WeekNotes for 2024 Week 19: The emotional impacts of working in a space built for change

Weeknotes are a habit I’m cultivating where I share writing (and some links) as a thinking-in-public process. The idea is to explore ideas I’m grappling with, primarily in my professional life, without worrying about them being full-formed. The potential visibility of these notes is a nudge to develop them a bit more than if they were private. While my audience is mostly theoretical, if you’re reading this, please understand these are meant to be exploratory and provisional.

quotes

What difference can AI make when the current rate of poetry production already exceeds our collective ability to respond to its existence? Jon Stone on AI Is No Threat to Poetry; We’ve Already Got It Licked

thinking about

Half a week late on this WeekNotes as I am still wrapping up loose threads from last term. One thread is a presentation the Makerspace team (including the technitions who work in the space) and our Assessment Librarian are giving next week at WILU on “Developing and Assessing a Culture of Change at the TRU Library Makerspace” It’s mostly done, but I need to finish my part about the emotional impact of working in a space built for change, so I’m going to brainstorm that here.

What is the good?

The Makerspace is definitely the most rewarding thing I’ve done professionally. Nothing else comes close.

Some of the reasons for this aren’t about how we are a culture of change: I work with a terrific team; we get to know our users really well and see them develop over time; for some students, we become a place of belonging; we help people explore things they’re passionate about; almost all of our users are engaged in our space; sometimes they change their plans because of the time they spend with us; we’re often able to help get them jobs and other opportunities.

What is emotionally impactful for me about being a culture of change?

One thing is that I’m always learning new things. We’re a growth focused learning space and so, in a way, our users’ growth makes us grow; as they learn something new about sewing or podcasting or 3D printing, often we do too. I love learning new things.

Another thing is that I am often surprised as some expectation or assumption is unsettled. Seeing that something I thought would be the case isn’t.

Which I guess is connected to the last thing, which it is that it is humbling in the best way. Seeing ideas or solutions I didn’t think of or couldn’t have done. Seeing that a staff member is really good at something they didn’t know they were good at; that they are better than I could be. That is very rewarding when you work together in a team.

What can be hard?

Trying new things takes a lot of time and energy. It can be exhausting. You need to be careful about boundaries and burn out. I am not good at that part.

Working with people who have ideas or want to get involved requires a lot of mentorship and mediation. Often a lot more than if you just did things yourself. Definitely more than if you just had a suggestion box.

Finally, not all ideas are great ideas and not every plan works out. You need to say no a lot, explain why ideas won’t work, or how they will break something fundamental to your mission or values.

links

Charlie Warzel on ElevenLabs Is Building an Army of Voice Clones

The core problem of ElevenLabs—and the generative-AI revolution writ large—is that there is no way for this technology to exist and not be misused. Meta and OpenAI have built synthetic voice tools, too, but have so far declined to make them broadly available. Their rationale: They aren’t yet sure how to unleash their products responsibly. As a start-up, though, ElevenLabs doesn’t have the luxury of time. “The time that we have to get ahead of the big players is short,” Staniszewski said. “If we don’t do it in the next two to three years, it’s going to be very hard to compete.” Despite the new safeguards, ElevenLabs’ name is probably going to show up in the news again as the election season wears on. There are simply too many motivated people constantly searching for ways to use these tools in strange, unexpected, even dangerous ways. (View Highlight)

Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’ It’s the Zombie Internet

At first, previously viral (but real) images were being run through image-to-image AI generators to create a variety of different but plausibly believable AI images. These images repeatedly went viral, and seemingly tricked real people into believing they were real. I was able to identify a handful of the “source” or “seed” images that formed the basis for this type of content. Over time, however, most AI images on Facebook have gotten a lot easier to identify as AI and a lot more bizarre. This is presumably happening because people will interact with the images anyway, or the people running these pages have realized they don’t need actual human interaction to go viral on Facebook.

[Daniels: Why We Tell the Stories We Tell

SXSW 2024](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBANXz79fDg)

Join award-winning writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert as they talk about the process of developing, creating, and releasing their surprise hit movie that took the world by st— okay, look, if you’re still reading this, we should tell you that we’ve run out of new things to say about Everything Everywhere All At Once, so although we’ll try our best to stay on topic, we’ll most likely go on a bunch of tangents about the state of the world, the impending climate crisis, the collapse of consensus truth, the rise of AI, the importance and impossibility of self care, and our collective responsibility as storytellers to confront the issues of our time, because that’s probably going to be what’s on our mind, but we can’t make any promises, but at times we don’t feel qualified to talk about any of that stuff, anyway we hope you enjoy our SXSW keynote!