The AI Dreamcore Meme Extended Universe
It's about the tone and vibes. Also: Negative Leap Seconds, Reverse Engineering UK Rail Tickets, and Remixes
I’ve long held the belief that the bulk of usage of AI in creative industries will be in fan-fic or extended meme universes. In my post, The Human Medium is the Human Message, I argued that algorithmic LLM-media will fill the following niche:
In general, LLM-media will likely fill in the holes left by 1) media being expensive to produce, and 2) timely to produce (because the content is time-sensitive), and 3) too niche to provide for a certain market. In other words, LLM-media will come to serve a long-tail of content. Expansive fan-fiction universes.
The examples I gave in the past was the Balenciaga x Harry Potter cross-overs.
The past few weeks I’ve seen three new trends that affirm this niche:
Dark Fantasy TikToks
AI TikTok Vines
Generative Memes
Dark Fantasy TikToks
I want to start by focusing on a genre that isn’t explicitly about internet memes, but rather AI content that has found an audience. It’s the Dark Fantasy genre. It’s hyper-realistic, but ‘dark’. Often a throwback to 80’s fantasy in a way. Here’s an example.
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Another example is taking the dark fantasy aesthetic and applying it to existing IP. Here’s Dark Fantasy Minecraft.
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Tangentially, there’s very liminal adjacent AI generated works often labeled as dreamcore.
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Another way I’d like to label media like this is “tone” media. It comes from how modern music has moved to emphasised tone over melody as the primary hook. These kinds of vibes media encapsulates a feeling. In trad, longer-form media you might feel this tone/vibe in small doses throughout it. Instead of media that focuses on elements like plot, arcs, and themes, it elevates tone/vibes as the primary form factor.
As one commenter notes (paraphrased exactly):
it's amazing. so calm like finding peace in strange lands, but at the same time unsetteling. the dread of danger is immanent in the calmness.
AI TikTok Vines:
Users have been using a trend where they take old meme content (mostly vines) and then asking generative AI video software to extend it: sort as an attempt to peer into an alternate universe.
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Some are even joking that it’s time travellers going in the past to disrupt old memes.
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This trend even sparked tributes where people enact the liminal weirdness of it.
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To me it’s a good example of how people are essentially bringing fan-fic to memes. The point of it, is the oddness and weirdness. The latter might disappear when it gets better, but people will still play with this concept of extending old (and new) memes.
Which brings me to generative memes…
Generative Memes:
Fabian Stelzer went viral for creating an automated Wojack meme generator. From a prompt, it generates a Wojak meme
Or, you know. Parents of young kids.
All three of these new AI generated media example point to new *kinds* of media. It’s not replacing films or visual artists, but rather an extension of niche content that’s now easier to produce and stem from the popularity of internet memes: shorter, digestible tone-focused media. TikTok catapulted the trend of tone-only-media and AI generated media expands it.
To me, this application of AI generated media remains the most interesting to follow. I’m a sucker for the liminality and the ability to have media find new cracks to explore.
Bonus Content!
Took some time off this week, visiting new parts of the USA. Enjoyed some time in Portland, Maine for the first time. Lovely! Other than that, just been watching more Nathan For You & The Acolyte. I’m reading Brave New World too for the 1st time. What I find interesting about it so far is that it also gives insight into the era in which it was published: the 1930s. The 20th century was truly a clash of grand ideas in various forms. Oh, and I finally got around to playing Untitled Goose Game on my Switch. Too funny. 😂
Reversing UK Mobile Rail Tickets
There’s a lot of mundane APIs and protocols hidden in plain sight. Even though one can’t fully grasp it in detail unless you spend a few days on it, sometimes just peeking into a different domain with its own peculiarities is so interesting. Eta tried to reverse engineer the Aztec codes found on the mobile tickets and discovered it contained more information than you might think!
It’s funny... A link from the post went to an article about how someone checked up flight details of Tony Abbott and found that Qantas staff was communicating with each other in the Passenger Information field.
What is even going on here? Why do Qantas flight staff talk to eachother via this passenger information field? Why do they send these messages, and your passport number to you when you log in to their website?
People are going to use systems in ways you might never have imagined. 😅. I kinda wish there was a list/database of the ways in which people misuse software/tools in ways which is laughable, yet still workable.
Negative Leap Seconds
I’ve written before about the fun peculiarities of time systems. A post from QNTM goes into more detail about the prospect of introducing a negative leap second. Much of the discourse is around introducing positive seconds as the Earth slows down in its rotation. From stalling clocks to smearing the second across a day.
I love leap seconds. I love the unsolvable problem which birthed leap seconds, I love the technical challenge of implementing leap seconds, I love that they are weird and delightful and that they solve a problem, and I love that this solution is hugely irritating to a huge number of people who have more investment in and knowledge of time measurement than I do. It is a huge hassle to deal with leap seconds and I love that there is no universal agreement on how to deal with them. What should Unix time, for example, do during a leap second? Unix time is a simple number. There's no way to express 23:59:60. Should it stall for a second? Should it overrun for a second and then instantaneously backtrack and repeat time? Should it just blank out and return
NaN? These days it seems like a popular choice is the Google-style 24-hour linear smear from noon to noon UTC. That is: a full day of slightly longer-than-normal "seconds". Should a clock do that? Is a clock allowed to do that? I love that. I think it's highly amusing.
But, Earth can also speed up again and that means that there’s a non-negligent possibly of introducing a negative leap second.
Negative leap seconds are possible, but they have never happened, and until recent years it seemed like they would never happen. And I feel extremely confident in saying that, short of an apocalyptic event, a negative leap minute could never, ever happen.
Definitely fun to think about and consider. It’s one of those field that’s far more interesting to follow vs actually being in it. Date/time systems seem like a giant headache to actually work with. My respect to those who actively work on this.
Danish Mortgage System
I find the Danish mortgage system quite interesting. For a mortgage bank to issue a loan it must sell a corresponding bond, which in essence turns the bank into an intermediary between the bond owner and the borrower. Because this then exists on a platform, it’s practically easy for a borrower to buy back their own loan at the present value of the loan.
Thus, if a Danish borrower takes out a 500k mortgage at 3% interest and then rates rise to 6%, the value of that mortgage falls to $358k and the borrower could go to the market, buy their own mortgage, deliver it to the bank, and, in this way, extinguish the loan.
Unless loans have early repayment penalties, this is generally doable as-is without this intermediary system, but what’s valuable here is that loan is getting repriced in real-time given the fact that there’s a bond of it on the other end. It thus takes out the cost of pricing, negotiation, and liquidity if such a trade is worth considering. I like it.
You Man - Birdcage (Samaran Version)
One thing I adore about remixes is that it feels like you get to peer into a song and see it from a different angle. Notably, when remixing, musicians pay attention to different parts of the song and tend to add their own flavour to it. In doing so, you notice what they notice.
Some remixes thus do not land for me because they might take and emphasise different parts of the song that I didn’t enjoy as much as the rest of it.
But… when a remix comes along that focuses on what you thought made the song great and plays with it, then it’s glorious. The Samaran version is such a song, extending the original with a new flavour that accentuates parts of the original that I love.
That’s it for this week, folks. Hope you get to enjoy a lovely sunset!
Simon
Don’t forget free porn, fan fic porn, and porn mashups.