I was wrapped in thought the other day, meditating on good writing and what distinguishes it from the merely average. I had read a new article by one of my favorite writers in the manner that I usually do—you see, us writers, or creatives in general, do not enjoy the luxury of merely reading for pleasure, as normal people of the quintessential ‘audience’ do. We must in fact approach reading with a scrutinizing eye, sometimes taking in the text in chunks to contemplate and process the aspect of
And someone gets it so I don't have to scratch the itch. Thank you. LLMs are a parlor trick. But the rubes can all be fooled once, and that is what is happening.
I was half expecting a plot twist, where AI wrote the article in your style... Not that it was lacking anything! It would have been funny to trick us all.
Romanticism, its belief in the expressive inner being if not the total revolt against reason, may be the only viable option moving ahead. I enjoyed this piece.
Good for you for mentioning "Beauty", however she has long been absent as an ideal in contemporary art. That which is given the floor at for example The Whitney or MOMA is an abstraction of the political and is often depressingly ugly in its rejection of Beauty - as if she, Beauty came from Eve, the mother of all living human souls, came from a mythical Garden that must be trashed - as must be all memory of the authority of religious tradition. Art and Beauty replaced by rebellion as the supremely the truly "original". Echh
To be quite frank, this article feels like as if it had been written by (a poorly prompted) AI. The author tries so hard, the whole thing feels like a verbal circus (in order to distinguish itself from AI, which, incidentally, can do the "verbal circus" much better) and more direct and simple language would benefit it (like the one used in the excerpt from "Terms of Endearment", which I enjoyed), in my opinion, unless the author's goal was to mimic this "Dark Futura" atmosphere, in which case he succeeded, but it feels off when connected to the appeals to heart and authenticity.
To be honest, few things have made me feel as empowered as AI. Finally, we truly have access to all the wealth of Human knowledge. We've had the Internet, but the information had to be searched for, and it was never quite what I needed to find. You had to know how to search for it.
Now, I can literally talk to the computer and it tells me exactly what I'm looking for. No keywords, no paid ads, no SQL, or second guessing. I can write full, complete sentences and get what I need. In fact, the more you talk to it, the better responses you get.
But it goes beyond just looking up stuff. I love learning foreign languages, and we've never quite had anything like this. A highly capable language tutor who can explain the smallest minutia of grammar or vocabulary, and then give you exercises to practice. I've learned in weeks for free what could have taken months or years of paid classes with a teacher.
Imagine this with any skill-programming, science, any academic subject. You can learn to do anything now, including creative writing.
Sure, I can plagiarize an essay or lazily ask it to write it for me. But can also have the AI pull up hundreds of sources for your research in a click of a button and put them into a handy list, sorted and categorized however you want. You can have it proofread your writing, fixing errors.
I was listening to an interview of one of the pioneers of AI whose name I have forgotten, and he said that one of the biggest problems the programmers face is making AI acknowledge its ignorance. It's programmed to always have an answer, and when it doesn't, it makes one up with whatever info comes handy. It's called a "hallucination" in AI lingo.
I can never get what I need from AI. It's enough that I question it about the meaning of life, and why one should go on living, and it itself admits it can't tell me.
I agree that AI is great for apprehension of new-to-us idioms.
"but so long as it lacks physical form through which to experience all the whirlwind ups and downs and agonies of flesh, it’s doubtful it can ever transcend its imitative pretenses beyond mere digital Kabuki". You inadvertently perhaps explained precisely why we are a spirit entombed in a physical body. Then consider, could we experience all there is in one life?
Enjoyable essay, those that attack you on X might be surprised at this other aspect.
Singslang is good, I’m definitely copping that one.
I had the same idea recently. As AI improves human expression will twist and spark in ways that seem to skirt madness. We’re too addicted to novelty to fall for saccharine mimicry and too devilish to not delight in torturing the algorithms. Our distinctive lack, indeed.
Firstly, I'm viscerally against this proclaimed dichotomy between 'reason' (cold, 'AI'-prone) and 'emotion' (neo-romanticism). It promotes the lazy view that scientists have to be cold and unfeeling while the non-scientists have a deep connection to warmth and life.
We can see where this leads to, or rather: has already led to. It's the basis on which feminists descry 'white old men' (Disclaimer: I'm a white old woman). It's the basis on which western education has promoted verbose 'me and my feelz' outpourings as more valid than having to study 'hard' things like maths, physics and other MINT subjects.
The truly insidious result of this emphasis on emotion is that generations of pupils have never been taught how to see, how to look at what is around them in the natural world. That is what leads to the lack of wonder, of enthusiasm for finding out you rightly and sadly notice.
One final note: the original Romantic movement led to the high time of inventions and capitalist growth. One might regard this as societal answer to an overwhelming emotionalism. Perhaps AI is such an answer in our age, a time where all 'feelz', expressed in the facile terms of fridge magnets, are valid. Worse: perhaps too many have become incapable of discerning what is AI's 'deep fakes' and what isn't because too many have never learned to look and listen and to trust their own judgement.
Oh dear. As much as I appreciate the *romantic* take in this piece, ultimately, it's foolish and even somewhat masturbatory, to wit:
1) The phrase is "a ways away." The reason there's no apostrophe is because it derives from the genitive version of the word "way" kind of like how we don't write "her's" with an apostrophe. Old English never dies, baby!!
2) I will fully admit that I love some of the poetry that was produced by the (original) Romantics. But if you look at the lives these people led, it's one disaster after another. I mean, yeah, it's cool that Shelley used to put copies of his poems in balloons and launch them into the air, but on the other hand, he was a pedophile, a mooch, a shit father, and basically a lazy bum his entire life.
3) No need to invent "Singslang" or any other such nonsense. First, just use the word "nigger" in any English-language text, and you'll automatically prove you're human. Second, AI only understands and speaks a tiny fraction of the world's languages. Good luck finding an AI that can speak and read Kannada, for instance, which approximately 60 million human beings speak every day, etc, etc.
3b) I should add here that I speak and write in a language that even Google cannot understand, and it probably never will, which is (Cyrillic) Moldovan. You don't have to be some isolated indigenous tribe to exist outside the purview of these idiotic Silicon Valley morons. You just have to get past the ones they use at the United Nations (which is how all these translator apps/AIs were trained).
3c) Speaking of which, take a gander at the languages they speak in Togo. Um... even people in Togo can barely tell where one begins and the other ends :)
4) Yah, you can "smell" it when an AI wrote a text or tell when an AI generated a photo-type image. But can you distinguish an AI piece of artwork from human-created piece of modern art hanging in some gallery in Soho right now? LMFAO no, you cannot. Because that's where "Romanticism" gets you in the long run, blobs and dots of color that you can interpret any way you want to (aka a Rorschach test).
5) AI is a cheap joke. Saying AI will "take over" anything is like someone saying that the Mechanical Turk from the 18th century is going to take over the world of competitive chess. Give me a break. The only people who fear AI are those creating or consuming something that they know has no inherent worth or value.
6) There is literally not a single system or process or control of anything that is being done 100% by AI right now because it is fundamentally unreliable and cuckoo crazy. AI is just the literal embodiment of the infinite monkey theorem, which proposes that an infinite number of monkeys banging on some typewriters will one day replicate Shakespeare. Well, AI is just super fast digital monkeys cranking out billions of pages per second. We gasp in amazement at the "hits" and immediately forget all the "misses."
7) Hate to get all Saint Augustine here on you for my last comment (primum movens), but even flesh and blood people do not create anything de novo. All those things we call "creations" are lovely and wonderful and sometimes even cherished, but they're ALWAYS reinterpretations (or "reboots" or "reimaginings") of original IP, to put it into modern lingo. And I'm saying this as an artist myself :)
Other than that, another great read! I truly mean that.
I agree. An example of 7 is the wheel, how did it arise people say who have never stepped on a fallen twig lying on hard ground and almost broken their necks as their foot goes from under them. What we call art are the feeble attempts to copy the master that created all we see in nature. I believe even the wildly overrated Picasso admitted such when he came out of the newly discovered cave with the paintings of animals that were stylistically far better than anything he ever created saying we had learned nothing and there had been no progress in all those thousands of years since they were drawn. He was certainly correct about his sort of "art" in any case.
People AI with the Internet. They say pundits said the Internet will just die but look at it today! It succeeded beyond imagination. We can’t live without it!
But AI is not the Internet or software in general. The big difference between everything that came before it and AI is AI is trying to be human. But there is such a diversity in humanity (both personal and group level) that it is IMPOSSIBLE to ever replicate it authentically. Only in Hollywood do they think that’s possible. 🤡
What it will do is REDUCE OUR OPTIONS as to what it does mean to be human. If we continue to believe that it CAN be us when it absolutely cannot, WE will start MIMICKING IT, and consequently lose the diversity that makes human.
In other words, it’s not that we will create an AI that can perfectly be like us. No.
But that AI will - through our own convenience and submission - turn us into it.
Sooooooo much feminist junk seeping out of this, which suggests AI wrote it or your mind has been got at by a woman or you are a woman finally writing in your natural style, and unnecessarily obtuse language oozes out all over the place, an increasing trend that happens as civilisations fall off the cliff. I hope AI actually wrote this because it is nothing like your best stuff.
Once again, your writing is masterful! Relevant, hard hitting content in gift wrapping. Regarding biosynth AI, should that occur, the new creature will look at humans as titans, or even gods.
However I feel about this particular article, I just appreciate the fact I am even inclined to react to it and I enjoy reading other comments too, which, for me, is rarely the case nowadays. Good job, author, for attracting this kind of audience.
And someone gets it so I don't have to scratch the itch. Thank you. LLMs are a parlor trick. But the rubes can all be fooled once, and that is what is happening.
Your quality was greater when your quantity was less. Simple enough.
I really enjoyed this read. Hear Hear as the pompous would say.
I was half expecting a plot twist, where AI wrote the article in your style... Not that it was lacking anything! It would have been funny to trick us all.
extra points if it had been rewritten by ChatGPT and then doubly rewritten by the AI that reverse engineered the AI-checking software :)
Romanticism, its belief in the expressive inner being if not the total revolt against reason, may be the only viable option moving ahead. I enjoyed this piece.
Good for you for mentioning "Beauty", however she has long been absent as an ideal in contemporary art. That which is given the floor at for example The Whitney or MOMA is an abstraction of the political and is often depressingly ugly in its rejection of Beauty - as if she, Beauty came from Eve, the mother of all living human souls, came from a mythical Garden that must be trashed - as must be all memory of the authority of religious tradition. Art and Beauty replaced by rebellion as the supremely the truly "original". Echh
I heard Goodness and Truth have been on holiday for a while as well.
To be quite frank, this article feels like as if it had been written by (a poorly prompted) AI. The author tries so hard, the whole thing feels like a verbal circus (in order to distinguish itself from AI, which, incidentally, can do the "verbal circus" much better) and more direct and simple language would benefit it (like the one used in the excerpt from "Terms of Endearment", which I enjoyed), in my opinion, unless the author's goal was to mimic this "Dark Futura" atmosphere, in which case he succeeded, but it feels off when connected to the appeals to heart and authenticity.
I personally feel that he gets florid sometimes...but we're all different, eh? I suppose he's just being himself. Well I hope he is being himself.
To be honest, few things have made me feel as empowered as AI. Finally, we truly have access to all the wealth of Human knowledge. We've had the Internet, but the information had to be searched for, and it was never quite what I needed to find. You had to know how to search for it.
Now, I can literally talk to the computer and it tells me exactly what I'm looking for. No keywords, no paid ads, no SQL, or second guessing. I can write full, complete sentences and get what I need. In fact, the more you talk to it, the better responses you get.
But it goes beyond just looking up stuff. I love learning foreign languages, and we've never quite had anything like this. A highly capable language tutor who can explain the smallest minutia of grammar or vocabulary, and then give you exercises to practice. I've learned in weeks for free what could have taken months or years of paid classes with a teacher.
Imagine this with any skill-programming, science, any academic subject. You can learn to do anything now, including creative writing.
Sure, I can plagiarize an essay or lazily ask it to write it for me. But can also have the AI pull up hundreds of sources for your research in a click of a button and put them into a handy list, sorted and categorized however you want. You can have it proofread your writing, fixing errors.
Beware. I’ve used AI to find sources and it sometimes just makes shit up. More than once it cited a book that didn’t actually exist.
I was listening to an interview of one of the pioneers of AI whose name I have forgotten, and he said that one of the biggest problems the programmers face is making AI acknowledge its ignorance. It's programmed to always have an answer, and when it doesn't, it makes one up with whatever info comes handy. It's called a "hallucination" in AI lingo.
I can never get what I need from AI. It's enough that I question it about the meaning of life, and why one should go on living, and it itself admits it can't tell me.
I agree that AI is great for apprehension of new-to-us idioms.
"but so long as it lacks physical form through which to experience all the whirlwind ups and downs and agonies of flesh, it’s doubtful it can ever transcend its imitative pretenses beyond mere digital Kabuki". You inadvertently perhaps explained precisely why we are a spirit entombed in a physical body. Then consider, could we experience all there is in one life?
Enjoyable essay, those that attack you on X might be surprised at this other aspect.
Singslang is good, I’m definitely copping that one.
I had the same idea recently. As AI improves human expression will twist and spark in ways that seem to skirt madness. We’re too addicted to novelty to fall for saccharine mimicry and too devilish to not delight in torturing the algorithms. Our distinctive lack, indeed.
Firstly, I'm viscerally against this proclaimed dichotomy between 'reason' (cold, 'AI'-prone) and 'emotion' (neo-romanticism). It promotes the lazy view that scientists have to be cold and unfeeling while the non-scientists have a deep connection to warmth and life.
We can see where this leads to, or rather: has already led to. It's the basis on which feminists descry 'white old men' (Disclaimer: I'm a white old woman). It's the basis on which western education has promoted verbose 'me and my feelz' outpourings as more valid than having to study 'hard' things like maths, physics and other MINT subjects.
The truly insidious result of this emphasis on emotion is that generations of pupils have never been taught how to see, how to look at what is around them in the natural world. That is what leads to the lack of wonder, of enthusiasm for finding out you rightly and sadly notice.
One final note: the original Romantic movement led to the high time of inventions and capitalist growth. One might regard this as societal answer to an overwhelming emotionalism. Perhaps AI is such an answer in our age, a time where all 'feelz', expressed in the facile terms of fridge magnets, are valid. Worse: perhaps too many have become incapable of discerning what is AI's 'deep fakes' and what isn't because too many have never learned to look and listen and to trust their own judgement.
Oh dear. As much as I appreciate the *romantic* take in this piece, ultimately, it's foolish and even somewhat masturbatory, to wit:
1) The phrase is "a ways away." The reason there's no apostrophe is because it derives from the genitive version of the word "way" kind of like how we don't write "her's" with an apostrophe. Old English never dies, baby!!
2) I will fully admit that I love some of the poetry that was produced by the (original) Romantics. But if you look at the lives these people led, it's one disaster after another. I mean, yeah, it's cool that Shelley used to put copies of his poems in balloons and launch them into the air, but on the other hand, he was a pedophile, a mooch, a shit father, and basically a lazy bum his entire life.
3) No need to invent "Singslang" or any other such nonsense. First, just use the word "nigger" in any English-language text, and you'll automatically prove you're human. Second, AI only understands and speaks a tiny fraction of the world's languages. Good luck finding an AI that can speak and read Kannada, for instance, which approximately 60 million human beings speak every day, etc, etc.
3b) I should add here that I speak and write in a language that even Google cannot understand, and it probably never will, which is (Cyrillic) Moldovan. You don't have to be some isolated indigenous tribe to exist outside the purview of these idiotic Silicon Valley morons. You just have to get past the ones they use at the United Nations (which is how all these translator apps/AIs were trained).
3c) Speaking of which, take a gander at the languages they speak in Togo. Um... even people in Togo can barely tell where one begins and the other ends :)
4) Yah, you can "smell" it when an AI wrote a text or tell when an AI generated a photo-type image. But can you distinguish an AI piece of artwork from human-created piece of modern art hanging in some gallery in Soho right now? LMFAO no, you cannot. Because that's where "Romanticism" gets you in the long run, blobs and dots of color that you can interpret any way you want to (aka a Rorschach test).
5) AI is a cheap joke. Saying AI will "take over" anything is like someone saying that the Mechanical Turk from the 18th century is going to take over the world of competitive chess. Give me a break. The only people who fear AI are those creating or consuming something that they know has no inherent worth or value.
6) There is literally not a single system or process or control of anything that is being done 100% by AI right now because it is fundamentally unreliable and cuckoo crazy. AI is just the literal embodiment of the infinite monkey theorem, which proposes that an infinite number of monkeys banging on some typewriters will one day replicate Shakespeare. Well, AI is just super fast digital monkeys cranking out billions of pages per second. We gasp in amazement at the "hits" and immediately forget all the "misses."
7) Hate to get all Saint Augustine here on you for my last comment (primum movens), but even flesh and blood people do not create anything de novo. All those things we call "creations" are lovely and wonderful and sometimes even cherished, but they're ALWAYS reinterpretations (or "reboots" or "reimaginings") of original IP, to put it into modern lingo. And I'm saying this as an artist myself :)
Other than that, another great read! I truly mean that.
I agree. An example of 7 is the wheel, how did it arise people say who have never stepped on a fallen twig lying on hard ground and almost broken their necks as their foot goes from under them. What we call art are the feeble attempts to copy the master that created all we see in nature. I believe even the wildly overrated Picasso admitted such when he came out of the newly discovered cave with the paintings of animals that were stylistically far better than anything he ever created saying we had learned nothing and there had been no progress in all those thousands of years since they were drawn. He was certainly correct about his sort of "art" in any case.
This is absolutely true.
People AI with the Internet. They say pundits said the Internet will just die but look at it today! It succeeded beyond imagination. We can’t live without it!
But AI is not the Internet or software in general. The big difference between everything that came before it and AI is AI is trying to be human. But there is such a diversity in humanity (both personal and group level) that it is IMPOSSIBLE to ever replicate it authentically. Only in Hollywood do they think that’s possible. 🤡
What it will do is REDUCE OUR OPTIONS as to what it does mean to be human. If we continue to believe that it CAN be us when it absolutely cannot, WE will start MIMICKING IT, and consequently lose the diversity that makes human.
In other words, it’s not that we will create an AI that can perfectly be like us. No.
But that AI will - through our own convenience and submission - turn us into it.
We must never let it.
This is an excellent reply because you are both correct.
Sooooooo much feminist junk seeping out of this, which suggests AI wrote it or your mind has been got at by a woman or you are a woman finally writing in your natural style, and unnecessarily obtuse language oozes out all over the place, an increasing trend that happens as civilisations fall off the cliff. I hope AI actually wrote this because it is nothing like your best stuff.
My comment.
I wish I can turn off the aye eye, like spell check, so it didn't correct my incorrwctions
Once again, your writing is masterful! Relevant, hard hitting content in gift wrapping. Regarding biosynth AI, should that occur, the new creature will look at humans as titans, or even gods.
However I feel about this particular article, I just appreciate the fact I am even inclined to react to it and I enjoy reading other comments too, which, for me, is rarely the case nowadays. Good job, author, for attracting this kind of audience.