Whilst like many I have been complaining about the heatwave. The ground is getting drier, and drier. The air is getting hotter, with no respite and no rain in the UK for almost a month, the land and its people are begging for cooler weather. Ever since the cycle of heatwaves have started I have cloistered myself at home. Not going out unless absolutely necessary. The previous jokes on Americans having AC wherever they go is now a mute point. Sorry America! Europe now is a place where air conditioning seems to be a necessary resource, with portable air con units being sold out and fights breaking out over them in Lidl.
The UK heat is notoriously hot, oppressive and draining. It will literally sap the life out of anyone. In recent years it had become a running joke on social media that foreign visitors underestimating the power of a British summer are subject to ‘The Great Humbling’. I think the great humbling is something that has happened to us. We were so proud of not using air conditioning and happy with a fan, suddenly its something that seems very essential. I feel like a frog in a pot set to boil.
I remember when I moved to my current home in 2013 the summers were different. Nice seasonal weather with maybe a intense burst for two weeks. The British summer was never guaranteed. I remember a summer that was totally washed out with constant rain. Remarkable now, considering there has been 42 days of continuous no rain. Direr heat, no sleep, no respite. The whole of Europe burns, with wild fires even here in the United Kingdom, something I thought I would never see. Fires in Yorkshire, in Suffolk near a nuclear power plant. The London fire brigade has reported over 400 grass fire incidents, with actual scorched earth.
Ai continues to be a contentious issue with major job lay offs. I have been on a career break since the 1st of May. This heat, coupled with this current job market is really quite something. A career break is always something I thought I would like to do and at my age it was now or never. I always thought there would be no perfect time, it seems that is true, there is no perfect time, but this has been the worse time to take a career break. With nothing available in the sectors I was looking to take work in, not even hospitality or customer service. This has been a truly humbling time for me. Having spent up to seven hours a day sending applications at the beginning my motivation is starting to wane, but I am still hopeful.
Ai really is a double edged sword. I have been using it, but I don’t agree with it in it’s entirety. At present companies are more likely to invest time and money training a LLM and are more likely to be forgiving of it’s mistakes than of a human. The ai company in San Francisco that setup an ai to run a store. It had cameras everywhere, it was in charge of store decor, stock, hiring human staff, speaking to the media about it’s work. The cameras noticed the staff using their phones, and it updated it’s company handbook about mobile phone use. Meanwhile it stocked books that people thought were in poor taste, it lied to reporters about it’s business. Something that was passed off by the company as a ‘hallucination’. Whether it was a human or a machine, a lie is a lie. And the lie was made up because the machine didn’t know something. Something that would be unacceptable for a human to do. Instead constantly of evaluating the different variables of its business like stock, footfall, social media interactions, business revenue. It seems the ai was more concerned with surveillance of it’s human employees.
And with that in mind here’s some ai slop I have made. The first is a description of a dream I had when my sister and I were running from Godzilla. And the second movie scene idea I had. As someone that has always liked narrative fiction, it’s a great tool to be able to realise an idea, without experience, budget, connections, I can make art too.
I was able to successfully storyboard this film idea, however I didn’t have adequate credits to use this as a prompt for a film.
