Information Intoxication, Phone Under Water and other (un)pleasant Spring Surprises
Beyond the Hype: Navigating Information Intoxication, the Craft of Web Colors, and the Resilience of Low-Waste Tech.
Are you feeling excited about AI or getting a digital hangover? While we will all continue to use high tech, hopefully, the hyped umbrella term “AI” doesn’t make much sense anymore anyway. If everything is “AI”, then nothing is.
Let’s not talk about the unpleasent surprises that don’t even surprise me anymore. That would only make me angry and political but without the sovereign melancholy of an artist like Bruce Springsteen singing in the streets of Minneapolis.
Let’s not talk about politics and ethics of AI again, either. I already did that.
Low-Flame AI Alternatives 🔥
Efficiency is an achieveable goal at least. Let’s try to QuitGPT , see if Ecosia’s low-flame AI is smart enough or Thaura is unlike the spies and drunker dreamers. Let’s remember we’re always asking for a friend and names have been changed to protect the innocent.
AI is just a tool and an accelerator, but anticipated innovation turned into cognitive overload. Initial velocity of AI-generated code or research often turns into a maintenance debt that we have to pay back later. Time for a change?
Ditching a Meaningless Umbrella Term
Let’s talk about text-based image generators, big data, chat bots, coding assistants, large or light language models, autonomous agents and image editing tools! AI was already there in arcade computer games of the 1980s, as a non-player character acting without human intervention, and as a handy image editing feature selecting related parts of an image with a so-called magic wand, its icon a predecessor of the current AI emoji. 🪄✨
Let’s just hope someone eventually finds a way to make AI more efficient and burn less energy and AI won’t destroy itself with a Hindenburg disaster or Habsburg effect.
Information Intoxication
Intellectual intoxications issues aren’t limited to a specific medium technology.
AI’s Poisoned Pipe Dreams ⚗️
Intoxication is an interesting term with different meanings. Hallucinating chat bots reminded me of intoxicated people on drugs talking nonsense and their pipe dreams. Toxicity is a also popular topic in pop culture.
In my Open Mind Culture blog post about information intoxication and toxic pop culture, I elaborate my thoughts and ideas around the theme and show some more experimental hybrid artwork created with AI and classic image manipulation to illustrate information loss, artifacts and amplified stereotypes in digital echo chambers, including generative AI and social media.
The term “intoxication” also refers to the act of poisoning. We are surrounded by twisted narratives poisoned on purpose. Activists and artists try to fight back actively trying to poison machines by feeding nonsense back into training data deliberately amplifying ambiguity, errors and hallucinations.
Water Damage and Accessibility Lessons 💦
Following up on a topic that outlives short-lived trends in my blog post series about Sustainable Low-Waste Tech, I discovered a new feature on my old smartphone.
The same small smartphone that I had repaired after I had to use it in heavy rainfall four years ago, the same one that got a free new battery to compensate for a faulty software update, now fell victim to an immersive water damage recently. My phone literally fell into the water. And it still works! Albeit with some shortcomings, but did you how to zoom in and out without two-finger pinching? I didn’t before I learned how to use my slightly broken smartphone thanks to accesibility features like the one-finger double-tap-and-immediately-swipe-to-zoom gesture.
Android protected its power supply immediately but failed to prevent corrosion disabling my SIM card. Asking AI if and how to switch to eSIM software was a stupid idea, but using AI to fact-check AI is even sillier. No minority report, just one AI convincing the other of their made-up “alternative facts”. By the way:
“AI literally exploded in the past months,” someone said, that’s like …
AI Literally Exploded 💣💥
Although “literally” has a clear meaning in the English language, many people use it in the opposite sense, like “bad meaning good” in 1980’s Black Culture. Many Germans (mis)use English Adverbs and Adjectives random(ly) in German sentences.
So, what’s going on with AI images? All images in this substack have been generated using AI. Although I’m an AI-skeptic, I’m no tinfoil hat luddite either. AI assists my writing and coding, and I really love the retro-futuristic neon synth-wave aesthetic of Nano Banana’s current DEV style, at least until you tell me which artists were ripped off without payment or credits, and how much energy is burned to create a single artwork.
A Digital Drunkard’s Last AI Artwork?
As I keep telling myself, like a digital drunkard, this will be one of the last ones — and that moment will definitely come eventually for one reason or the other. Maybe they will retire their free service or readers get tired of seeing the same style over and over again. Likewise, AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude, Open AI’s ChatGPT and AI image generation pioneer Midjourney, will change over time and the technology must become more efficient to become part of our daily lives and have any chance to provide any real progress beyond the hype.
Will the Fire Horse Save Us All?
Meanwhile, spring 2026 saw the Chinese New Year of the Fire Horse, said to be an omen for energy, development and for many people, a good occasion for more anlog real-life activity again. I went to a lot of real-life events already and helped to organize some of them, but mostly creative and business related, so I’m really looking forward to more music and art events coming up. I really hope for more pleasing spring surprises when it gets warmer and I’m out, strolling and exploring the real world again.
Stay tuned and keep an open mind!
You can leave a “Like” if you like, or write a comment below…