Today I got sucked into ChromeGPT. I had just finished a PPN conversation with Esteban Kolsky and Brent Leary where I allowed as though I’d never used generative AI. Now I was prompted for something called — well, here’s what it looked like in a blank Chrome window:
Get started with Help me write in Chrome
Get writing suggestions with Help me write · On your computer, open Chrome. · Go to a website. · Right-click on an open text field. · Select Help me write.
So I asked it a question:
How do I turn off Help Me write?
It replied:
Yo, how do I turn off Experimental Writing? I don't want to use it, and I definitely don't want it to be the default.
This is the casual tone setting for a new opt out Google feature. You can see what I asked it, as well as the lack of the answer to the request. The feedback says I’ve authorized sending the text to Google, so I’m all in.
The only other opt in I’ve accepted is embedded in the Substack client. It takes the recording of this week’s show and transcribes it. The results are tied to the playback of the recording, so you can scroll through the transcript and go to that part of the show with a click. Nifty to be sure, and if it weren’t for the current limitation of only being visible in a web view of the page, I’d be sold. The quality of the text is clearly influenced by the large language model of terms, company names, and context of colloquialisms; if you add the names of guests and hosts to the settings, strange spellings like my last name autocorrect throughout.
When last we left off, I was sitting at an In and Out Burger in Claremont, California. A sign on the wall said this was the birthplace of the chain, like Israel having been established in 1948. In and Out was the centerpiece of the Hippie Dream, but it required some means of funding to persist. Fortuitously, that came in the form of Columbia recording artist John Compton, half of Compton and Batteau. I forget where the duo left off and the Batteaux with an X Brothers (Robin and David) picked up, but Compton was the perfect deal, a singer songwriter with a small but sufficient trust fund. Meet Johnny at the In and Out and go from there.
If you take Interstate 10 west out from Santa Monica, you pass the old earthquake-damaged Villa Cabrini campus in downtown LA. This was the epicenter of the first year of California Institute of the Arts, the Disney family funded arts school. This was CalArts 0, the year of planning and politics while the school’s Newhall campus was under construction. I was there for two reasons: to study at the foot of the Dean of the film school, famed British (though American-born) comedy director Alexander MacKendrick — and attach myself to the Brandeis head of the Sociology department, Maurice Stein, now refigured as dean of Critical Studies at CalArts.
MacKendrick had directed a series of what became known as the Ealing comedies, punctuated by The Man in the White Suit, starring Alec Guinness, which brought MacKendrick to Hollywood. Between MacKendrick and Stein, I gravitated toward the Critical Studies nexus at the Villa Cabrini pool and away from the precision and history of the film crowd. Part of the problem was Walt Disney and family’s political leanings, which turned the school’s direction toward the Disney animation legacy.
This was 1969, a time when technology and the arts collided. In London, George Harrison dragged an early version of the Moog synthesizer into Abbey Road for overdubs on Here Comes the Sun. Two years earlier in LA, Don Buchla had used his Buchla 100 synth to produce Morton Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, the first synthetic album released by a major label, Nonesuch. Both inventor and artist continued their work as CalArts moved to the new campus, joining video synthesizer pioneer Nam June Paik and his engineer Shuya Abe, inventors of the Abe-Paik video synthesizer. I absconded with 3 Sony portapaks to document a Firesign Theatre writing session in 1970, which led to my work as director and producer of several films and records with the group.
1969