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Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic staffer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is Damon Beres, an Atlantic senior editor who oversees our Technology section. Damon also recently wrote about the high-stakes bluster of Elon Musk for this newsletter, and covered BuzzFeed’s pivot to AI-generated personality quizzes in January. In today’s edition, he endorses the underappreciated comedic brilliance of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in a certain 2000s rom-com, as well as a wise picture book about a sloth, and he makes a case for quiet-loud music.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

Jerry Springer explained it all. John Mulaney's Baby J takes apart a likable comedian. I don’t want to smell you get high.

The Culture Survey: Damon Beres

Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: Along Came Polly, the 2004 rom-com with Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston—and, much more important, Philip Seymour Hoffman. Everyone knows he was one of the great actors of his era, but if you haven’t seen him slip and fall on the hardwood floor at the start of this movie, well, you don’t really know anything at all. It’s pure comedic brilliance.

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: My 1-year-old is obsessed with books. He wakes up in the morning pointing to his bookshelf and repeating “Books, books, books,” like an incantation. He pronounces it like the end of “Malibu,” or like he’s trying to scare someone on Halloween. Boo-ks, boo-ks, boo-ks.

One of his favorites is “Slowly, Slowly, Slowly,” said the Sloth, by Eric Carle, the author of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Sloth is all about owning who you are and navigating the perceptions of others. In the book, the sloth lives an existence that is truly its own. The other animals of the rainforest judge it. A rude jaguar comes up and asks why it’s so lazy. And on its own time, to no one in particular—the jaguar’s not even on the page anymore—the sloth eventually offers:

It is true that I am slow, quiet and boring. I am lackadaisical, I dawdle and I dillydally. I am also unflappable, languid, stoic, impassive, sluggish, lethargic, placid, calm, mellow, laid-back and, well, slothful! I am relaxed and tranquil, and I like to live in peace. But I am not lazy … That’s just how I am. I like to do things slowly, slowly, slowly.

It’s a beautiful message. Take your time. Be yourself. Don’t take any nonsense from cats.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I’ll never forget Ian Bogost’s 2022 article “The Internet Is Just Investment Banking Now.” When it published, I was working at a start-up that operated to some extent in the “web3” space, which I had mixed feelings about. Ian’s story put everything into perspective. It is, to this day, the smartest, most clear-headed and creative essay on the issues with that particular technological paradigm that I’ve come across—an outstanding piece of analytical writing. About one year later, I work here and get to call Ian a colleague. Happy ending.    

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: If I really need to let my brain go soft and get the drool flowing, I’ll boot up Holedown, a simple game that involves aiming balls at numbered barriers that halt your progress through a tunnel. Sometimes you can ricochet off of the barriers just right to maximize your score. It’s satisfying and low-stakes, but just short of mindless—an ideal game, in other words.

An actor I would watch in anything: I very happily watched Ethan Hawke wander the aisles of a Blockbuster Video while he recited the famous “To be, or not to be” monologue in the 2000 film adaptation of Hamlet. I’m one of his ride-or-dies. I can’t wait to see him in the new Pedro Almodóvar short film Strange Way of Life. It looks divine.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Allow me a slight cheat. It’s “Rid of Me,” by PJ Harvey. It is the best quiet rock song. It is the best loud rock song. The balance is everything. Half of this track is like twisting the handle on the world’s heaviest jack-in-the-box, and the other half is the fireball that pops out.

I love music that plays with this dichotomy. The Japanese band Boris—definitely not for everyone—opens their album Pink with a song called “Farewell.” It has a gauzy, dreamlike lead-in that explodes into something much bigger and more cantankerous. Most of the tracks that follow are profoundly loud, complex metal music.

A gentler version of this is happening in popular music too. Mitski can pulverize you with “Your Best American Girl” or “A Pearl,” but she’s also tender and vibey. If anything, I’ve found her almost subdued the couple of times I’ve seen her on tour, but it’s also been clarifying to see how clearly she impacts the audience, which is younger and cooler than I am. People are crying and singing along. A similar thing seems to be happening with boygenius: Its music is quiet-loud.

Rather than allowing volume to be a stand-in for emotional communication—the “quiet” stuff is sad or wistful; the “loud” stuff is angry—listeners can find something valuable in a kind of commingling. It reminds me of the name of a Daniel Clowes comic, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron: The soft and hard can go together. It’s the mood. [Related: “Rock and roll ain’t what it used to be.”]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Julie Beck, Faith Hill, Derek Thompson, Tom Nichols, Amy Weiss-Meyer, Kaitlyn Tiffany, and Bhumi Tharoor.

The Week Ahead

Chain Gang All Stars, the new novel by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah in which convicted murderers fight to the death, on television, for the chance to win their freedom (on sale Tuesday) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, a “cheerful goodbye” to the Marvel franchise that shows what the superhero genre has been missing (in theaters nationwide Friday) The coronation of King Charles, which, according to the Royal Family’s official website, promises to “reflect the monarch’s role today and look towards the future, while being rooted in longstanding traditions and pageantry” (live coverage begins Saturday at 5 a.m. ET on ABC, CNN, NBC, SkyNews’ YouTube channel, and elsewhere)

Essay

Illustration by Diego Cadena Bejarano

The Painstaking Journey to a David Grann Book

By John Hendrickson

First, some swashbuckling. The journalist David Grann embarks on a multi-leg journey from New York to Florida to Santiago, an annoying combination of planes and customs and cars and ferries en route to Chiloé Island, a little strip off the coast of Chile. There, he meets the boat captain who has agreed to steer him hundreds of miles farther south, to Wager Island, a place where nobody lives.

Storms have rolled in. To Grann’s surprise, the captain’s vessel is much smaller than it appeared in the photos. The tiny crew needs to chop wood to keep it heated; they retrieve drinking water from nearby glaciers. Out at sea, the boat’s top-heaviness reveals itself. No combination of Dramamine and anti-nausea wristbands and behind-the-ear patches can save an uninitiated stomach against these waves near the bottom of the Earth.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

What to read when you need to start over The song that captures the evolution of Willie Nelson When you crave some comforting strangeness Kenan Orhan on exile and memory Short story: “The Renovation” A splashy drama about the diplomacy of marriage Why women never stop coming of age How Harry Belafonte transformed American music Tucker Carlson’s final moments on Fox were as dangerous as they were absurd. The most telling moments from the E. Jean Carroll–Donald Trump depositions

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The Kyrsten Sinema theory of American politics Long-haulers are trying to define themselves. AI is a waste of time.

Photo Album

Club members hold oars for a symbolic burial at sea in Currumbin, Australia, on April 25, 2023. (Chris Hyde / Getty)

An observation of Anzac Day in Australia (pictured), classic-car racing in England, and more of our editor’s selected photos of the week

It has been 70 years since the world last witnessed the crowning of a new British monarch. On Tuesday, May 2, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, will join our U.K.-based staff writers Sophie Gilbert and Helen Lewis to talk about the new era of the monarchy and its role both within the United Kingdom and on the international stage. Register for the event here.

Earlier this year, Willie Nelson was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, having already been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1993. Both a living legend and a relatable everyman, Willie turns 90 years old today, and it’s tempting to mark the occasion with yet another retrospective. But the beats and tribulations of his life have already been well covered in a lifetime of magazine profiles and biographies. And anyway, judging by the small library of memoirs he has released, nobody can indulge such retrospection better than the man himself. Rather, reflecting on his journey today, I’m struck by the enduring relevance of a single song: “Funny How Time Slips Away.”

What about this deceptively simple composition—a fairly basic chord structure, three unadorned verses, and no chorus to speak of—makes it so evocative and enduring, so endlessly adaptable across the divides of genre and generation? What does “Funny” reveal not only about the artistry of Willie Nelson, but also about the culture that venerates him?

Since its first recording more than 60 years ago, the song has continued to evolve. After early renditions by Billy Walker, Jimmy Elledge, and Nelson himself in the early 1960s, the song quickly transcended its country roots in the Nashville Sound. An impressive cohort of artists subsequently reinterpreted the song in diverse styles: the too-cool croon of Elvis Presley; the silky groove of Al Green; the easy-listening of Perry Como; the soulful R&B of Dorothy Moore; the Beale Street blues of B. B. King. To such esteemed company, one might also add Stevie Wonder, Norah Jones, Lyle Lovett, The Supremes, The Spinners, Leon Bridges, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and many, many others.

Meanwhile, Willie has offered his own repeated reimaginings. He has performed “Funny” as a lovelorn serenade, a lonesome jazz ditty, an orchestral ballad, a brass-band tune, a blues duet, and more. “Funny How Time Slips Away” has no authoritative, canonical version. This creates a strikingly open field of interpretive possibilities, each of which changes the emotional impact and very meaning of the song.

In essence, “Funny” depicts a jaded narrator running into an old flame. The three verses comprise only one side of the ensuing conversation. With poetic economy, Nelson spins a tale that blends heartbroken earnestness with scathing self-deprecation, sincere nostalgia with tragic pettiness. Decades before Lionel Richie and Adele would execute the same rhetorical maneuver, Nelson begins with an ambiguous greeting: “Well, hello there.” From this first line, the song coaxes listeners in and immediately knocks them off balance. Are we meant to identify with the narrator? Are we the addressee? Or are we eavesdropping on a conversation?

All of this remains unspecified, and so, too, do our sympathies. The narrator dons an air of blasé detachment, as if he had almost, but not quite, forgotten about the former love. Listeners recognize this as a sad pretense, of course, and that tension gives the song its edge. Each verse casts new light (and new shadows) on the characters’ relationship, yet in a way that always remains between the lines. The ruse gradually unravels, revealing a core to the song that is heartbroken and embittered. The narrator’s words are riddled with artifice and contradiction throughout. Take the title and refrain, for instance: The use of funny is clearly euphemistic rather than literal, but a euphemism for what exactly? Depending on the performer, funny can alternately imply any number of reactions to time’s passage: fascination or frustration, consolation or disconsolation, regret or gratitude, wistfulness or outrage.

Or consider the last line: “But remember what I tell you / That in time you’re gonna pay.” Is this a credible threat? A pathetic cry of impotent rage? An ice-breaking joke meant to acknowledge the narrator’s previous, since-worked-through anger? (Indeed, many versions place this line in the past tense—“But remember what I told you”—which clouds the exegetical waters even further.) Semantic elasticity is the song’s secret weapon. Its lyrics are concrete enough to feel real, but hazy enough to justify numerous readings. “Funny” endures precisely because of its capacity to nourish ever-changing emotional landscapes.

Of the countless renditions, my personal favorite is Nelson’s stripped-down live recording from a gathering of country songwriters in 1997 (later released on Ralph Emery’s Country Legends Series Volume 1). It is a softer, more weather-beaten performance, inflected with Nelson’s inimitable jazzy licks and bold chromatic transitions. Embracing his elder-statesman role in American music, Nelson’s performance lays bare the sting of retrospection and transcends the faux detachment of the song’s narrator. In the hands of late-stage artists, one gets a visceral sense of time escaping, adding a meta-textual gravity to a song that is, fundamentally, about the passage of time. Glen Campbell and Dr. John both recorded the song in their twilight years; both recordings were released on their final albums. With age, the titular sentiment evokes something far bigger than lost love—namely, that tangled sense of regret, satisfaction, and melancholy that accompanies getting older.

Like the song, Nelson wears many faces: cowboy and hippie, patriot and renegade, churchgoer and gambler. He is America’s grandpa and the only person to ever out-smoke Snoop Dogg. He is a songwriter of stubborn originality as well as an earnest interpreter of the Great American Songbook. Perhaps nothing distills his genius nor encapsulates his capacious cultural resonance better than “Funny How Time Slips Away.” The song is simultaneously a reliable standard and a musical shape-shifter, just like its songwriter. In short, we love “Funny” for the same reason we love Willie himself: It contains our multitudes and welcomes our contradictions. The brilliance of both lies in their ability to project whatever one most needs to receive. In the song, each can hear their own story. In Willie, each can see their own hero.

This month, a local TV-news station in Arizona ran an unsettling report: A mother named Jennifer DeStefano says that she picked up the phone to the sound of her 15-year-old crying out for her, and was asked to pay a $1 million ransom for her daughter’s return. In reality, the teen had not been kidnapped, and was safe; DeStefano believes someone used AI to create a replica of her daughter’s voice to deploy against her family. “It was completely her voice,” she said in one interview. “It was her inflection. It was the way she would have cried.” DeStefano’s story has since been picked up by other outlets, while similar stories of AI voice scams have surfaced on TikTok and been reported by The Washington Post. In late March, the Federal Trade Commission warned consumers that bad actors are using the technology to supercharge “family-emergency schemes,” scams that fake an emergency to fool a concerned loved one into forking over cash or private information.  

Such applications have existed for some time—my colleague Charlie Warzel fooled his mom with a rudimentary AI voice-cloning program in 2018—but they’ve gotten better, cheaper, and more accessible in the past several months alongside a generative-AI boom. Now anyone with a dollar, a few minutes, and an internet connection can synthesize a stranger’s voice. What’s at stake is our ability as regular people to trust that the voices of those we interact with from afar are legitimate. We could soon be in a society where you don’t necessarily know that any call from your mom or boss is actually from your mom or boss. We may not be at a crisis point for voice fraud, but it’s easy to see one on the horizon. Some experts say it’s time to establish systems with your loved ones to guard against the possibility that your voices are synthesized—code words, or a kind of human two-factor authentication.

One easy way to combat such trickery would be to designate a word with your contacts that could be used to verify your identity. You could, for example, establish that any emergency request for money or sensitive information should include the term lobster bisque. The Post’s Megan McCardle made this case in a story yesterday, calling it an “AI safeword.” Hany Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, told me he’s a fan of the idea. “It’s so low-tech,” he told me. “You’ve got this super-high-tech technology—voice cloning—and you’re like, ‘What’s the code word, asshole?’”

But we also should be wary of getting paranoid too quickly. A broader loss of trust in any audio, or video for that matter, could feed the “liar’s dividend,” or the idea that more public knowledge about fakes can make it easier for bad actors to undermine legitimate media. America doesn’t exactly have a surplus of trust right now: Faith in media and institutions, including organized religion and public schools, is polling miserably, at the same time that AI is amplifying the ability to spread false information online. “We want people to be aware of what’s possible,” Henry Ajder, an AI expert who has been studying synthetic voice technology for half a decade, told me. “We also don’t want to just absolutely terrify people.” If you do get an out-of-the-ordinary call, you can always just stay calm and ask commonsense questions that your loved ones should know how to answer, Ajder said.

Beyond the anecdotes, data about AI voice scams are practically nonexistent. Juliana Gruenwald, a spokesperson for the FTC, told me that the agency does not track how often AI or voice cloning is used in scams. Fraud-report statistics for the first three months of this year don’t show an increase in the number of scams involving the impersonation of family and friends. The FBI, which also keeps data on phone scams, did not respond to a request for comment.

[Read: The rise of AI Taylor Swift]

Still, there’s clearly genuine risk here. Last month, for a story about the proliferation of such clones on TikTok, I replicated Taylor Swift’s voice using just one minute of audio of her talking in an old interview on YouTube. It took five minutes and cost $1 using the online Instant Voice Cloning tool from ElevenLabs. (The company did not respond to a request for comment about how its software could be used in scams.) All the program needs is a short audio clip of the person speaking: Upload it, and the AI will do the rest. And you don’t have to be a high-profile figure to be vulnerable. It simply takes one public audio clip of you, perhaps pulled from a TikTok or an Instagram post or a YouTube vlog, and anyone can create an AI model of your voice that they can use however they choose. Our extensive digital histories, built over years of life online, can be used against us.

Although the technology feels like it’s lifted from a Philip K. Dick novel, this is, in a sense, a classic American story about the uncertainty of a new frontier. The historian Susan Pearson, who wrote The Birth Certificate: An American History, told me that when more Americans began moving from the countryside to cities in the mid-19th century, the country developed “a real cultural fascination” with swindlers and an “anxiety about being in these new large spaces, where all kinds of strangers are going to interact and you don’t necessarily know who you can trust.” We developed technologies like credit scores, for better or worse, so that we might know who we were doing business with. The expanse of the AI-powered internet is perhaps a corollary to that earlier fear.

We’re in a period of change, trying to figure out the benefits and costs of these tools. “I think this is one of those cases where we built it because we could and/or because we can make money from it,” Farid said. “And maybe nobody stopped to think whether they should be doing it.” There are some legitimate use cases for voice cloning: It could empower a person who has become impaired or lost their ability to use their own voice, for instance. In 2021, AI helped the actor Val Kilmer use his voice when he lost his natural ability to speak as a result of throat cancer. But the beneficial uses don’t necessarily require unregulated, free-for-all access, Farid pointed out.

Many critics of AI have said we should slow down and think a little more about what the technology might unleash if left alone. Voice cloning seems like an area in which we really ought to do so. Perhaps humans will evolve alongside AI and create new verification technologies that help us restore trust, but fundamentally, once we start doubting that the person on the other end of the line is really the person we want it to be, we’ve entered an entirely new world. Maybe we’re already there.  

In 1956, something totally unprecedented happened in America: A Black artist topped the Billboard top-albums chart, not just once but for 31 consecutive weeks. That artist was Harry Belafonte, and the album was his third, Calypso. The musician, actor, and civil-rights champion died today at age 96 at his home in the Upper West Side, not far from his birthplace of Harlem. Born to immigrants from Jamaica and Martinique, Belafonte was still in his 20s when he rocketed to superstardom and became a household name. His subsequent life as a film star and champion of progressive causes has tended to draw more attention than his early and important musical accomplishments—not to mention the life-affirming joy that those accomplishments inspired in listeners.

Even the seemingly innocuous, lightweight fun of Calypso opened up fresh territory in the cultural landscape. The album didn’t just establish a new benchmark of artistry and popularity for a Black singer; it was also the first album by any single artist to reach the million-seller mark, thus becoming a fixture in a large percentage of American homes, hearts, and minds. Even more significant, Belafonte’s hybrid of Jamaican music, folk, and pop paved the way for popular music as both the soundtrack to and a tool of the struggle for freedom.

Belafonte’s list of firsts is so staggering, it’s easy to see why his music can get lost in the superlative shuffle. He was credited, among so many other things, as the first African American television producer, and he was the first African American to win an Emmy Award. Although Belafonte’s recorded output slowed a crawl after the ’60s—his final studio album, Paradise in Gazankulu, was released in 1988—music was never an afterthought to him. It was his wellspring. Including breezy, bass-driven gems such as “Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora)” and somber, bluesy ballads such as “Memphis, Tennessee,” his songs provided emotional context to his activism as the latter began to eclipse his musical output in the ’60s. He didn’t have to sing overtly about politics; his very existence as a chart-topping pop artist (and, let’s not forget, a universal sex symbol) who happened to be Black was, at the time, a statement in and of itself.

The idea of equitable Black representation in American pop culture may not have begun with Belafonte, but he certainly pushed that ideal to new heights. He was as much a part of the folk-revival firmament of the ’50s and ’60s as were Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio, and Odetta (with whom Belafonte dueted in 1960 on an endearing live rendition of the children’s folk song “There’s a Hole in My Bucket”). But he made the transition to television and film so smoothly that it was hard to deny he belonged there, at the top—a casual and charismatic entertainer who never hesitated to risk it all for his vision of a better world.

No one will ever mistake the massive hit singles on Calypso, “Jamaica Farewell” and “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)”—which became Belafonte’s signature tunes and have rendered him musically immortal—for civil-rights anthems such as Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” But Belafonte’s songs were radical for the joy, pride, and inclusiveness they fostered—especially amid so much brutality and injustice. His music may have had an escapist side, but it’s good to remember the origins of that escape: the island states of the Caribbean, the cradle of calypso, where a new wave of independence was rising in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Belafonte’s renewal of traditional African-Caribbean ballads and work songs didn’t just evoke an earthy, homespun past. They broadened Black consciousness and inspired hope for the future. Revolution you could limbo to: That’s Belafonte’s musical legacy, and it was one of his greatest weapons.

If you spend any time on the internet, you’re likely now familiar with the gray-and-teal screenshots of AI-generated text. At first they were meant to illustrate ChatGPT’s surprising competence at generating human-sounding prose, and then to demonstrate the occasionally unsettling answers that emerged once the general public could bombard it with prompts. OpenAI, the organization that is developing the tool, describes one of its biggest problems this way: “ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.” In layman’s terms, the chatbot makes stuff up. As similar services, such as Google’s Bard, have rushed their tools into public testing, their screenshots have demonstrated the same capacity for fabricating people, historical events, research citations, and more, and for rendering those falsehoods in the same confident, tidy prose.

This apparently systemic penchant for inaccuracy is especially worrisome, given tech companies’ intent to integrate these tools into search engines as soon as possible. But a bigger problem might lie in a different aspect of AI’s outputs—more specifically, in the polite, businesslike, serenely insipid way that the chatbots formulate their responses. This is the prose style of office work and email jobs, of by-the-book corporate publicists and LinkedIn influencers with private-school MBAs. The style sounds the same—pleasant, measured, authoritative—no matter whether the source (be it human or computer) is trying to be helpful or lying through their teeth or not saying anything coherent at all.

[Read: AI search is a disaster]

In the United States, this is the writing style of institutional authority, and AI chatbots are so far exquisitely capable of replicating its voice, while delivering information that is patently unreliable. On a practical level, this will pose challenges for people who must navigate a world with this kind of technology suddenly thrust into it. Our mental shortcuts used for evaluating communicative credibility on the fly have always been less than perfect, and the very nature of the internet already makes such judgment calls more difficult and necessary. AI could make them nearly impossible.

ChatGPT and its ilk are built using what are known as large language models, or LLMs. That means they hoover up very large quantities of written language online and then, very crudely speaking, analyze that data set to determine which words would likely be assembled in which order to create a successful response. They generate text that’s been optimized for plausibility, not for truthfulness. Being right isn’t the goal, at least not now; sounding right is. For any particular query, there are many more answers that sound right than answers that are true. LLMs aren’t intentionally lying—they are not alive, and cannot produce results meaningfully similar to human thought. And they haven’t been created to mislead their users. The chatbots do, after all, frequently generate answers that are both plausible and correct, even though any veracity is incidental. They are, in other words, masters of bullshit—persuasive speech whose essence “is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are,” the philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote in his book-length essay on this sort of rhetoric.

[Read: Elon Musk, baloney king]

What LLMs are currently capable of producing is industrially scaled, industrial-grade bullshit. That’s troublesome for many reasons, not least of which is that humans have enough trouble discerning the age-old artisanal variety. Every human is required to make a zillion tiny decisions every day about whether some notion they’re presented with should be believed, and rarely do they have the opportunity or desire to stop, gather all the relevant information, and reason those decisions from first principles. To do so would pretty much halt human interaction as we know it, and even trying would make you pretty annoying.

So people instead rely on cognitive heuristics, which are little shortcuts that, in this case, help tip us toward belief or disbelief in situations where the full facts are unknown or unknowable. When you take medical advice from your doctor, you’ve employed an authority heuristic, which assigns trust in sources you believe have specialized knowledge and expertise. When you decide that something is probably true because it’s become the consensus among your family and friends, that’s the bandwagon heuristic at work. Even the best heuristics aren’t perfect: Your doctor might disbelieve your reported symptoms and misdiagnose you, or your social circle might be riddled with people who think the Earth is flat. But according to Miriam Metzger, a professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies how people evaluate credibility online, many of these shortcuts are, on balance, largely sound and extremely useful. Most people in most situations, for example, would be well served to listen to their doctor instead of taking medical advice from their weird cousin.

The growth of the internet has posed all kinds of issues for the accurate use of credibility heuristics, Metzger told me. There are too many potential sources of information vying directly for your attention, and too few ways to evaluate those sources or their motives quickly. Now your weird cousin is posting things on Facebook—and so are all of his weird friends, and their friends too. “The digital environment gives us a vastness of information in which it’s just harder for consumers to know who and what to trust,” Metzger said. “It’s put more of the burden on individuals to make their own credibility assessment practically every time they are confronted with new information.”

In the United States, this informational fragmentation is usually seen through the lens of politics, but it has also seeped into more mundane parts of life. On the internet, everyone can theoretically access expertise on everything. This freedom has some huge upsides, especially for people trying to solve small, manageable problems: There are enough instructional YouTube videos and Reddit threads to make you into your own travel agent, mechanic, plumber, and physical therapist. In many other scenarios, though, making judgment calls on the internet’s conglomeration of questionably sourced knowledge and maybe-faux expertise can have real consequences. We often don’t have anywhere near the information we’d need to evaluate a source’s credibility, and when that happens, we generally start rummaging through our bag of heuristics until we find one that works with whatever context we do have. What we end up with might just be the fluency heuristic—which is to say, the sense that certain patterns of communication are inherently credible.

In mainstream American culture, good grammar, accurate spelling, and a large and varied vocabulary free of expletives, slurs, or slang are all prerequisites for credibility, and a lack of them can be used to discredit challengers to existing authority and malign people with less education or different cultural backgrounds. This heuristic also can be easily used against the people who employ it: The more the phishing email looks and sounds like real communication from your bank, the more accounts scammers get to drain.

This is where the tidy, professional corporate-speak of well-trained LLMs has serious potential to cause informational chaos, Metzger said. Among other sources, the best AIs are trained on editorial content from major media organizations, archives of academic research, and troves of government and legal documents, according to a recent report by The Washington Post. These are just the type of source that would employ a precise and highly educated communication style. ChatGPT and other chatbots like it are text-generation machines that make up facts and sever information from its source. They are also authority-simulation machines that discourage readers from ever doubting them in the first place.

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Professional influencing—put simply, making a living from creating and sharing content about one’s personal life—can seem like a bizarre career choice. In some ways it is. But taking the influencer economy seriously can help us better understand how the contours of the “American dream” are shifting for a new generation.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

What your favorite personality test says about you Fox News lost the lawsuit but won the war. This country will break our hearts again.

Love and Hate

Fifty-four percent of young Americans would become an influencer if given the chance. This statistic, from a 2019 Morning Consult report, has made the rounds and been profusely ridiculed by people online. But if you look a little deeper, this desire reflects a deep economic pessimism on the part of Gen Z. A 2022 survey found that 23 percent of the generation never expects to retire, while 59 percent does not own or expect to own a home in their lifetime, numbers that were higher than for any other generation surveyed. Gen Z was also more likely to work multiple jobs and do independent work, despite many of them wanting more permanent roles.

We haven’t yet seen how Gen Z’s financial prospects will shake out. But homeownership and retirement are much more distant goals than they were a few decades ago. Although Gen Z could make a financial comeback, like Millennials have, their current uncertainty is shaping how they approach traditional work norms, and how they might transform the labor system as they age further into the workforce.

Influencing, in the context of inflation and mass layoffs, can appear to be the new American dream for Gen Z. Watching someone film their own life and make a disproportionate amount of money from doing so, without being beholden to anyone, seems like an appealing way to avoid financial uncertainty. The payoff can be life-changing. Seeing the rise of successful influencers (or even your high-school friend who decided to start regularly posting on TikTok), you might be easily convinced that if you keep posting videos, follow other creators, and engage with your viewers, you, too, could pull in $20,000 for a single Instagram post.

But the dream is deceptive. Influencing may appear to be a different type of labor—or not be labor at all—but it still falls into the same traps as traditional work. Not everyone succeeds, for one. As Alice Marwick, an associate communication professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, explains, most discussions around influencers focus on mega influencers (commonly defined as those with more than 1 million followers): the kind who can live in luxury based solely on their content. “But that’s the tiniest tip of the pyramid,” Marwick told me. “Beneath them, there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of people who are trying to do the same thing, but not succeeding.” For those people, she explains, it’s one of many stressful careers with long hours and no guarantee of success.

Although influencing is certainly a privileged form of labor, it is work. The social-media economy, whether society takes it seriously or not, is a crucial part of broader systems of American capital. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany recently wrote, creators have become vital assets for social-media companies and advertisers, but they generally lack worker protections, despite having similar concerns as more traditional workers. As Kaitlyn explains, creators are concerned about pay transparency, discussing unionization, and even starting to strike when they feel they are being taken advantage of or discriminated against. Despite their freedom from an employer, they are also reliant on platforms and institutions that they may not agree with. As I wrote yesterday, some influencers have become skeptical of social-media platforms and their effects on people’s mental health, but will typically only go so far as to discuss these concerns on those same platforms—which are, unfortunately, the foundation of their livelihood.

Influencing also puts concerns about class in America into stark relief. Even for young Americans who don’t want to become an influencer, odds are that they at least follow one. Content can be merely a form of entertainment, but it’s also possible that the act of watching someone else vlog their beautiful, comfortable life is rooted in a deeper belief that you may never attain what they have. Instead of improving our own lives, we continue to watch, as their subscriber numbers grow and their houses get larger, and our circumstances remain the same.

Influencers occupy a space between traditional and nontraditional paths to success, between an alternative to 9-to-5 American capitalism and an embodiment of it. As Marwick explained to me, a number of people enjoy lifestyle vlogs because “if you have a really difficult life, sometimes you just want to sit and watch someone do something in a pretty house.” It’s a way to remove yourself from the stress of day-to-day life, or even long-term thoughts about your economic stability. But at the same time, Marwick notes, many viewers are holding on to “very real class resentment that is based on very real issues, and that can rear its head at any time.” Influencers are hated and loved for the same reasons—a double-edged sword of the worst kind.

Related:

Even influencers are scared of the internet. The influencer industry is having an existential crisis.

Today’s News

Fox News agreed to settle for $787.5 million in the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems. A Moscow court upheld the detention of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested during a reporting trip to Russia last month. Today is the deadline to submit individual tax returns in the United States.

Evening Read

Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Wikimedia

A History of Humanity in Which Humans Are Secondary

By Katherine J. Wu

Most accounts of humanity’s origins, and our evolution since, have understandably put Homo sapiens center stage. It was our ingenuity, our tools, our cultural savvy that enabled our species to survive long past others—that allowed wars to be won, religions to blossom, and empires to rise and expand while others crumbled and fell. But despite what the schoolbooks tell us, humans might not be the main protagonists in our own history. As Jonathan Kennedy argues in his new book, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, the microscopic agents behind our deadliest infectious diseases should be taking center stage instead. Germs and pestilence—and not merely the people who bore them—have shaped inflection point after inflection point in our species’ timeline, from our first major successful foray out of Africa to the rise of Christianity, to even the United States’ bloody bid for independence.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

I’ve been watching influencers for almost a decade now. Bethany Mota (formerly known as Macbarbie07) and Michelle Phan, for instance, have a deep grip on my psyche. As someone who thinks often about the delusions of the internet, I find it fascinating how much I enjoy watching lifestyle vlogs, where people go grocery shopping and organize their fridges in aesthetic, edited ways. I recently interviewed one of my favorite beauty influencers, Jenn Im, for my article about the phenomenon of “meta-content,” where influencers post on social media about the harms of social media. One of the first things I did to relax after the story published was to watch her most recent vlog about life as a mom—my brain melted into goo, which is exactly what I needed.

If you want to read more about influencers and the internet, I’d recommend starting with Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino, which I recommended to Jenn recently (and am secretly hoping she discusses on her YouTube channel). Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman is also a classic. Lastly, I’d recommend anything by Megan Garber, a staff writer here at The Atlantic. Megan has a talent for explaining everything that I’ve been noticing but can’t quite describe, and her recent cover story, “We’re Already Living in the Metaverse,” is no exception.

— Kat

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Two weeks in a row, ChatGPT botched my grocery list. I thought that I had found a really solid, practical use for AI—automating one of my least favorite Sunday chores—but the bot turned out to be pretty darn bad at it. I fed it a link to a recipe for cauliflower shawarma with a spicy sauce and asked it to compile the ingredients in a list. It forgot the pita, so I forgot the pita, and then I had to use tortillas instead. The following week, I gave it a link to a taco recipe. It forgot the tortillas.

How is AI going to revolutionize the world if it can’t even revolutionize my groceries? I vented to my colleague Derek Thompson, who’s written about the technology and its potential. He told me that he’d been using ChatGPT in almost the reverse way, by offering it cocktail ingredients he already had in his pantry and asking for drink recipes. I decided to give it a go, and soon enough I was sipping a pleasant mocktail made with jalapeño and seltzer.  

The AI—at least in its free iteration—was pretty bad at gathering information from a random website link in an orderly fashion, but it did a good job playing with the ingredients that I provided. It is adept at a kind of creative synthesis—picking up on associations between words and pairing them in both familiar and novel ways to delight the user. Understanding why could give us a richer sense of how to deploy generative AI moving forward—and help us avoid putting it to wrongheaded, even harmful uses.

[Read: ChatGPT will change housework]

In addition to being a dismal grocery shopper, ChatGPT has struggled in the past to do basic math. We think of computers as logical and exacting, but ChatGPT is something different: a large language model that has been trained on big chunks of the internet to create associations between words, which it then “speaks” back to you. It may have read the encyclopedia, but it is not itself an encyclopedia. The program is less concerned with things being true or false; instead, it analyzes large amounts of information and provides answers that are highly probable based on our language patterns.

Some stochasticity or randomness—what the computer scientist Stephen Wolfram calls “voodoo”—is built into the model. Rather than always generating results based on what is most likely to be accurate, which would be pretty boring and predictable by definition, ChatGPT will sometimes choose a less obvious bent, something that is associated with the prompt but statistically less likely to come up. It will tell you that the word pours finishes the idiom beginning with “When it rains, it …” But if you push it to come up with other options, it may suggest “When it rains, it drizzles” or “When it rains, it storms.” As Kathleen Creel, a professor of philosophy and computer science at Northeastern University, put it: “When you give it a prompt, it says, Okay, based on this prompt … this word is 60 percent most likely to be a good word to go next, and this word is 20 percent, and this word is 5 percent.” Sometimes that less likely option is inaccurate or problematic in some way, leading to the popular criticism that large language models are “stochastic parrots”: able to piece together words but ignorant of meaning. Any given chatbot’s randomness can be dialed up or dialed down by its creator.

“It’s actually not in the business of doing something exactly,” Daniel Rockmore, a professor of math and computer science at Dartmouth College, told me. “It’s really in the business of doing something that’s super likely.” That distinction is meaningful, even in the realm of routine chores: Giving me a grocery list that is likely to be right isn’t the same as giving me a grocery list that includes everything I need. But when it comes to putting together a mixed drink based on a set of given ingredients, there isn’t necessarily one right way to do things. “You can get a shitty cocktail, but you kind of can’t get a wrong cocktail,” Rockmore pointed out.

As if to test Rockmore’s theory, Axelrad, a beer garden in Houston, recently ran a special called “Humans vs. Machines,” which pitted ChatGPT recipes against those constructed by human mixologists. The bar prompted ChatGPT to design a cocktail—for example, one inspired by the Legend of Zelda video-game series—and then tested it against one made by a bartender. Patrons could try each concoction and vote for their favorite. The bar ran the competition four times, and the robots and humans ended up tied. ChatGPT’s remake of Axelrad’s signature Blackberry Bramble Jam even triumphed over the original.

Lui Fernandes, a restaurant and bar owner who runs a YouTube channel about cocktail making, has likewise been toying with the technology. He told me that ChatGPT’s recipes are “actually very, very good,” though far from flawless. When he started pushing the limits of conventional ingredients, it “spit out some crazy recipes” that he would then have to adjust. Similarly, when my editor offered ChatGPT an objectively awful list of potential ingredients—Aperol, gin, half a beer, and a sack of frozen peas—it suggested he make a “Beer-Gin Spritz” with a garnish of frozen peas for a “fun and unexpected touch.” (You can always count on editors to attempt to break your story.) ChatGPT may understand based on its training data that vegetables can sometimes work as a drink garnish, like celery in a Bloody Mary, but it couldn’t understand why peas would be an odd choice—even if the drink itself was odd, too.

[Read: Nine AI chatbots you can play with right now]

“Every now and again, it’s gonna throw up something which is totally disgusting that it somehow thinks is an extension of the things we like,” Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician and professor at the University of Oxford, told me. Other times its choices might inspire us, like in the case of the Blackberry Bramble Jam. It is also, I should say, excellent at writing original recipes for classic and familiar drinks, having read and synthesized countless cocktail recipes itself.

What we’re basically talking about here is creativity. When humans make art, they remix what they know and toy with boundaries. Cocktails are more art than anything else: There are recipes for specific drinks, but they always boil down to taste. In this simple, low-stakes context, ChatGPT’s creative synthesis can help us find an unexpected solution to a quotidian problem.   

But this creativity has limits. Giorgio Franceschelli, a Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering at the University of Bologna who conducted a study on these models’ imaginative potential, argued over email that the technology is inherently restricted, because it leans on existing material. It cannot achieve transformational creativity, “where ideas currently inconceivable … are actually made true.”

Although ChatGPT may help us explore our own creativity, it also risks flattening what we produce. Creel warned about the “cultural homogeneity” of cocktail recipes produced by the bot. Similar to how recommendation algorithms have arguably homogenized popular music, chatbots could condense the cocktail scene to one that just plays the hits over and over. And because of how they were trained, AI tools may disproportionately offer the preferences of the English-speaking internet. Fernandes—a Brazilian immigrant who, in tribute to his heritage, chooses to focus on South and Latin American spirits that other bars may overlook—found that the bot struggled to balance cachaça or pisco cocktails. “It wasn’t actually able to give me as good of a recipe as when I asked it about bourbon, rye, or gin,” he said. If we’re not thoughtful about how we use AI, it could lead us toward a monoculture beyond just our bars.

[Read: What have humans just unleashed?]

Technology experts and bartenders alike told me that we should think of AI-generated cocktail recipes as a first draft, not a final product. They encouraged a feedback loop between human and bot, to work with it to home in on what you want.

And this advice expands beyond cocktails. Rockmore proposed treating its responses as “a suggestion from someone that you don’t really know but you think is smart” rather than considering the tool to be “the all-knowing master oracle that has to be followed.”

Too often, it seems, we’re turning to AI chatbots for answers, when perhaps we should be thinking of them as unreliable—but fun and well-read—collaborators. Sure, they’ve yet to save me any time when it comes to things that I need done precisely. But they do make a nice spicy margarita.  

The Punjabi track was 2022's most-searched song on Google and has surpassed half a billion views on YouTube.

My longest parasocial relationship, with a popular beauty influencer named Jenn Im, is going eight years strong. I discovered her in a vlog titled “Meet My Boyfriend” and have, along with more than 3 million other subscribers, kept up with what she eats in a day and her monthly beauty favorites ever since. Her videos have become a salve for my brain, allowing me to relax by watching someone else’s productive, aesthetic life.

Jenn, however, has complicated things by adding an unexpected topic to her repertoire: the dangers of social media. She recently spoke about disengaging from it for her well-being; she also posted an Instagram Story about the risks of ChatGPT and, in none other than a YouTube video, recommended Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, a seminal piece of media critique from 1985 that denounces television’s reduction of life to entertainment. (Her other book recommendations included Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, and Recapture the Rapture, by Jamie Wheal.)

Social-media platforms are “preying on your insecurities; they’re preying on your temptations,” Jenn explained to me in an interview that shifted our parasocial connection, at least for an hour, to a mere relationship. “And, you know, I do play a role in this.” Jenn makes money through aspirational advertising, after all—a familiar part of any influencer’s job. “This is how I pay my bills; this is how I support my family,” she said. “But that’s only a small portion of it.”

I first noticed Jenn’s social-media critiques in a video Q&A, where she discussed parasocial relationships. The video is exceptionally aesthetic. Jenn is dressed to the nines in her California kitchen, wearing a pair of diamond knocker earrings from 8 Other Reasons; she fluidly carries out an Estée Lauder ad in a Parachute robe before the first two minutes are over. She’s pro–parasocial relationships, she explains to the camera, but only if we remain aware that we’re in one. “This relationship does not replace existing friendships, existing relationships,” she emphasizes. “This is all supplementary. Like, it should be in addition to your life, not a replacement.” I sat there watching her talk about parasocial relationships while absorbing the irony of being in one with her.

[Read: The influencer industry is having an existential crisis]

Lifestyle vlogs romanticize the most mundane parts of daily existence in a way that can feel nonsensical to the uninitiated. People record themselves grocery shopping and brushing their teeth, but aesthetically, with soothing background music and voice-overs of the influencer’s thoughts. Watching someone else live their life is easier than living my own, and it gives me ideas on how to optimize my existence. But the more aware I become of the scaffolding beneath the facade, the more disoriented I feel.

The open acknowledgment of social media’s inner workings, with content creators exposing the foundations of their content within the content itself, is what Alice Marwick, an associate communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described to me as “meta-content.” Meta-content can be overt, such as the vlogger Casey Neistat wondering, in a vlog, if vlogging your life prevents you from being fully present in it; Meghan Markle explaining, in a selfie-style video for the Harry & Meghan docuseries, why she and Prince Harry recorded so many videos amid a family breakup; or the YouTuber Jackie Aina noting, in a video about YouTube burnout, that making videos is fundamentally about getting views. But meta-content can also be subtle: a vlogger walking across the frame before running back to get the camera. Or influencers vlogging themselves editing the very video you’re watching, in a moment of space-time distortion.

Viewers don’t seem to care. We keep watching, fully accepting the performance. Perhaps that’s because the rise of meta-content promises a way to grasp authenticity by acknowledging artifice; especially in a moment when artifice is easier to create than ever before, audiences want to know what’s “real” and what isn’t. As Susan Murray, a media-studies professor at NYU, explains, “The idea of a space where you can trust no sources, there’s no place to sort of land, everything is put into question, is a very unsettling, unsatisfying way to live.” So we continue to search for, as Murray observes, the “agreed-upon things, our basic understandings of what’s real, what’s true.” But when the content we watch becomes self-aware and even self-critical, it raises the question of whether we can truly escape the machinations of social media. Maybe when we stare directly into the abyss, we begin to enjoy its company.

Digital authenticity—which Marwick noted is “culturally constructed” to begin with—has shifted over the years. On Tumblr and early Instagram circa 2014, curated perfection was the preferred way to exist online—an image of the back of a girl’s head, for instance, with bouncy ringlets and a robin’s-egg-blue bow. The next few years brought the no-makeup selfie and the confessional, long-form Instagram caption to the fore, indicating a desire to accomplish authenticity through transparency and introspection. Those genres were eventually questioned too: Cultural critics began to argue that being online is always a performance and thus inherently a fabrication. In her 2019 book, Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino described how online spaces, unlike physical ones, lack a backstage where performance can be suspended. “Online,” she writes, “your audience can hypothetically keep expanding forever, and the performance never has to end.” Online scams of this period, such as Fyre Festival and the Caroline Calloway moment, relied on the social-media presentations of doctored realities. If everything is fake anyway, why bother with the truth?

Then came BeReal, a social app that sends users once-a-day push notifications to take simultaneous front- and back-camera photos without filters or captions. It was positioned as a counter to online inauthenticity, but as R. E. Hawley wrote, “The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions.” BeReal users still angle their camera and wait to take their daily photo at an aesthetic time of day. The snapshots merely remind us how impossible it is to stop performing online.

It can be difficult, in this context, to imagine how much further the frontiers of our digital world can stretch. Jenn’s concern over the future of the internet stems, in part, from motherhood. She recently had a son, Lennon (whose first birthday party I watched on YouTube), and worries about the digital world he’s going to inherit. Back in the age of MySpace, she had her own internet friends and would sneak out to parking lots at 1 a.m. to meet them in real life: “I think this was when technology was really used as a tool to connect us.” Now, she explained, it’s beginning to ensnare us. Posting content online is no longer a means to an end so much as the end itself.

[Read: ‘Scar girl’ is a sign that the internet is broken]

I asked Jenn if she ever worried about discussing the risks of social media, given her position as an influencer. She told me that, to the contrary, this is exactly what motivates her: “I can’t change the world, but if I can affect my sphere of reach, then I’m going to try and do that.” But it’s not that simple. Meta-content reminds us that a performance of authenticity is still a performance. The artifice of the internet stays, even when we fold it in upon itself. It’s easy to think of our online self as just one of the many versions of us—who we are at work is not the same as who we are with our parents or friends. But the online version can be edited in ways that the others can’t.

Audiences, likely familiar with posting on social media themselves, recognize these constructions. There are times where I look at the tiny digital version of myself on Instagram that looks and acts like me but remains a bit too polished—an uncanny valley between me and myself. “There’s still a question and interrogation of what’s real at the base, but [audiences are] more willing to accept … distortions or performance” than they were in the past, Murray says.

We used to view influencers’ lives as aspirational, a reality that we could reach toward. Now both sides acknowledge that they’re part of a perfect product that the viewer understands is unattainable and the influencer acknowledges is not fully real.

A few weeks after our call, Jenn put up a vlog. I watched a clip of our interview in it, a different angle of our Zoom call than I had experienced. “As you saw, we just had an extremely long conversation about social media, parasocial relationships, and the future,” she says in the clip, later adding, “I forgot to say this to her in the interview, but I truly think that my videos are less about me and more of a reflection of where you are currently … You are kind of reflecting on your own life and seeing what resonates [with] you, and you’re discarding what doesn’t. And I think that’s what’s beautiful about it.”

As I watched a video of her being interviewed by me for the article on meta-content you’re reading on this very page, I found that this sentiment rang true. Watching Jenn’s wedding video made me seriously consider marriage as a choice I would one day make; watching and bookmarking her newborn-essentials video made me feel more prepared for the daunting task of pregnancy (despite having no plans to undertake it anytime soon).

But meta-content is fundamentally a compromise. Recognizing the delusion of the internet doesn’t alter our course within it so much as remind us how trapped we truly are—and how we wouldn’t have it any other way.  

When the Saturday Night Live sketch “Lisa From Temecula” first aired in February, it spawned not just a major viral moment for the show but also a slew of digital Valentine’s Day cards that helped solidify catchphrases for the cantankerous titular character (played by Ego Nwodim). Against a bright-pink background dotted with purple hearts, the cards proclaimed “Cook My Meat!” and “You Tryna Get Some Butt Tonite?” among other bits of dialogue. Beyond circulating the internet at a dizzying pace, viral sketches can spawn a level of adoration that generates near-instant fandom. And in Lisa’s case, viewers appeared to connect with her disdainful side-eye and vociferous meat cutting right away.

Last night, SNL gave her a second run. The sketch felt particularly rare in a season absent the sorts of characters that were once a show staple, and that the recent cast member and heavyweight Kate McKinnon was so adept at inhabiting. When McKinnon, along with a slew of her long-standing peers, departed SNL last May, the show seemed more invested in getting its now relatively green cast to gel rather than develop recurring characters that could pop—but also pull the spotlight away from the ensemble. It couldn’t be seen, in the derisive words Lisa once launched at a man she thought was hitting on her, as “doing the most.”

But much of what made “Lisa From Temecula” a breakout hit, besides Nwodim’s razor-sharp physical comedy, was the way her scene partners responded. Nwodim cracked open a kind of jollity. As Shirley Li pointed out at the time, the sketch was an exuberant reminder about the vibrancy of live TV. Bowen Yang didn’t just break; he gave up trying to hold it together, threw down his fork, and resigned himself to the moment, while the episode’s host, Pedro Pascal, jubilantly strained to keep the sketch going amid Lisa’s steak-cutting ferment. In that way, Lisa recalled characters such as Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer and McKinnon’s “Close Encounter” abductee, each of whom regularly caused their scene partners to stifle their giggles—or laugh outright. They highlighted, in other words, the group effort of SNL.

Lisa’s second appearance found her at a wedding reception, as her older sister Shayna’s plus-one. The cast didn’t lose it to the same extent, which was understandable, given that the surprise of the original sketch—the table shaking wildly in response to Lisa carving her “extra-extra-well-done” steak; the wine sloshing every which way—was, this time, expected. But Nwodim captivated with a haughtier attitude, more exaggerated antics, and catchphrases old and new. Where previously she mistook the friendly warmth of her sister’s friend (played by Pascal) as flirtation, this time Lisa’s sister’s friend Kelly (played by the host, Ana de Armas) felt the steely chill of her rebuff. When Kelly genially welcomed Lisa, mentioning how sweet it was that she had accompanied her sister, who had just gone through a hard breakup, Lisa retorted, “Yeah, that’s cute. But my box is closed tonight.” Nwodim’s matter-of-fact delivery and boundary-setting body language compounded the humor of her misunderstanding.

The sketch followed the structure of the original almost exactly. This time, Lisa set about tossing a large salad for the table, using a bottle of dressing she’d specially asked the waiter for, because she preferred her lettuce drenched. (“Everybody knows lettuce is nasty without ranch.”) She brought back one of her original catchphrases, “Cook my meat!,” after discovering a piece of smoked salmon—which she awkwardly pronounced “sal-mon”—on the salad, and developed a comparable one with “Toss my salad!” The way Nwodim embellished Lisa’s particular dining preferences further added to the character’s still-emerging backstory.

[Read: The SNL sketch that left the cast helpless]

Nwodim has been having a stellar season at a time when SNL’s next breakout star hasn’t yet been identified. Watching her get the opportunity to continue developing Lisa feels significant. Not since Maya Rudolph has a Black woman on the show really gotten that opportunity. When Sasheer Zamata and Leslie Jones both joined the cast in 2014, they were better known for big impersonations than memorable original characters.

As much as it promises variety, SNL is a show that bends toward routine (look at how many episodes’ first sketches end up having a game-show premise); a big part of that regularity has been established over the years through a pantheon of classic recurring characters. Last night felt like a turning point for the season, if only because it hinted at the possibility of “Lisa From Temecula” joining those ranks.