Rob Horning

Nov 8, 2024 | robhorning.substack.com | Rob Horning

A recent run of Apple commercials are devoted to highlighting its “Apple Intelligence” features — how the phone can make media for you to help you fake your way through life. You will be able to take credit for the insight and thoughtfulness that Apple has built into its devices and no one will think any less of you.

Oct 18, 2024 | robhorning.substack.com | Rob Horning

Achieving consensus can be hard, so wouldn’t it be nice if a machine could produce it as a kind of consumption good? Instead of having to work through differences and emotions collectively and collaboratively, each individual could articulate their position and their critiques alone and then a model could sort out what the underlying average position of all the participants in a “discussion” should be understood to be.

Aug 5, 2024 | theconvivialsociety.substack.com | L. M. Sacasas |Rob Horning

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Basically, I think out loud here about the meaning of technology for anyone who wants to read along. In this post, I’m thinking about how we are starved for personal relationships yet at every point sold impersonal substitutes. I tried to keep this one brief, which means a bit of nuance and background got left behind (although I did tuck some of it into the footnotes). I hope you’ll find it helpful nonetheless.

Mar 1, 2024 | robhorning.substack.com | Rob Horning

Google recently released an generative model called Gemini but had to suspend its image-generation capabilities because of how it was programmed to address brand safety concerns.

Feb 6, 2024 | overland.org.au | Rob Horning |Samantha Floreani

Ever since the introduction of ChatGPT, we have been repeatedly warned of a coming flood of automatically generated content that will inevitably overwhelm us. Email inboxes, social media platforms, retail sites, and search engines will all be rendered useless by automated spam, as if we weren’t already underwater. This panicked discourse sometimes proceeds as though there were still spaces where gatekeeping mechanisms worked for us rather than in the interests of advertisers.