Freddie deBoer in Full Stop:
Since Google’s “Deep Dream” project landed with great fanfare onto our collective Twitter feeds, it’s prompted a mountain of online aggregation, analysis, and sharing. And there’s little wonder why. With beautiful/disturbing/uncanny visuals, references to the impressive-sounding “artificial neural networks,” and origins in one of the most fascinating companies in the world, the story is a click farmer’s dream. It’s no surprise that so many publishers rushed to fill the stream with takes on the technology.
Unfortunately, much of the actual information sharing of these pieces – you know, thejournalism – has been counterproductive. With click-begging headlines, useless metaphors, vague discussion of essential information, and the general ambient woowoo that chokes our tech media, stories about Deep Dream have demonstrated the capacity for aggregation-style internet journalism to mislead. Faced with an interesting but limited project, one which utilizes complex technologies that require nuance and care to talk about meaningfully, our professional technology writers have fallen down, hard, on the job.
More here.