ThoughtsForm: The Amazing Digital Circus
Unlike past AI-themed media it's able to more accurately trace the shape of things
Welcome to ThoughtsForm, the weekly essay entry in my Emergent Dispatches publication. My name is Eric and I’m a strange and eccentric person from the internet with a long history of strangeness and eccentricity. Sonder Uncertainly, this newsletter, was created at the start of 2025 and contains a wide variety of distinct AI generated content and projects. The other sections are my older publications.
Emergent Dispatches is my latest attempt to twirl in place all fancy-like and make interesting noises about AI. Weeeeee!
The Amazing Digital Circus
I am heavily biased towards a wide variety of the themes and concepts of this show. I wasn’t sure that I’d be into it but it was repeatedly recommended to me for good reason.
This article will be a recap that includes some spoilers and a paywalled section with my thoughts about the AI tech that icnludes more spoilers.
I strongly suggest you go watch TADC first. It’s available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHovnlOusNLgvAbnxluXCVB3KLj8e4QB-
It’s nine 25 minute episodes (the final episode had a limited theatrical release and includes the previous episode). The first episode is a pilot which has lower production quality.
Individual episodes have between 79 million and 454 million views on YouTube.
It’s a psychological dark comedy
The Amazing Digital Circus covers LLM-based AI architectures and personas and capabilities better than anyone else has. Other media may have done better work of the philosophical concepts of AI, but the technical nuance is on display in TADC because the creator understands about language models and hallucinations and a variety of other concepts.
The rapid pace of AI progress means it’s hard to stay current with media representations. TADC, by virtue of being web content rather than traditional media content, was able to surf this wave very well. This show is post-GPT4-era AI-related media, and there isn’t a lot of that yet.
A lot of very intelligent people will not be comfortable watching this show because of its emotional depth. There’s a lot of heavy stuff in here that will make people uncomfortable if they haven’t done some kind of an inner journey through similar experiences. They’re dismiss it for being childish as some kind of weird warping of the immature inner state that prevents them from approaching it, and then they miss out on a very well assembled narrative about modern technologies and identity.
Everything aftrer this is paywalled and spoiler-heavy.
