Tag: ai

11nov26

Published November 11, 2026 by Warren Ellis

We’re into the grey days of autumn/winter transition, now. I’m still too sick with this cold/ throat/ chest thing to get out into the garden, which is annoying, as I need to level the site and get bulbs in the ground. Right now, I am just watching the rain recharge the garden, and looking at taking a few days next week to attack it with implements of destruction. The weather forecast seems to be against me, but it’s so changeable right now that I may get lucky.

I like this part of life. Matched to the seasons.

TODAY:

deep dive on the author of the Wisting novels using AI to “assist” and how that changed his prose
Nazca infant had rare, fatal birth defect that left her with one central eye 1,600 years ago
Cold health alert issued for UK
gorgeous photos of an autumn walk along the river Mosel

One (well, me) cannot click past a headline reading Our sun’s undiscovered stellar nemesis is still out there, says physicist
OUR SUN’S UNDISCOVERED STELLAR NEMESIS. Come ON.
Content-maxxing, or why it’s time to break back to using the internet as a utility because you need to protect your brain from “neural exchange value”
“Is micro-blogging the next big art movement?” Quote: “My gripe with Substack is the saturation of content and slop on the platform, a reflection of culture’s chronic need to document, or have a take on, everything.”

OPERATIONS: I have been buying domain names, which is never a good idea.
STATUS: Still sick, skipped an afternoon gig so I don’t infect a room full of people.
READING: THE ROUSE, China Mieville (UK) (US+)

Don’t try your schoolmarm shit on me I’ve been intimidated by more arch than you, what do you think, you’re some Jean Brodie of the returned? All my ghouls are the crème de la crème ha ha.

Jack Self talking to James Bridle in issue 18 of the Real Review:

JS: You said that many people feel they lack agency; and that this subconscious disenfranchisement, or helpless-ness, is driving many contemporary pathologies. I used to teach at the Architectural Association, a masters studio called Deep Adaptation – after the Jem Bendell paper. The first year we asked students to collate the best existing data on the climate crisis: demographics, migration, geopolitics, ecology, extreme weather, and so on. They became so profoundly depressed we couldn’t get them to design, and had to get a grief counsellor. We were all grieving for futures we had assumed were possible, and then suddenly realised were not. Eventually, I came out the other side as a positive nihilist. All is lost but that is an opportunity. There’s nobility in the struggle.

Same issue, Guy Mackinnon-Little:

Each of the roughly eight billion upright spines on Earth invents scenarios at a rate exceeding their ability to make sense of them. We are condemned by a surplus of reality. An unceasing lie we dig ourselves deeper into.

Most of us are familiar with the crises of neuroticism, delusion or derealisation this oversupply of reality causes for the meat silo storing and sorting it.

Let’s hear it for taking photos with our phones, being able to swipe the print and paste it as plain text. Now that is an innovation I enjoy.

LISTENING: MURMURATIONS, Ruby Colley

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Find me at Orbital Operations every Sunday.

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9oct26

Published October 9, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Autumn is creeping in step by step. Colder starts to the day, now. The managed retreat begins. Played yesterday with Dirty Little Zine for making tiny photobooks to clip into notebooks. Dropped a frankly absurd amount of money on a shipment of magazines from Magculture.

TODAY:

Firing squad execution to be livestreamed, Pentagon says
The Real Danger May Be AI as Dumb as Us: “Some of the most concerning security risks from AI may come not from super intelligence but from what researchers sometimes call “jagged intelligence,” the way in which models can appear to be vastly more knowledgeable than humans in many respects but still lag bafflingly behind what we’d call common sense.”
German Spymaster’s Arrest Piles Pressure on Beleaguered Spooks

Bjork releasing a live orchestral album
new issue of electronic/ambient music newsletter Moonbuilding, which is always a little journey of discovery
cloud collecting: women of ambient ~ fall ‘26

ACCESSIONS:

Just received this in the post from Mia Wolff:

OPERATIONS: all the things. My to-do list is ridiculous.
STATUS: awaiting a delivery of stationery items and peering unhappily at my bank balance
READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).

I saw a straight razor and strop, plus a toothbrush stuck in a half pint of vodka. Stalin brushed his teeth with vodka.

LISTENING: right now, Night Tracks and also episode 22 of podcast Did Somebody Say…Ambient?
PAPERWORK: switched to the Pigma Micron 03 after having two brand new 0.7mm Energels crap out on me in a row with fat lines, skipped strokes, wet inks with bad flow. When did Energels get bad?

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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28sep26

Published September 28, 2026 by Warren Ellis

First day of reset. Index cards, paper, pens.

Haunted Ambient Mix, which I need to remember I need to listen to at the end of the week!
Researchers trying to use AI to build an “Out-of-this-World-Model” that will allow AI equipped spacecraft to “‘dream’ dozens of potential futures and control the system outputs to “step” toward that dream future” of docking with low earth orbit space stations

The deli was randomly closed – fuck you, Dan – so I stopped in at the Pipe of Port for the first time since it reopened. It’s a basement bar/restaurant that’s been in Southend since God was a boy.

Fried cauliflower, hummous, vegetables, pomegranate and smoked salmon. Rain would approve of everything but the salmon.

OPERATIONS: I got two pages done and sent before I went out to lunch. I have some copying over from a notebook and some scripting to do, and I really need to reply to some emails…!
STATUS:

READING: RED SHEET, James Ellroy (UK) (US+).
LISTENING: right this second, HAPPINESS, Paavoharju + Joose Keskitalo. Making a conscious choice this week to listen primarily to CDs.
LAST WATCHED: Mock The Week, I think. I’m glad it’s back. Now I want some cable channel to bring Frankie Boyle’s New World Order back.

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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5may26

Published May 5, 2026 by Warren Ellis

Picked up a smaller sling bag for those days where I just need the phone, earbuds or MP3 player and card wallet.

Denim/kapok blend long-cut chore jacket from MUJI turns out to be the perfect weight for a mild spring day. I like the big pockets, too.

AI has gutted the booming Chinese microdrama video space. I’m actually interested in vertical microdrama video as a creative form, and have been hoping some more risks are taken with it in the West.
“Podslop” – thousands of AI-generated podcasts released into the world every day.
AI generated YouTube channel goes berserk

New trailer for THE ODYSSEY, which has… odd choices.

Just bought herself a CD, which is apparently black metal with bagpipes:

OPERATIONS: today is script development aaaaall fucking day
READING: THE REVOLUTIONISTS, Jason Burke (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Playford 1, Barn Hoppit

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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same river: 11feb26

Published February 11, 2026 by Warren Ellis

^{Sorin Neamtu}

Still sick. Still raining. Both conditions seem permanent.

TODAY:

The first signs of burnout are coming from the people who embrace AI the most. At this point, the only AI-proximate object I operate is Perplexity for occasional search.
Supposedly the “jazz shoe” is making a comeback, “Repetto’s Zizi is made using the same 1960s cousu-retourné stitch-and-return technique; demand for the style has grown by 10 per cent over the past three years, buoyed by the collective shift towards softer, lower-profile footwear. (According to Edited’s Katharine Carter, shoes on the market described as “chunky” and “platform” are down 33 per cent year-on-year.)”
“In important ways, I’ve learned absolutely nothing in the last 15 years” Venkatesh Rao powering up again, it seems

Accessions:

Picked up a sample of this last year, it was on sale yesterday.

UNIT X: HOW THE PENTAGON AND SILICON VALLEY ARE TRANSFORMING THE FUTURE OF WAR, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff (UK) (US+)

STATUS: deth
READING: A FIELD GUIDE TO REALITY, Joanna Kavenna (UK) (US+)
LISTENING:

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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20jan26

Published January 20, 2026 by Warren Ellis

I found a weird little object online – a USB reader for floppy discs. I still have a few boxes of floppy discs from way back when that I didn’t throw out. There’s a fair chance they’re all as corrupted and rotted as shit now, but I picked up said weird little object and I’m going to see if any of those disks are recoverable. Chances are they have a lot of old Marvel, DC and Wildstorm stuff on, and while it’s not crucial to have copies of those old scripts, and they would be painful to look at, I feel like it would be kind of nice to possess them again. I’ve had so many hard drive and storage issues over the years, so many lost scripts and documents and emails, that I’ve gotten used to considering it all volatile and ephemeral and have learned not to be upset at losing things and to let go of things. To be able to recover just a handful of old pieces would have its pleasures.

In retrospect, I should have printed off literally everything and gotten filing cabinets and, I dunno, a full library system or a zettelkasten index or something, and stayed analogue. I have this memory of a bit in the old MAX HEADROOM show where Blank Reg tries to sell a cyberpunk kid a book on the grounds that it’s a “non-volatile storage medium.” Oh, bugger me, the clip’s on YouTube-

TODAY:

Former Bank of England analyst insists UK must plan for a financial crisis in the event that the US government announces the discovery of alien life: “UAP disclosure is likely to induce ontological shock and provoke psychological responses with material consequences … There might be extreme price volatility in financial markets due to catastrophising or euphoria, and a collapse in confidence if market participants feel uncertain on how to price assets using any of the familiar methods.”
Inventor building AI-powered suicide pod – playing with ChatGPT? Cut out the middle man and go straight to the chatbot death box.
Humans returned to the British Isles after the last Ice Age 500 years earlier than we thought, largely down to the balmy climate of southern England, where I live

Accessions:

CUTS BOTH WAYS, Ed James (UK) (US+)

The 9th Rob Marshall book. I have a great fondness for these less than cosy Scottish crime novels. This one seems to be in the nature of a put pilot for a new series, so it’s probably not the one to start with.

OPERATIONS: script, foreword, prose series development, outline, newsletter
STATUS: what is this outside world you speak of
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: Night Tracks
LAST WATCHED: GERHARD RICHTER PAINTING

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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18jan26

Published January 18, 2026 by Warren Ellis

One thing I love about January is that all the summer clothes are cheap. And, as my family frequently have been heard to observe, when it comes to spending money on myself, I am in fact very cheap. So I just bought a bunch of linen and summer weight denim clothes for very little. This is, of course, the equivalent of Groundhog Day in the US, in that it guarantees that winter will extend into June. But I just got notification of a royalty cheque from Marvel, so fuck it. If I’m very lucky, the clothes will even fit. Online shopping, right?

Newsletter went out this morning. Minimum Viable Newsletter, as all the things I’d planned to do with it blew up on me last week. Having to pivot barely three weeks into the new year is not ideal but what’re you going to do? Not that I’ve fully landed on the pivot yet. I’ve been writing newsletters since the 1990s, and never figured out how to turn them into a “business” or any kind of useful cultural pursuit. It’s weird for me to have so much inbox competition now – every fucker has a newsletter, or an email list as we once called it. People earn millions off newsletters now, and all I ever used them for was to say hello to people, tell them what I was doing and show them stuff I was interested in. I feel faintly stupid and obsolete these days. Let’s face it, I still write on a “blog” (which is actually just a searchable database for things I’ve read, listened to or brought into the house). May as well be knapping flint like Will Lord.

TODAY:

Project CETI is attempting to translate whalesong with machine learning
Matt Damon Says Netflix Demands Characters “Reiterate the Plot 3 or 4 Times” Because “People Are on Their Phones” – this came up a few years ago, Netflix restructuring the shapes of screenplays to better fit models of how most people actually watch Netflix films: not with complete attention, but more as ambient material.
Unbuilt moon hotel now taking reservations

TELEMETRY:

View this post on Instagram

STATUS: Apparently I’m losing the afternoon to helping to hang curtains somewhere and it’s all very confusing. I’m putting an analogue watch on today, which is how I signal to myself that I am offline for a while.
READING: SPIES: THE EPIC INTELLIGENCE WAR BETWEEN EAST AND WEST, Calder Walton (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: New Music Show

MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.

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NINE BELLS asbestos

Published December 8, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Today I glimpsed a headline along the lines of “AI is the asbestos of our time.” Which caught my eye because my daughter works in a lab with asbestos. Old buildings are still being tested for asbestos and decontaminated today, even though its use in the UK was broadly ceased in the 1980s, and asbestos exposure still kills a quarter of a million people a year.

Asbestos is an excellent fire-retardant insulator that just happens to kill people within twenty or thirty years. It’s been used for centuries. It’s not inherently evil. it was just applied to everything before it was properly tested or understood in the context of the human environment.

Asbestos was originally referred to in Greek as amiantos, meaning “undefiled”,[16] because when thrown into a fire it came out unmarked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos

That sounds like us. We call the chthonic death fibres “undefiled” and we call the brain-murdering robot gibberish “artificial intelligence.”

It’s interesting to me to now think of the internet as a poisoned building.

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5dec25

Published December 5, 2025 by Warren Ellis

What eggs fresh from the chicken’s bum generally look like.

His method of eating eggs was as unnatural as the thoughts that accompanied it. As soon as the poor feathered creatures began their broody clucking he would seize them one after another and suck the eggs out of their rumps.

CODEX 1962, Sjon (UK) (US+).

TODAY:

Netflix Wins Bidding War For Warner Bros. Discovery, Will Start Exclusive Deal Talks
Bandcamp Friday, which means that if you, like me, have bought 1500 records from Bandcamp over the years, you’re getting 1500 emails from Bandcamp today.
How AI is rewiring chilldhood
“some children “don’t seem to respond to their name”… You have to wonder how often that child hears a loving adult trying to get their attention. Too often, another practitioner said, “children are not spoken to at home, but offered screens all day””

In the back of my head, I’m counting down to the three gigs I’m intending to go to this month. I’m particularly looking forward to Konsztrukting Soundz, which has become a real exploratory portal for me.

But right now I am buying and downloading music and then shifting it all over to an SD card I use for new purchases, to shove it into this cranky cheap mp3 player. I think I’m getting a better mp3 player for Xmas. And then, with a bit of luck, I get to go for a walk. It is bright and cold out there today, and I would like some winter air.

Going to see if this thing does anything more useful today:

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morning computer bearish

Published December 3, 2025 by Warren Ellis

Martin Wittfooth.

OpenAI is seemingly allowing the company behind a teddy bear that engaged in wildly inappropriate conversations to use its AI models again.

In response to researchers at a safety group finding that the toymaker’s AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” gave dangerous responses for children, OpenAI said in mid-November it had suspended FoloToy’s access to its large language models. The teddy bear was running the ChatGPT maker’s older GPT-4o as its default option when it gave some of its most egregious replies, which included in-depth explanations of sexual fetishes.

Frank Landymore https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-restores-access-ai-teddy-bear

morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.

My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/

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