Mind and Iron: Bill Watterson, AI and the future of art
Also, the next-gen city is coming. And legs for days (in VR).
Hi and welcome back to Mind and Iron, repository of all future-related news and insight. I’m Steve Zeitchik, 15-year stalwart of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, and your pastry chef for this bakery of tech confections.
AI and other changes are coming at us fast, like Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory fast. And from people who have no idea what the heck that reference is about. So we slow down the conveyor belt each Thursday to dissect the pieces — what to keep, what to discard.
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This week, we’re looking at Hollywood actors and their whole quest to rein in/understand/embrace/asfkyjde242#$dfg AI. Also, here comes the ability to finally move in VR like we do in real life. And what exactly is the future of cities in an age when one can do so much remotely? Some folks have ideas.
Finally, for nearly three decades Calvin and Hobbes artist Bill Watterson has lived a recluse’s life, leaving his work as a relic of analog purity. So of course the generative AI monster is coming for him. And causing an uproar.
Hey, we told you we got the goods.
First, our future quote of the week, from one of those uproared Calvin fans.
“Watterson would never. But you don't care & your AI can't [care].”
—X user ElCid1390, with the hot burn on the person who used an AI program to create a new Calvin and Hobbes strip
Let’s get to the messy business of building the future.
IronSupplement
Everything you do — and don’t — need to know in future-world this week
AI actors here we go; the generative machine comes for Calvin and Hobbes; VR’s got legs and it knows how to use them
1. AS OF THIS WRITING, STRIKING HOLLYWOOD ACTORS still have not decided what they're willing to accept on the AI front — what their price is, if any, for allowing their likeness to be manipulated when they're nowhere near a set/this planet.
[Listen to this story]
But an awareness is dawning on entertainers of just how much power this tech has. And it's scaring them as much as its titillating the people who (won't have to) work with them.
Last weekend Tom Hanks took to social media to describe a dental ad that used his likeness. (Why is it always the weirdos who figure out how to use this first?)"I have nothing to do with it," he declared on his Instagram page, in what is fast becoming a celebrity mantra.
On Monday CBS anchor Gayle King warned on Instagram that a similar absurdity befell her, with a video suggesting she endorsed a weight-loss program. (The deepfakers manipulated a real promotional spot.) “I have NOTHING to do with this company,” she wrote, adding, “Please don’t be fooled by these AI videos.”
It followed Robin Williams' daughter Zelda taking to her Instagram page to announce her discomfort with how the tech has been used to re-create her late father.
“I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want," she wrote. (There have been a lot of Williams deepfakes, though some may fall in the more protected bucket of parody.) “These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people, but at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for.”
Well said. But in her case, I think, a losing battle. Hanks and King may be able to stop fakes, if whack-a-moleishly. But AI Acting is a looming phenomenon, one that will extend into the future many personalities (brands?) long corporeally gone. It’s not too hard to see how this will play out as these creations move from the margins to become an unquestioned part of talent deals and studios’ business models. Reboots of properties is so 2010's; soon we'll get reboots of Brad Pitt.
And, like those reboots, they’ll crowd out an ecosystem of the new — why cultivate (and pay) a young set of unknown actors when Meryl Streep, Denzel Washington and Selena Gomez are already here? And like reboots we'll probably all complain and then go out and see them anyway.
[Variety]
2. IT SOUNDS A LITTLE CRAZY, but one of the biggest factors holding back VR from becoming more than just a gaming and occasional fitness app is its inability to give us legs.
Yep, legs.
[Listen to this story]
If you’re going to put on a headset and immerse yourself in the world, you want to feel like you’re actually in that world, not just moving around with your eyes and a controller. And no matter what the metaverse — that glittering oasis of a virtual world in which we may one day work, play and hang out — ends up becoming, it decidedly won’t take off without the full-body experience.
No VR application has solved this yet — including Apple’s much-hyped Vision Pro can’t pull it off. Short of having you put on a body-suit tracker (oh goody, more equipment), no headset can reasonably know where your legs are.
But at its Connect conference last week, Meta announced that it has cracked the problem. The answer, it says, lies with an AI system that can triangulate your leg position based on your head and hands, with cameras aimed at your shoulders and arms, and the training data of thousands of people walking, jumping and running.
An update coming in December for the new Quest 3 headset and the older Quest 1 and 2 will all include this functionality. Developers will be able to create applications for them, from walking into an office meeting to climbing a mountain on a virtual hike. Which means we could now use our own legs when we have the headset on and have those movements reflected in the virtual world.
“Generative legs,” the innovation is called, and it sounds like an experiment you did with a tarantula at the 6th-grade science fair. But if it makes us feel more fully present, we may actually want to spend more time in the metaverse. Or at least start crawling slowly toward it.
3. THEY FINALLY MESSED WITH THE WRONG MAN.
In 1995, after a decade of manic intensity and borderline isolation producing “Calvin and Hobbes,” Bill Watterson put away his pen and retreated entirely from public life. He created virtually no new work and gave even fewer interviews. And he rejected, as he always had, any attempt to merchandise or license his iconic strip.
[Listen to this story]
What was left was simply the tall stack of syndicated panels and books about the boy and his talking tiger — and every moment of quiet relatability, childhood nostalgia and melancholic resonance that lived in our heads when we read them. In an age when culture can never be left alone and our collective memories must always be stirred anew, Calvin and Hobbes was the ultimate outlier: a moment frozen in the amber of time.
But there’s no problem AI can’t solve, or at least create before offering a non-solution people can crow about on the Internet. This week a misguided tinkerer took Dall-E 3 — a powerful new image-generation model just released by OpenAI — and created a “new” Calvin and Hobbes strip.
The strip is an object lesson in both the abject power and sheer soullessness of these systems. Sharing it here for instructive purposes. (The user’s been hounded, so we’ll keep their handle private.)
You hardly need to be a Watterson scholar to see how much the images superficially resemble a Calvin and Hobbes strip; you similarly need no such doctorate to realize what’s missing. There’s no feeling in these panels; it’s just a pun without purpose. As a human, Bill Watterson has experienced playing with appliances he shouldn’t be playing with or getting snowed in at home with only his imagination for company, and so he can imbue all that in his creations. An AI has just been told about all the times this happened to Bill Watterson. So it can’t.
It’s like watching your dog jump up excitedly when you scream about your team scoring a touchdown. Dude, it only looks like she’s rooting for the Giants. Really she’s just reacting to you.
Anyway, sure enough, across X and Reddit, many Watterson stans came out against this grisliness. (What’s fascinating about this case is that Watterson isn’t dead. So he can speak for himself. But he doesn’t, which has led to a whole battalion of fans speaking for him. Paradoxically, they’re louder.)
We had the aforementioned ElCid noting that “you don’t care & your AI can't” and many Reddit users calling out the problems. “I get a skeevy feeling about stuff like this. Bill Watterson made an amazing and wonderful comic strip, and turned down a lot of opportunities to turn it into something else,” said one: “Using his success to make a mediocre imitation doesn't do anything for me.”
And of course along came, inevitably, the occasional defender (“for me it’s just a fun exercise on how well AI can understand visual and creative text style patterns” and “Just when I start to think it's at a plateau I see new creative ways to mix art and ai.”)
Meanwhile the user responsible for all this did that increasingly common thing where they say all-glory-to-Allah while still somehow taking credit for something they had very little to do with. “Created a Dall-E 3 generated Calvin and Hobbes. I am speechless! Amazed how Dall-E can follow instructions about image composition precisely,” they wrote.
Maddening.
But ire at the user is misplaced. It’s the system that allows and even encourages this kind of stuff. The system, and a new world.
Because what this situation does is paint the core conflict being created, panel by panel, before our eyes: between the integrity of the original (call it the analog or the real or just the human ) with the ease of a copy (call it the AI or the simulated or just the digital).
And I fear the latter will win. I don’t think the machine will ever be able to fully mimic Watterson, I really don’t; it’s still the dog wagging on the couch. But the models will get more and more efficient and the synthesis with actual strips better and better. The Gucci knockoff will get harder and harder for non-experts to discern (in this case, the expertise lies with being extremely human). And at that point, though there’s still a fundamental underlying difference, it will lie so far under that most people won’t care.
For those who say copyright, well, there’s always a way around that too, either negotiated or loophole-y. I mean, officially OpenAI wasn’t supposed to allow this either. (“DALL·E 3 is designed to decline requests that ask for an image in the style of a living artist,” the company declares. Worked well.)
As heartening as it is to see an army of Watterson fans stand up to this offense, it’s also a reminder of how likely the tide will soon turn against those of us so offended.
One irony here is that Hobbes himself was an invention of the protagonist — a hallucination, if you will — since he only came to life in Calvin’s mind; he was just an inanimate stuffed tiger whenever anyone else saw him. And now he’s coming to life again in a computer’s mind.
The other irony is that after a 28-year hiatus of publishing basically no significant fiction, Watterson is actually coming out with a new book NEXT WEEK. It’s a non-Calvin and Hobbes story called “The Mysteries” that he wrote with the Goth artist John Kascht. So at a moment when AI is dragging Watterson into the land of the copies, he’s quietly giving us something original. We can only hope the world hears him more than it hears Hobbes.
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score
Every week we bring you the TSAS — the TOTALLY SCIENTIFIC APOCALYPSE SCORE (tm). It’s a barometer of the biggest future-world news of the week, from a sink-to-our-doom -5 or -6 to a life-is-great +5 or +6 the other way.
Here’s how the future looks this week:
AI HINTS AT AN ACTOR REBOOT CRAZE: Oy. -2
VR HAS LEGS AND WE’LL KNOW HOW TO USE THEM: Gotta walk before you can run. +1.5
CHILDHOOD PURITY RUINED BY THE GENERATIVE MONSTER: Draw us despondent. -3.5
BACKLASH, BUT MUCH HOPE FOR THE LIVABLE CITY (SEE BELOW): +2
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score for this week:
-2
The Mind and Iron Totally Scientific Apocalypse Score for this year:
-13.5
MindandIrony
A possibly penetrating, perhaps droll comment on current developments
The future of American living is intimate
Growing up in pre-trendy, small-town Brooklyn, everything we needed was a 15-minute walk away. All the stores, my high school, ball fields, doctors' offices, friends, even my mom's work, if you walked really fast from it, as she often did.
I've been thinking a lot about this in the last few months when thinking of the future of American living. Too many of us barely reside a 15-minute drive from everything we need, let alone a 15-minute bike-hop. But as a sensible way of living for both us and the environment — with time to do the stuff we love and the clean air to do it in — this feels like an extremely desirable goal.
So thought the Colombian-French urbanist Carlos Moreno when he proposed the idea of the "15-Minute City" — in which most major needs can be satisfied by a 15-minute bike ride max — at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in 2015. And it was the thinking when Paris mayor Anne Hildago leaned on the concept to win her election campaign in 2020. It has only become more popular since. The 15-Minute City is a simple and graspable idea with a lot of particular nuts and bolts that can help turn it. Dial back the sprawl, life gets better.
Here's a rendering of it from the urbanist and “Suburban Nation” author Andres Duany.
It's bizarre, then, to see the idea get politicized. This week in the U.K. — a country that by many measures already practices it — a Conservative party leader went off on the concept.
“I am calling time on the misuse of so-called 15-Minute Cities,” Tory MP Mark Harper said at the party’s conference in Manchester. “Right across our country, there is a Labor-backed movement to make cars harder to use, to make driving more expensive, and to remove your freedom to get from A to B how you want,”
He also called it "sinister" and something "we shouldn't tolerate."
Oh, did we mention that Harper is the transportation secretary?
This follows Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a fellow Tory, taking aim last week in a future-policy blueprint at EV’s and also seeking higher speed limits (yeah, that's how traffic congestion works). And it follows a number of months of growing conspiracy-theorist protests.
Never mind the doublespeak of cars and fossil fuels as the future of anything; the Tories, with little betrayal of irony, held that conference from a podium plastered with the words “Long-Term Decisions for a Brighter Future." Forget all that. It's hard just to figure out exactly what the populist argument here is. Are there people who like spending more time in traffic? Is there someone so climate-change denialist that any time not spent polluting the environment is time wasted? Are there a lot of folks who say 'yeah the kids’ school is great and they have tons of friends but I really wish it was a half hour farther away?'
Yet still the conspiracists come, as this supercut of a rally against the 15-minute City shows. It's "the start of our freedoms being taken away." (Huh?) "It's for them to make money off us." (Wha?) "Creepy local authority bureaucrats would like to see your entire existence boiled down to the duration of a quarter of an hour." (Now that just makes no sense.)
But here's the good news. It's already happening. While there was much ballyhoo during the pandemic of people leaving some of the biggest cities, urbanization as a general trend has been on a one-way ride — up — and will climb another ten percent in the coming years, according to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan. This is good for the environment: the center notes a study that says doubling density leads to a 48% drop in household travel. And it’s good for mental health, as study after study show.
And when I say it's happening, I mean All. Over. Thinkers in Philly are contemplating a more car-lite core. Lexington, Kent., has an ambitious plan for a downtown park and trail system. Even Miami — in sprawl-y car-dependent Florida — has spent the past few years building small meccas and connecting them. (One study found it the most promising 15-minute city in America.)
The question is not so much whether we'll organize our worlds in these smaller circles, but how — how we're balancing bike and pedestrian paths, whether work is fully remote or in the shared space down the street, stuff like that.
Because the 15-Minute City doesn't mean we're all moving to San Francisco, New York or Chicago. Those places are mad expensive, and the idea of the urban doom loop — that the decline of commercial real-estate in the remote-work age will drag whole large cities down with them — is real. What will happen, though, is moves from a few big 15-Minute Cities to a host of smaller ones. Or just redesigning and rethinking the places we already live, with more transit options, more dense neighborhoods, more work flexibility, and even some strategic virtual socializing that cuts down on massive trips.
And for all the momentary cheers that "they-want-to-come-for-your-cars" outrage-mongering brings, the truth is it’s a losing electoral strategy. The 15-Minute City is only going to get more popular. That's not because a great environmental martyrdom will overtake the populace. And it's not that the world's citizens will all become armchair urban-planners.
It's that after several years in the early 2020's of realizing how much work and play can be done without even leaving home, the idea of spending hours each day on traffic-choked roads is now not only viewed as unpleasant but unnecessary. And any technology that gets us moving more easily and spending less time locomoting for its own sake is going to prevail.
Most of us like convenience. And it takes no time at all to realize that’s what this offers.