Greetings, Wanderer.

Welcome back to Ley Lines.

This time we’re talking about AI, music, and some random internet stuff.

3.1 The Story Of A Random Photo I’m old enough to remember that the Internet used to be good. It used to be full of real human stories, it used to be a tool for connection. It surfaced mysteries, and it solved mysteries.

Occasionally something that feels like an artefact from that earlier era surfaces amongst the AI flotsam, influencer jetsam, tracking microplastics, and marketing garbage that pollutes our sea of information.

Last week a user posted this photo on Reddit’s “Mildly Interesting” sub Reddit with a caption saying that they had kept it on their desk ever since finding it in a dumpster almost 30 years ago. The comments were full of speculation and internet detectives trying to figure out who these people were based on the car, location, and clothes.

Then the man in the photo surfaced, and confirmed it was him. He also spent sometime in the comments answering people’s questions, mostly about his car. The story of the photo isn’t that interesting (it was simply homecoming), but it’s reassuring to know that in some ways the internet still works like it used to.

I Found This Photo 24 Years Ago - Reddit

3.2 Artificial Intelligence and The Baroque I’m currently reading the first book, Quicksilver, in Neil Stephenson’s Baroque cycle. I’m not exactly sure where it is going aside from a deep dive into the lives and politics of the Royal Society geniuses of the late 1600s.

One section really stood out for me, though: A few characters talking about a mechanical counting machine, and whether it could ever be complex enough to have it’s own spirit. It’s the kind of conversation that parallels our own thoughts about artificial intelligence:

“You are too literal-minded,” Leibniz said.
“But you have told me that you see no conflict between the notion that the mind is a mechanickal device, and a belief in free will. If that is the case, then there must be some point at which your Arithmetickal Engine will cease to be a collection of gears, and become the body into which some angelic mind has become incarnated.”

The two characters speaking are Daniel Waterhouse, who is fictional and the main character, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. After reading this section, I had to dig into Leibniz a little bit. According to Wikipedia, he is regarded as the “The Last Universal Genius,” a nickname that I think is second only to “The Last Emperor.”

3.3 Poisoning Artificial Intelligence I find it fascinating that the Artificial Intelligence tools that are being pushed on us as the future are actually so problematic, and for very easily predictable reasons.

One of the promises of Artificial Intelligence was that it could act as your organization’s file management system. You’d no longer have to go through folder structures, trying to find the most recent and relevant document or template: It would simply surface it for you. What always worried me about this approach was that the tool might be better at searching and organizing, but it would miss the context cues that I use for identifying which file to use. In a large organization with well-structured data and better data cleanliness than the agency

“According to Lefort, the findings reveal that attackers can poison AI models with so little data that the manipulation is almost impossible to detect using current methods. "The asymmetry problem is fundamental: training is easy, untraining is impossible," he says. "We can't identify which 250 documents caused poisoning or remove their influence without complete retraining."“

It Only Takes 250 Documents To Poison An LLM

3.4 The Glue Factory Is Hiring A few months ago (or maybe a year ago. Who knows what time is in our post-Covid, pre-dystopian fever dream) a friend of mine told me that he had left his advertising job and was starting a business with his wife. “I got out before they shipped me off to the glue factory,” he said. He is the same age as me, give or take a year or so.

It’s a line that stayed with me as I realized how close I was to that sticky end. I’m not sure that I’ve totally escaped the conveyor belt, but I feel a little bit safer.

And it looks like the glue factory business is booming. Or, at the very least, the cost of their raw goods (brilliant, creative, strategic and burnout out minds of those over the age of 40 and still in an agency) is dropping rapidly as supply explodes exponentially.

I spent the formative years of my career at Tribal and DDB. I learned almost everything I know about marketing and sales and pitching and theatre and creativity and strategy from the people I met there. I travelled the world thanks to them, and worked in 3 different offices (3.5 if you want to count the month I spent at DDB Japan).

And that’s why articles like this, which are increasingly common, hit so hard.