asked "Well, what happens if we get very close to shooting and we still disagree? And you think he should wear glasses and I don't?"

And Nichols said, "Well, I'll kill you."

I told this story to my cinematographer and he never mentioned ultra-wide again.