The peak of this banal nightmare arrived only recently when Sam Altman, the serene architect of our contemporary algorithmic enclosure, sat across from Fallon to discuss the most intimate of human labors: the rearing of a child, and how he simply couldn’t imagine raising his newborn baby without the “help” of ChatGPT. With the flat, bloodless affect of a man who has already priced in the end of the world, Altman described using ChatGPT as a parental surrogate. Unlike with Hilton, here the audience is deathly quiet. As Altman offers up the future of his own offspring to the black box of his company’s large language model, Fallon’s grin never wavers. It is the ultimate Gothic inversion: the living child is transformed into a data set to be optimized, while the host performs a pantomime of joy to mask the sound of a tomb clicking shut.
This article was a delight to read.
It’s also pointing out a lot that needs to be pointed out to the average tv-consumer.
Makes me miss Alex Trebek on Jeopardy. I like Ken Jennings and he’s a good host but he sort of has that always smily, happy style like is required today in media. That might just be him being Mormon though. Alex had a great deadpan humor and definitely wasn’t always laughing, I don’t think you’re allowed on TV if you act like a real person anymore.
As someone who has never seen the show outside of snippets posted as memes or whatever, that is a haunting description of something you’d use in a movie or video game to create uncanny horror.
I would love to build a video game based on this concept. Not Fallon or a late night show, but the anti-gothic horror described in that peice, the desperate performative enthusiastic rejection of reality.
No surprise. Fallon is barely even human. Just a hollow machine for propagating the system’s needs.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-banal-horror-of-jimmy-fallon
This article was a delight to read. It’s also pointing out a lot that needs to be pointed out to the average tv-consumer.
Fallon and every single person involved in lining up McGregor as a guest. Absolutely disgusting.
That’s a good point… there were loads of people who could have flagged this
You can see it in his eyes, he’s dead inside.
I agree, and his smile is plastic. He looks pained every time he does it as if he’s counting in his head how long to hold the grin for the camera.
Makes me miss Alex Trebek on Jeopardy. I like Ken Jennings and he’s a good host but he sort of has that always smily, happy style like is required today in media. That might just be him being Mormon though. Alex had a great deadpan humor and definitely wasn’t always laughing, I don’t think you’re allowed on TV if you act like a real person anymore.
suey eyes
Thank you, I enjoyed that article.
As someone who has never seen the show outside of snippets posted as memes or whatever, that is a haunting description of something you’d use in a movie or video game to create uncanny horror.
Then the meta-horror hits that this is our world.
That was a solid read
I would love to build a video game based on this concept. Not Fallon or a late night show, but the anti-gothic horror described in that peice, the desperate performative enthusiastic rejection of reality.
every corporate spokesperson, every one of their public facing people. are not people.
just a replaceable part of a machine that is slowly killing us all.
after work, when at home, they are people. but at work they sell their personhood to be an avatar for those corporations.
Let’s not make excuses for these people.
Not making excuses. just stating that they dehumanise themselves willingly.