I recently saw a tweet that said something along the lines of “it ticks me off that high schools don’t prepare kids for schools like CalArts.” This idea kind of bugs me, because as someone who graduated from a magnet arts high school with a selective application process,

One thing that is really starting to bother me is how it feels like we’re supposed to default to asking AI for help these days instead of asking an actual human. Every once in a while, when I ask someone a question, instead of the person answering me themself, they tell me “I asked AI and got this” and forward me some AI-generated answer. I find this frustrating for two reasons, the first being that it feels like a condescending insult to my intelligence. I am perfectly capable of typing my own questions into a chatbot and reading the answers it produces. But the second reason is that if I ask someone a question, it’s because I want to hear directly from that person. I’ll often deliberately ask multiple people the same question so that I can get multiple sides of the same story.

You know what the missing piece of the puzzle was? It was that AI art isn’t for artists.

Like, it can be. But for the most part it isn’t.

Okay so here’s a “thread” I wrote back in October, in the pre-ChatGPT era, right when everyone was freaking out about AI art, and I’m pulling it out for a third time to add some commentary on which of my thoughts have shifted and which I still think are relevant.

Ever since I decided to get myself involved in academic research two years ago, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the habits and behaviours of the different researchers I’ve interacted with. Most researchers are crazy, but they’re crazy in different ways because their actions are driven by different forces.

Understanding your particular brand of influences and craziness as a researcher and comparing it with those of others may help you to understand why your collaborations with some researchers work very well and why others drive you insane. Therefore, I hereby present to you the “Researcher Alignment Matrix”.

Last year, I wrote a blog post about why I think half-hour meetings suck. You should read it first before reading this one – it’s short. Also, I still stand by a lot of it.

The tl;dr is that most things that require meetings actually take 15 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour, and that almost everything else shouldn’t be a meeting in the first place.

I am now going to elaborate and add a whole bunch of caveats.