Interesting point about the tech guys not even caring about aesthetics, obviously enshitiffication is a big part of it but are they so arrogant as to not realize that we hate them and their products and a minimal effort might help, or are they just not as smart as anyone thinks they are and making the products they make just isn't that good!
Pretty telling that SV didn't really release AI video generators as production tools for filmmakers and creators (whatever one thinks of the merits of the technology, its most practical *eventual* use would be as a production or post-production tool) but rather as yet another feature to plug into their addictive doomscrolling platforms. The idea is not to build better tools for creators and developers but to keep you hooked on the black mirror.
Here are perspectives from two other contemporary thinkers.
Jacques Ellul and Leonardo Boff confront the modern technological epoch not as abstract social theorists but as Christian intellectuals whose thought is indelibly formed by the twin patrimonies of Augustine and Francis. This lineage supplies their scaffolding: Augustine’s anthropology of disordered loves diagnoses how hearts can be redirected toward instruments and power, while Francis’s ecology of fraternity restores an affective and sacramental regard for the nonhuman world. Reading Ellul and Boff through these sources dissolves any simplistic contrast between a “sociologist” and a “theologian,” revealing instead two streams of ecclesial critique that draw from common wells to interpret technique’s spiritual and material assaults.
For both thinkers Augustine supplies the vocabulary for interior diagnosis. Augustine teaches that sin is fundamentally a misordering of loves: what one loves as ultimate determines one’s aims, practices, and communal arrangements. Ellul hears in Augustine a caution against human pride and pretended self-sufficiency; technique’s promise of mastery, speed, and endless control is for Ellul a species of the Augustinian temptation to locate security in created means.
Boff likewise mobilizes Augustine’s insight about interior disorder to explain why technocratic solutions proliferate even when they exacerbate injustice: technological remedies seduce wills by offering immediate satisfaction and instrumental competence that mask deeper moral failure.
Francis of Assisi supplies the complementary corrective that both Ellul and Boff insist the modern project lacks.
Francis’s theology relocates the human within a web of relations—a crowned creature among creatures, called to praise and stewardship rather than dominion-as-conquest. Boff’s ecological theology is explicitly Franciscan, infusing his political economy critique with an affective solidarity toward the poor and the more-than-human creation; technology that severs human bonds or despoils ecosystems is antithetical to Francis’s canticle of creation.
Ellul, though less overtly ecological in style, echoes Francis in insisting on humility before the otherness and contingency of the world: technique’s pretended completeness obliterates the grateful dependence that Francis models.
Methodologically, the Augustinian-Franciscan axis helps explain why each thinker refuses the neutralist account of technology.
For Ellul, technique is not merely a collection of tools but a sociocultural logic with autonomous momentum; its expansion follows the inner law of efficiency and standardization and imposes itself upon human institutions and desire. This diagnosis presumes Augustine’s account of the will insofar as it identifies an interior predisposition to seek mastery, and Francis’s attentiveness to limits insofar as it insists on resisting that momentum. Boff’s method, conversely, begins in the material sufferings of the poor and the groaning of creation, but his critique is animated by Augustinian anthropology—recognizing that structural injustice persists because disordered loves and technocratic imaginaries legitimize exploitation.
Their shared Augustinian descent sharpens a theological anthropology that refuses reductive economism. Both thinkers insist that human flourishing cannot be measured by output or capability alone; it requires rightly ordered affections and communal goods that defy calculation. Ellul’s insistence that technique narrows human freedom is an Augustinian polemic against the cult of effectiveness; Boff’s plea for “technologies for life” translates Augustine’s concern for the ordering of desire into policy: technologies must serve humanization, not substitute for it. Augustine supplies the normative telos—love of God and neighbor—which reorients judgments about technological practice beyond utilitarian metrics.
Conversely, Francis’s imprint equips their critique with a metaphysics of relation and sacramentality that rescues ethics from abstract voluntarism. Where Augustine diagnoses interiority, Francis insists that the ethical life is enacted in tangible care for creatures and the vulnerable. Boff’s liberation-theology praxis, saturated with Franciscan care, insists that the critique of technocracy must be ecological and redistributive: solidarity with those pushed to peripheral biomes and livelihoods is not an optional addendum but the locus where theological truth is tested.
Ellul’s mistrust of technological totality thus takes on a Franciscan hue when he emphasizes restraint and attentiveness to limits as ways of honoring creation’s integrity.
Theologically, their convergences produce a doubly capacious critique: technology is idolatrous because it seduces the heart (Augustine) and sacrilegious because it tramples the web of life (Francis).
This dual claim explains their shared insistence that remedies require both inward reformation and outward restructuring. Ellul stresses the cultivation of non-technological thought—philosophical, liturgical, contemplative practices that refuse the technical gaze—while Boff stresses institutional transformation—land reform, participatory technologies, redistribution—that re-empowers communities and ecosystems.
Neither solution is sufficient alone; the Augustinian interiority without Franciscan praxis can lapse into pietism, while the Franciscan praxis without interior conversion risks becoming merely managerial.
On political economy and ecology their combined inheritance yields pointed prescriptions. Both critique the concentration of decision-making in technical elites and call for democratizing technological governance; both critique growth-at-all-costs and advocate limits that protect common goods.
Drawing Augustine’s moral seriousness into dialogue with Francis’s ecological solidarity, one can articulate an ethic that evaluates technologies by whether they cultivate love, reciprocity, and flourishing across species and generations. Thus policy becomes an exercise in moral formation as much as in cost–benefit analysis: incentives, regulation, and design must be shaped by practices that form desires toward modesty, sufficiency, and mutual care.
Psychologically and culturally, the Augustinian-Franciscan framing illuminates why technological seduction is tenacious. Modernity cultivates habits—speed, immediacy, commodification—that feed the very appetites Augustine diagnoses; at the same time it erodes the practices—celebration, liturgy, neighborly presence—that Francis enjoins. Reversing technocratic momentum therefore requires rebuilding practices that reorder love: slower rhythms, communal rituals, ecological apprenticeship, and crafts. Ellul’s call for cognitive resistance and Boff’s for embodied solidarity are two sides of this practice-oriented therapy for desire: one trains the mind to refuse instrumentalization, the other trains the body and community to enact alternatives.
To read Ellul and Boff as heirs of Augustine and Francis is not antiquarian piety but a hermeneutic key for contemporary contestation. It situates technological critique within a tradition that integrates interior conversion and concrete solidarity, showing why technological reform must be simultaneously spiritual, cultural, and political.
The false allure of technology is thus best countered not by technophobic rejection but by a reclaimed telos: a reordering of loves toward God, neighbor, and creation that renders technologies accountable to life. Only within that twofold reorientation—Augustinian inner conversion animated by Franciscan care—can a humane, ecological, and just technological practice be imagined and pursued.
Video production workers in the NY & LA areas I know were using these generators pretty recently. It's a mistake
I found Sentimental Values https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27714581/ a great movie except for the video de-aging of the lead actor Stellan Starsgaard took me out of the story. Use makeup! Or a different, younger actor!
Aristotle said we should go to the theater for all sorts of reasons. So I'm yearning now to see movies more like recorded plays. Learning AI was used to make Adrian Brody's voice sound more Hungarian dissociates him in my mind, at a semi-conscious level, from a real actor. He's now relegated to slop actor I regret to say. Voice control and accenting is never perfect, it's part of the actor's attempt to portray a character that serves the story.
the slop aesthetic isn't just a quality problem -- it's what you get when a system optimizes for plausibility rather than intention. sora produced outputs that technically resembled video but had no reason to exist, and audiences feel that absence before they can name it. the uncanny valley has always been a detector for things that look like they're trying without understanding why.
The whole ‘superintelligence’ and ‘selling intelligence by the meter like a utility’ project is based on mining intelligence from humans. AI and machines don’t possess intelligence and must source it from those who do. Humans are becoming the new natural resource.
"For years now, Silicon Valley has largely failed to produce something that most people want, or are even comfortable having in their lives;": That is indeed a fundamental problem. In my judgment, it's a matter of not only digital saturation but the domination, increasingly since the mid-90s, of Silicon Valley by cretins like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not willing to work for such fools,* and I suspect many other engineers who want to make truly useful things aren't either. What's left is mostly money-grubbers.
As for the demise of Sora, I assume the proximate cause is investment bankers telling Altman et al. that if they want an IPO, they'd better make OpenAI's financials at least a little less ghastly.
*Once upon a time, I was a member of the research staff in the UC Berkeley computer science department. I could easily have gone to work in Silicon Valley, as many of my colleagues did, but even then, I didn't have a high opinion of the people who ran it.
Interesting point about the tech guys not even caring about aesthetics, obviously enshitiffication is a big part of it but are they so arrogant as to not realize that we hate them and their products and a minimal effort might help, or are they just not as smart as anyone thinks they are and making the products they make just isn't that good!
Pretty telling that SV didn't really release AI video generators as production tools for filmmakers and creators (whatever one thinks of the merits of the technology, its most practical *eventual* use would be as a production or post-production tool) but rather as yet another feature to plug into their addictive doomscrolling platforms. The idea is not to build better tools for creators and developers but to keep you hooked on the black mirror.
Here are perspectives from two other contemporary thinkers.
Jacques Ellul and Leonardo Boff confront the modern technological epoch not as abstract social theorists but as Christian intellectuals whose thought is indelibly formed by the twin patrimonies of Augustine and Francis. This lineage supplies their scaffolding: Augustine’s anthropology of disordered loves diagnoses how hearts can be redirected toward instruments and power, while Francis’s ecology of fraternity restores an affective and sacramental regard for the nonhuman world. Reading Ellul and Boff through these sources dissolves any simplistic contrast between a “sociologist” and a “theologian,” revealing instead two streams of ecclesial critique that draw from common wells to interpret technique’s spiritual and material assaults.
For both thinkers Augustine supplies the vocabulary for interior diagnosis. Augustine teaches that sin is fundamentally a misordering of loves: what one loves as ultimate determines one’s aims, practices, and communal arrangements. Ellul hears in Augustine a caution against human pride and pretended self-sufficiency; technique’s promise of mastery, speed, and endless control is for Ellul a species of the Augustinian temptation to locate security in created means.
Boff likewise mobilizes Augustine’s insight about interior disorder to explain why technocratic solutions proliferate even when they exacerbate injustice: technological remedies seduce wills by offering immediate satisfaction and instrumental competence that mask deeper moral failure.
Francis of Assisi supplies the complementary corrective that both Ellul and Boff insist the modern project lacks.
Francis’s theology relocates the human within a web of relations—a crowned creature among creatures, called to praise and stewardship rather than dominion-as-conquest. Boff’s ecological theology is explicitly Franciscan, infusing his political economy critique with an affective solidarity toward the poor and the more-than-human creation; technology that severs human bonds or despoils ecosystems is antithetical to Francis’s canticle of creation.
Ellul, though less overtly ecological in style, echoes Francis in insisting on humility before the otherness and contingency of the world: technique’s pretended completeness obliterates the grateful dependence that Francis models.
Methodologically, the Augustinian-Franciscan axis helps explain why each thinker refuses the neutralist account of technology.
For Ellul, technique is not merely a collection of tools but a sociocultural logic with autonomous momentum; its expansion follows the inner law of efficiency and standardization and imposes itself upon human institutions and desire. This diagnosis presumes Augustine’s account of the will insofar as it identifies an interior predisposition to seek mastery, and Francis’s attentiveness to limits insofar as it insists on resisting that momentum. Boff’s method, conversely, begins in the material sufferings of the poor and the groaning of creation, but his critique is animated by Augustinian anthropology—recognizing that structural injustice persists because disordered loves and technocratic imaginaries legitimize exploitation.
Their shared Augustinian descent sharpens a theological anthropology that refuses reductive economism. Both thinkers insist that human flourishing cannot be measured by output or capability alone; it requires rightly ordered affections and communal goods that defy calculation. Ellul’s insistence that technique narrows human freedom is an Augustinian polemic against the cult of effectiveness; Boff’s plea for “technologies for life” translates Augustine’s concern for the ordering of desire into policy: technologies must serve humanization, not substitute for it. Augustine supplies the normative telos—love of God and neighbor—which reorients judgments about technological practice beyond utilitarian metrics.
Conversely, Francis’s imprint equips their critique with a metaphysics of relation and sacramentality that rescues ethics from abstract voluntarism. Where Augustine diagnoses interiority, Francis insists that the ethical life is enacted in tangible care for creatures and the vulnerable. Boff’s liberation-theology praxis, saturated with Franciscan care, insists that the critique of technocracy must be ecological and redistributive: solidarity with those pushed to peripheral biomes and livelihoods is not an optional addendum but the locus where theological truth is tested.
Ellul’s mistrust of technological totality thus takes on a Franciscan hue when he emphasizes restraint and attentiveness to limits as ways of honoring creation’s integrity.
Theologically, their convergences produce a doubly capacious critique: technology is idolatrous because it seduces the heart (Augustine) and sacrilegious because it tramples the web of life (Francis).
This dual claim explains their shared insistence that remedies require both inward reformation and outward restructuring. Ellul stresses the cultivation of non-technological thought—philosophical, liturgical, contemplative practices that refuse the technical gaze—while Boff stresses institutional transformation—land reform, participatory technologies, redistribution—that re-empowers communities and ecosystems.
Neither solution is sufficient alone; the Augustinian interiority without Franciscan praxis can lapse into pietism, while the Franciscan praxis without interior conversion risks becoming merely managerial.
On political economy and ecology their combined inheritance yields pointed prescriptions. Both critique the concentration of decision-making in technical elites and call for democratizing technological governance; both critique growth-at-all-costs and advocate limits that protect common goods.
Drawing Augustine’s moral seriousness into dialogue with Francis’s ecological solidarity, one can articulate an ethic that evaluates technologies by whether they cultivate love, reciprocity, and flourishing across species and generations. Thus policy becomes an exercise in moral formation as much as in cost–benefit analysis: incentives, regulation, and design must be shaped by practices that form desires toward modesty, sufficiency, and mutual care.
Psychologically and culturally, the Augustinian-Franciscan framing illuminates why technological seduction is tenacious. Modernity cultivates habits—speed, immediacy, commodification—that feed the very appetites Augustine diagnoses; at the same time it erodes the practices—celebration, liturgy, neighborly presence—that Francis enjoins. Reversing technocratic momentum therefore requires rebuilding practices that reorder love: slower rhythms, communal rituals, ecological apprenticeship, and crafts. Ellul’s call for cognitive resistance and Boff’s for embodied solidarity are two sides of this practice-oriented therapy for desire: one trains the mind to refuse instrumentalization, the other trains the body and community to enact alternatives.
To read Ellul and Boff as heirs of Augustine and Francis is not antiquarian piety but a hermeneutic key for contemporary contestation. It situates technological critique within a tradition that integrates interior conversion and concrete solidarity, showing why technological reform must be simultaneously spiritual, cultural, and political.
The false allure of technology is thus best countered not by technophobic rejection but by a reclaimed telos: a reordering of loves toward God, neighbor, and creation that renders technologies accountable to life. Only within that twofold reorientation—Augustinian inner conversion animated by Franciscan care—can a humane, ecological, and just technological practice be imagined and pursued.
Video production workers in the NY & LA areas I know were using these generators pretty recently. It's a mistake
I found Sentimental Values https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27714581/ a great movie except for the video de-aging of the lead actor Stellan Starsgaard took me out of the story. Use makeup! Or a different, younger actor!
Aristotle said we should go to the theater for all sorts of reasons. So I'm yearning now to see movies more like recorded plays. Learning AI was used to make Adrian Brody's voice sound more Hungarian dissociates him in my mind, at a semi-conscious level, from a real actor. He's now relegated to slop actor I regret to say. Voice control and accenting is never perfect, it's part of the actor's attempt to portray a character that serves the story.
Sorry Adrian don't take it (too) personally
the slop aesthetic isn't just a quality problem -- it's what you get when a system optimizes for plausibility rather than intention. sora produced outputs that technically resembled video but had no reason to exist, and audiences feel that absence before they can name it. the uncanny valley has always been a detector for things that look like they're trying without understanding why.
The whole ‘superintelligence’ and ‘selling intelligence by the meter like a utility’ project is based on mining intelligence from humans. AI and machines don’t possess intelligence and must source it from those who do. Humans are becoming the new natural resource.
"For years now, Silicon Valley has largely failed to produce something that most people want, or are even comfortable having in their lives;": That is indeed a fundamental problem. In my judgment, it's a matter of not only digital saturation but the domination, increasingly since the mid-90s, of Silicon Valley by cretins like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg. I'm not willing to work for such fools,* and I suspect many other engineers who want to make truly useful things aren't either. What's left is mostly money-grubbers.
As for the demise of Sora, I assume the proximate cause is investment bankers telling Altman et al. that if they want an IPO, they'd better make OpenAI's financials at least a little less ghastly.
*Once upon a time, I was a member of the research staff in the UC Berkeley computer science department. I could easily have gone to work in Silicon Valley, as many of my colleagues did, but even then, I didn't have a high opinion of the people who ran it.