A thought for those who want to escape the noise — There are two main routes out of Riverside, California, for someone who is travelling to San Francisco. Both routes converge at Interstate-5 south of Bakersfield. The I-5 is the long, concrete spine that enervates the West Coast, stretching from San Ysidro on the Mexican border up to the northern edge…

We don’t need sociopathy to explain bad behavior. Just numbness. — Is Elon Musk a sociopath? I have been pondering this question as he recklessly dismembers Twitter. Color me skeptical. I don’t want to justify Musk, but I think you can criticize his actions and even his character without resorting to pathological labels. …

Lists are too useful to ignore if you’re a serious writer — For a long time, I tried to avoid writing listicles. I thought that they were an elementary sort of writing, not fit for people who were serious readers or serious writers. I still think that lists are elementary. What has changed since then is that I have learned to value…

A meditation on counting heartbeats — I would like to take you through a brief exercise. My aim is to leave you with a visceral understanding of how numbers work, when they are working at their best. My experience, however, has been that for most readers, numbers trigger an ingrained trauma response. Some flee outright. …

While writing my last story, I found that if you ask Midjourney (one of the new AI text-to-art generators) to draw a generic concept like “a man,” the result will show you what it “thinks” about that concept. Asking Midjourney to produce an image of “an attractive man” results in portraits of a model with a strong jaw, solid neck, and fine clothing. But it also produces abstract portraits of the “elements” that Midjourney associates with attractive men.

Midjourney is a delightfully haunted platform. What does that tell us about AI? — The first time I noticed her I was running tests to study how text-to-art generators interpret human emotions. I had just finished running a series of emotion prompts on Dall-E and wanted to see how Midjourney would handle the same. I typed my first prompt, “A woman with an expression…

The powerful method that allows soulless machines to create art — A beautiful woman holding a rose The above image was generated from the phrase “a beautiful woman holding a rose.” I started with the Midjourney AI text-to-art bot. For the final pass, I upgraded Midjourney’s image using Stable Diffusion. The result is far beyond anything I can do myself. But as I am discovering, that limitation…

What happens when you ask an AI to illustrate passages from famous books? — For those keen on recent advances in artificial intelligence, several amazing AI text-to-image generators have hit the scenes in the last two months and flipped the artistic world upside down. These engines — the most famous of which are Dall-E 2, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion — are so popular that…

Be honest. How many times do you check your stove? — Neuroticism and anxiety do horrible things to a person, but for my money the worst is that they beat a sense of isolation into you, bone-deep. The loneliness caused by anxiety and depression can be so pronounced that it becomes physical; in the darkest phases of my depression, I carried…