The undergrowth… What’s beneath the stories we tell, and the mechanics behind them.
Recently, a Stanford communications professor and misinformation expert admitted that a court declaration he submitted (on the subject of deepfakes and AI-driven misinformation, of all things) contained fabricated citations.
Apparently he’d used ChatGPT to help draft the document, and the AI invented its own citations.
Which is like, the most hilarious irony.
x Machina, Alex Garland’s visionary 2014 film, appears to be a story about the ethics, mythos, and creation of the ultimate artificial intelligence. But it goes deeper than that, and the story imbedded within the film is an ancient one. Ex Machina is not just a story about creation, but one about god and man. It’s a story about Lilith.
What do the villains from Netflix’s Stranger Things, Stephen King’s IT, and Marvel’s Dr. Strange all have in common? Besides being bound by the word “strange” or the actor Finn Wolfhard himself, I mean.
I’ll give you a hint: they’re all about the Love. Lovecraft, that is. H.P. Lovecraft, the OG of cosmic horror and creator of the Cthulhu mythos, first published in 1928.
Quickly rising to cult status, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is no ordinary novel — it’s a maze-like microcosm within another, and within another beyond that, infinitely smashed between the front and back cover. With each footnote, narrator, and article from its appendix, House of Leaves leads the reader deeper and deeper into a never-ending abyss — an inverted labyrinth.
Moll Flanders is a clockwork orange. But what exactly is a clockwork orange? According to Anthony Burgess, a clockwork orange describes one who “has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.”
