writing

The Data Are Clear

By in jests japes jokes jollies, writing No Comments

Josh Nadeau:

Studies are suggesting (I won’t bore you with a list of citations) that more and more people are beginning to demand more from writing. There are, and it pains me to say, dissertations suggesting that writing seeks to evoke a response of heart and soul, not mind and intellect. These are saying that the era of the think piece, the data driven reporting, the academic cunning, are a thing of the past. There’s a growing constituency that seems enthralled by the very ordinary and very local—personal and particular stories by which the universal scope of experience can come flooding through. And believe me, this will be a fad. It will not last.

I’ve been saying recently that much nonfiction writing would be improved if we dropped our senseless prohibition against first-person perspectives, stopped camouflaging individual viewpoints behind the drab patterns of omniscient narrative, and simply offered up our reflections for whatever they are worth. Nadeau seems to have the same idea in mind, but he says it in a much funnier way. You should check it out.

Take It To the Limit

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Matthew Gasda:

What must be preserved from the encroachments of the calculator are forms of writing in which excellence was always an uphill battle: the long-form essay, literary fiction, poetry, plays, memoir, as well as personal letters. But even this preservation must make room for reasonable carve-outs. There’s a difference between a journalist who prompts Claude to generate a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole article, on the one hand; and one who asks Claude a factual question, on the other. The latter is doing something no different from consulting Google (Google results now are AI-driven anyway).

Norms can and should be developed within these professions for certifying organic work, which will no doubt command higher prices, just as handmade furniture from a carpenter comes at a higher cost than a chair from IKEA. If this means fewer people will be thought of as true writers, is that really such a bad thing?

I think we’re in the “bargaining” stage of the AI discourse. “OK, fine, you can have all of this writing. But surely you’ll leave me poetry, literary fiction, and personal letters?”

“Organic work commanding higher prices” strikes me as “capitalism wins again.” If some people get a thrill out of cultivating a New Yorker-type of relationship to writing, good for them. No different than if they spend thousands of dollars sniffing wine corks, even if I think it’s absurd. The human animal will always find a way to turn even a new status quo into a status game. Human writing becomes artisanal cheese. There will almost certainly be people for whom “human-written” becomes part of a cultivated relationship to language in the same way other people cultivate architecture, jazz, watches, coffee, typography, or restaurants. They may possess genuine discrimination. They may also be unbearable about it. Usually both are possible at once.

This is another instance where I wonder if the form of the piece doesn’t cause the tepid conclusion. It’s like: a writer has an insight about AI. He sets out his thoughts. But his thoughts don’t end on a summarizing note, and certainly not an uplifting one. So a “call to action” sort of ending gets perfunctorily tacked on, perhaps at an editor’s urging. Obviously, there’s no way to know. But it’s such a common occurrence that I wonder if it happens often. The conclusions are often so rote and uninspired.

The interesting part of the essay is exploratory. Gasda keeps discovering complications: the AI/non-AI binary is unstable; cognitive outsourcing long predates LLMs; writers have no principled reason to exempt their own favorite cognitive activity without explaining why; detector culture is corrosive; and the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate assistance is difficult to draw. But then, with very little argumentative preparation, we get: preserve literary genres, create professional norms for certifying “organic work,” accept a premium market for it, and perhaps recognize fewer “true writers.” It has the sound of an essay pilot being told, You need to land the plane. But the actual intellectual landing point might simply have been: “I don’t know where the line is. The old line doesn’t survive contact with the technology, and any new one will be contingent, socially negotiated, and probably unstable.” But that wouldn’t feel like an “ending” in the conventional magazine sense. It lacks resolution. It gives the reader no prescription, no hopeful gesture, no institutional program, no “what we must do.” I suspect this produces a great deal of bad nonfiction.

The first-person writer can stop at the exact point where his judgment stops. He can say, “I noticed this. I followed it as far as I could. Here is the shape it seems to have. I don’t know what follows from it.” No editor needs a call to action. No audience-development person needs the reader to leave feeling empowered rather than vaguely unsettled. Blogs at their best have a quality that magazine essays often lack: they preserve the scale of the thought. The writer doesn’t have to inflate an observation into a thesis or a thesis into a program. He can just say, “Here’s how I see it. Take it or leave it.”

Nothing to Declare But His Genius

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Venkatesh Rao:

Starting with this essay, I will no longer be explicitly declaring AI use, or segregating my AI-assisted writing in a separate experimental section. You should assume by default that I’m using AI. See my revised About page for a detailed update on my AI use philosophy.

Rao to the Pangram police:

I love the judo move here, simply sidestepping the attempted thrust of moral authority and using its momentum against it. And I’m glad somebody prominent in this particular intellectual neighborhood is willing to say it plainly. The more respectable writers behave as though being “Pangram’d” is a reputational catastrophe, the more they hand detector companies and accusers the authority to define legitimate writing. But authorship is an agency problem, not a particle-analysis problem. There are no disputes over royalties to settle. Anyone for whom AI assistance is disqualifying has the information needed to stop reading him. Everyone else can go back to asking the old-fashioned question: Is the writing any good? Anything beyond that would only become interesting to a reader if, upon follow-up discussion, it became evident that Rao wasn’t capable of expanding upon “his” ideas. The reader might think, “Wow, Claude must have been doing all the heavy lifting for this guy.” But that’s a risk for Rao to be concerned with, and if he isn’t, I’m not either. Too bad for all the newly self-appointed commissars who will lose their jobs if this example spreads. On second thought, swive ’em.

A Pot of Message

By in foolosophy, music, the geist of the zeit, writing 3 Comments

I’ve never considered what it would look like if someone made a connect-the-dots sociology book, but suddenly I have a clear image of it.

I particularly enjoy the implied metaphysics of “confidence needed for rock.” Apparently rock requires some national reserve of psychic testosterone, and the towers falling depleted it. Green Day, the Strokes, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, Queens of the Stone Age, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, the Killers, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Mastodon, etc. must have been operating on the strategic confidence reserve.

The fact that the stakes are so low here is what allows you to see how easily confidently-stated bullshit can sound authoritative if you’re primed to take it seriously. You begin with an outcome: rock lost cultural centrality. You select a major historical event: 9/11. You invent a mushy intermediate variable: “confidence.” You attribute the outcome to the event through that variable. Then you narrate the sequence with enough certainty that the story feels like an explanation. Nothing in that procedure actually demonstrates causation, but it has the shape of analysis. That shape is what’s persuasive. A happened. Then B happened. Here is an abstract concept that connects A to B. Therefore I have explained B.

Again, it sounds hilarious when a bloviator on social media is trying to explain such a gaseous topic as “the death of rock.” Hell, any post or article about “the death of X” is like a porch light on a humid summer night: guaranteed to attract a cloud of the dumbest moths pontificating in circles. But move exactly the same method into geopolitics, sociology, macroeconomics, institutional decline, technological change, whatever, and suddenly the subject itself supplies prestige. The nouns get heavier: “legitimacy crisis,” “late-stage institutional decay,” “neoliberal subjectivity,” “civilizational exhaustion,” or “loss of social cohesion.” Now you may not know enough to say, “Wait, that doesn’t line up with what actually happened.” And because the speaker sounds fluent in the domain’s vocabulary, you mistake facility at constructing an explanatory narrative for evidence that the narrative is true. It’s sort of like Gell-Mann amnesia, but in relation to methods of inference. You recognize the bogus reasoning instantly when its inputs are familiar, but fail to recognize the same reasoning when it is dressed in unfamiliar facts and consequential abstractions. So just remember our friend Reuben Rodriguez the next time you see some blowhard posing like Spengler and portentously analyzing the deep structure of history, technology, populism, etc., and say, “Wait; is this another ‘9/11 killed rock music’ moment?”

In addition to warning against the dangers of rhetorical slickness, I want to reiterate what I said recently: this sort of thing is what happens when writers are trained to channel their thoughts away from personal reflection and toward cultural analysis and criticism. Rodriguez might not be embarrassing himself with this pretentious twaddle if only he had the confidence to talk about his own perspective instead. “Rock used to feel dangerous and exciting to me. Now most new rock sounds derivative.” That could lead somewhere interesting. When did it stop working for you? Did the music change, or did you? Does novelty in music depend partly on being seventeen? Does acquiring a huge library of antecedents make genuinely new music harder to hear as new? How much of the pleasure of rock was inseparable from youth, friends, cars, clubs, clothes, sex, rebellion, the whole surrounding context? How much of rock’s essence owes to its roots in baby-boomer hedonism and rebellion, and can it survive being transplanted into less-libertine soil?

The “I” forces you to acknowledge contingency. “I don’t hear much interesting new rock” leaves open the possibility that interesting rock exists somewhere you aren’t listening. Once you remove the I, however, your disappointment acquires the dignity of analysis. I suspect the grand sociological explanation exists precisely to protect the writer from the less-flattering autobiographical one. “The culture changed” feels much better than “I aged out of this.” “The medium became hollow” beats “people stopped reading me.” “The scene lost its vitality” is preferable to “I don’t know where the interesting people went.” “Audiences no longer have the attention span for serious work” sounds nobler than “my work isn’t attracting an audience.” It is a perverse exchange: abandon the one subject on which you possess unique authority in order to make an authoritative pronouncement about the subject on which you possess almost none.

Joseph Epstein once quipped about ideological hacks who have traded their literary birthright for “a pot of message.” The birthright is the one thing the essayist actually owns outright: his experience, his perception, his peculiar angle of vision, the embarrassing detail, the contradiction he can’t quite resolve. Then he gives it away for some portable conclusion about Society, Technology, The Culture, The Death of Rock, The Decline of Blogging. Esau gives up something uniquely his for a bowl of stew; the essayist gives up something uniquely his for a thesis anybody could have written. What a tragedy.

How Much Do I Love You? How Hard Must We Try?

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, technology, writing No Comments

Derek Thompson:

In my corner of the world, which is journalism and academia and writing in general, Pangram has become nothing less than a cultural force. A meme, even. I’ve seen prominent politicians, chief executives, and public intellectuals exposed as slop-slingers. Their public humiliation sometimes fills me with righteous indignation. But it also makes my toes curl a bit, as I think about people spending all day policing the internet for slop and attempting to Pangram-shame people with a technology that can make mistakes.

Today’s interview is with Pangram founder and chief executive Max Spero. Among other things, we talk about:

  • what if AI writing takes over the internet and nobody cares?
  • how Pangram works—and how and when it makes mistakes
  • why AI writes “like that”
  • my fear that AI-writing witch hunts would be an unwelcome addition to online life
  • Pangram’s relationship with Substack
  • what if a big tech company, like OpenAI or Google, creates their own AI detector that puts Pangram out of business?

Evidently, I’m destined to be a gadfly, though with any luck not the kind that earns a glass of hemlock. I just think that most of what our commentating classes produce is empty verbiage that avoids the ostensible subject. What I find interesting here, as always, is what our choices reveal about our deeper sentiments. Fifteen years ago, when Nicholas Carr was beating the drum over how hyperlinks, search engines and the internet itself were making us dumber, I was zeroing in on an assumption he took for granted. He assumed that we truly wanted to do more difficult tasks like read challenging books, and that we were being prevented, more or less against our will, by technology. I simply noted that this was a big ol’ fat-ass begged question. Maybe all technology did was reveal our base inclinations once given multiple choices.

There was a whole hierarchy of “wanting” worth reflecting upon in Carr’s case. I want to read difficult books. I want to have read difficult books. I want to be capable of reading difficult books. I want to think of myself as somebody who reads difficult books. I want other people to regard me as somebody who reads difficult books. And, at 8:45 tonight, I want to aimlessly scroll around on the internet instead of reading one of the fifteen difficult books I have piled up on the nightstand. Those desires can all coexist, and they tend to be knotted together like last year’s strings of Christmas lights. Untangling them is hard. It’s much easier to blame an outside agent for “rewiring my brain” and preventing me from being my true self.

Now, here we are, where people are driving themselves crazy wondering who is using AI and to what extent, and they’re in agreement that this is unquestionably a bad thing. And once again, I say: isn’t it interesting that the thing we all profess to want is the thing to which none of us apparently want to devote time and energy? To me, all LLMs are doing is finally providing an equal alternative: you mean I don’t have to waste any time trying to write some LinkedIn bullshit? And it turns out that no one actually wants to devote time to writing LinkedIn bullshit!

But — crucially — we can’t bring ourselves to be honest about this, especially when it turns out that we don’t particularly want to devote time to writing posts and essays, either. We fear what it might say about us if we spend most of our lives wishing we could be elsewhere doing other things. We fear an honest accounting of our sunk costs and an honest reckoning with our regretted compromises. We fear an honest look at how much of our lives we would happily automate away if we had the option. Rather than face that squarely and decide what to do about it, we retreat to the earlier stage: proclaim that, say, writing LinkedIn posts by your own unaided effort is a good and worthwhile thing to do, and anyone who doesn’t want to do it is a bad, shameful person. It’s like a religious fanatic who catches himself thinking sinful thoughts and responds with horror and redoubled efforts at prayer and self-flagellation. Pray the AI away is a strategy, I guess, but I don’t think much of its chances.

We have spent ages assigning moral dignity to activities partly because we had to do them. AI is forcing us to discover how many things we called “meaningful work” because, until about five minutes ago, we had no practical way not to do them. As usual, sudden exposure to undiluted self-awareness sends us into a pants-pissing panic. Who are we in the absence of compulsion? How much choice is too much choice? What are my true desires, or are “desires” too ephemeral to bear the weight of a personality anyway? This sort of reflection seems much more penetrating to me than counting em dashes, which is probably why we’re talking about the latter.

Digging For Gold In My Neighborhood

By in technology, the geist of the zeit, writing No Comments

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I’m not naive about why writers write what they write. We do it for the love of the game, certainly, but most of us also need to get paid, whether the essential currency is prestige, attention, career advancement, or … currency. The blogosphere worked as it did, in the ways that I so loved, because it evolved in a way that rewarded writers and aspiring writers for doing that kind of work. When the incentive structure changed, it stopped working.

For the conversation to return, we’ll need a new structure where the right mix of incentives, disincentives, technology, UX decisions, norms, etc. are in place to make it worth our while, as writers, to write to each other in the way bloggers used to write to each other. I don’t expect it to happen, but consider this my plea to the universe (and, what the hell, the Substack Team as well) that it will.

There’s a funny little circularity to a man asking, on Substack, “Can we bring back blogging? I miss it.” Well, you’re not asking this on Blogspot, so I guess the answer is no, at least in the sense you mean it. Which raises the obvious question: why act like a hapless bystander, pleading to an indifferent universe? It looks like you’ve already got danieloppenheimer.blogspot.com set up and ready to go. All you need to do is delete the Notes account, stop relying on Substack recommendations, give up the subscriber count, publish an RSS feed, build a blogroll, and send readers away from your site constantly, accepting that many of them may never come back. Ah…

It’s almost a textbook collective-action problem. Someone wistfully says, “I’d love a decentralized blogosphere.” Then he says, “But I’d rather not give up my 18,000 subscribers.” Then he looks around and asks where the decentralized blogosphere went. All of that illustrates why things are the way they are. The early-oughts blogosphere was something of a gold rush, unsustainable by its nature. The evolving technological development of the time made visible a deposit of talent that the old distribution system had been bad at finding. Under the old arrangement, being an excellent political or cultural essayist wasn’t enough. You also had to get yourself onto the institutional map. That might mean going to the right university, moving toward the Acela corridor, knowing which magazines took pitches, cultivating editors, acquiring credentials, tolerating junior positions, and generally possessing enough career orientation to enter the pipeline. There must always have been people who could write wonderfully but who were badly matched to that process: the insurance adjuster in Nebraska, the teaching professor at a small liberal-arts college in Ohio, the lawyer who had no desire to become a journalist, the housewife with encyclopedic knowledge of some obscure subject, the obsessive amateur reading three books a week. Their talent was economically and culturally stranded.

Then Blogger and Movable Type arrived. And like a gold rush, the first people into the territory could obtain wildly disproportionate returns. If you were unusually good in 2002, there weren’t yet ten million people competing with you for attention. A link from the right person might expose your work to thousands of readers. Those readers might link it again. Within a short period, somebody who had never been through the institutional filtering machinery could acquire a readership, something that previously required an editor to bestow. And a readership was convertible into columns, magazine assignments, book proposals, speaking gigs, and a professional network. Indeed, that’s where most of the talented bloggers ended up. But for every one of them, there are probably a thousand blogs adrift on the Sargasso Sea, abandoned shortly after launch with no signs of struggle.

There’s a sentimental suggestion here that the blogosphere was wonderful because people once possessed better norms of conversation. Well, I was there, and while things were certainly more decentralized, which is generally a good thing, it isn’t hard in retrospect to see how social media was just an intensification of already-existing trends rather than a qualitatively different thing. People linked, posted constantly, picked fights, sought recognition, discovered unknown writers and answered one another partly because there were enormous potential rewards for doing so. The frantic cross-linking Oppenheimer remembers wasn’t merely a lovely communal custom. It was also prospecting behavior. There was gold in them thar hyperlinks. “Can we bring the blogosphere back?” in 2026 sounds slightly like asking “Can we bring back the California Gold Rush?” in 1900. You can move to California and pan for gold. Gold still exists. You may even find some. But you can’t recreate the historical moment when somebody discovered that an enormous previously unknown deposit was sitting there and word had only just begun to spread.

The gold-rush people came to the blogosphere hoping something might happen to them. Blogging was only a means to a professional end. The people still out here twenty years later are the ones who discovered that they rather liked living in an abandoned mining camp after everybody else left. It’s a good life, if you like wide-open spaces, little excitement, and sparse conversation with the cacti, coyotes and tumbleweeds. But if you think a bunch of urban Substackers are going to give up their careers and move back out here, well, I have a deed to a mine I’d like to sell you.

Celebrate Yourselves, Sing Yourselves

By in foolosophy, socmed, writing No Comments

I’ve read Jacobs for many years. I don’t think I’m revealing any sensitive information when I say that he has made clear on many occasions that he has a problem with social media. Many people, myself included, can take it or leave it. They scroll a bit, maybe comment here or there, and then go back to everyday life and forget about it. Jacobs may start by saying “Just a brief scroll; just a couple comments,” but by the end of the evening, he’s blotto and in a holding cell after starting a brawl and kicking out the window of a police cruiser.

I don’t begrudge anyone his choices about how to manage his free time. I do feel a twinge of irritation when “I hate social media” morphs into “and that’s why we should all do this instead.” I’ve also made clear many times my distaste for social media. But I was around during the early blogosphere a quarter-century ago, and all the same pathologies were represented there too, if less concentrated. His beloved “IndieWeb” will be no different. Human beings are garbage wherever you find them, which is why I’m not in any hurry to herd them in this direction or that. They’re still going to behave the same way when you get them there. And thus, to my chagrin, I’m forced to agree with Ezra Klein (another product of that early blogosphere) — let people make their own choices, however poorly. Set a better example if you want, but leave your shepherd’s crook behind.

At first, I wondered if this proselytizing instinct was just a natural outgrowth of his evangelical background. But then it occurred to me that he is also a professional writer and an academic. What is one of the first rules we learned when doing serious, formal writing? To never use the word “I.” First-person writing is usually seen as overly subjective and self-indulgent, which is why it’s left to lowly bloggers. “I keep checking Twitter and it makes me miserable” can feel embarrassingly confessional, even narcissistic. “Social media destroys tranquility and habituates us to pointless conflict” sounds like cultural criticism. It has altitude. It places the writer above the phenomenon rather than inside it. If I say, “This thing has a peculiar hold over me,” I admit weakness, susceptibility, perhaps lack of control. If I say, “This technology is engineered to addict and deform human beings,” then my struggle becomes evidence of the enemy’s power rather than evidence of my particular vulnerability.

So now I lean toward the idea that this prohibition against first-person perspectives has unwittingly caused the plague of crusading busybodies. Denied the opportunity to do what they really want — to talk about themselves — they are forced to sublimate their desires into sociology and punditry. So let me contradict myself in the spirit of Whitman and call for a collective change in focus. Let’s put the “I” back in writing and see if the performative political grandstanding doesn’t fade away.

The Signal Has Gone Dead, All That’s Left Is Noise

By in ai, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, writing 1 Comment

Juliette Ryan:

I can fairly quickly spot a piece of AI-generated writing but I know my judgement is not infallible. This is why I support Substack’s decision to integrate AI detection into their platform, a decision that was met with great uproar amongst many writers. To me, the backlash reveals how far the virus has spread. The loudest objections weren’t about the detection itself but what it implies: that the machine did the thinking.

The gist of Ryan’s argument is that LLMs have dramatically lowered the cost of producing misinformation by giving it the camouflage of fluent prose. Before LLMs, producing a polished 1,500-word argument required somebody to possess at least a certain amount of verbal skill, time, or money. That did not make the argument true, but it imposed a production cost. Now someone who barely understands a subject can produce a plausible-looking essay about it in minutes. The old signal has become noisier. True enough. But earlier in the essay, she writes:

After all, to truly understand something, you need to be able to explain it. And to explain it, you need to have assimilated extensive knowledge and the ability to synthesise it — to recognise where and how to build bridges over that dense knowledge so that they can be walked by the reader. Before AI, fluent writing signalled that someone had laboured for hours trying to collapse three-dimensional thought into a two-dimensional stream of words that could convey that understanding to another person. Good writing meant good thinking. Or it used to.

Good writing =/= good thinking. They are different skills. I know intelligent people whose prose is stilted and clunky. I know English majors who are astonishingly dumb. Rhetorical fluency is the ability to smoothly join a premise to a conclusion. It tells you nothing about the validity of either. Writing can be clear without being good in the sense of true or accurate. We know this from something as small as the aphorism. Her own post illustrates this.

Leaving aside her blithe assumption that detectors like Pangram work as well as their marketing copy would have you believe, her entire “mind virus” metaphor assumes a reading environment that I simply don’t recognize:

AI has fooled a large population of online content creators into thinking they know what they truly think. Their superficially fluent output is then read by unsuspecting others, unknowingly simulating (possibly false) understanding in their own minds, and they pass it along with a cursory hit of the “share” button. And so the virus spreads this pseudo-understanding, infecting the minds of all who say they don’t care whether they’re reading AI-generated content.

Here she seems to suggest that no one ever questions anything they read. It’s like she assumes that the interaction begins with a piece of writing and ends with its first impression on the reader. But most writing that makes an impression on me stays with me and gets chewed on for a while. Eventually, some vague dissatisfaction from early on makes itself known as a coherent objection. It sounded good at first, but something just didn’t feel right. I mulled it over, and finally, the problem becomes obvious.

She also acts like the author’s pseudo-profundity, once established, remains. But let’s assume that someone has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes by using AI to cover up a weak thesis. Or perhaps the thesis is strong, but it’s not truly the author’s, because Claude supplied it. In either case, the solution is to follow up with pointed questions or criticisms, perhaps in live conversation. A person who truly doesn’t have command of the ideas will not be able to keep faking it. Eventually, you’ll notice the lack of true familiarity with the subject. We all know this from our days of giving book reports in front of the class. You always knew the kid who didn’t actually read the book, because he wasn’t capable of summarizing it or expanding upon it. (I may have even been that kid on one occasion in third grade; I know my subject from the inside, as it were.)

In both instances, she acts like first impressions are forever. Her model of the reader is strangely passive for someone arguing that people need to preserve active cognition. She wants authors to think strenuously, but readers apparently just absorb whatever washes over them. Yet reading itself can be a form of thinking. The reader can do the intellectual work the writer failed to do, which is exactly what is happening here. Her prose is fluent. The argument initially has shape. Then you keep turning it over, and the hidden assumptions start coming loose. The irony is that her essay is explicitly worried about fluent language creating the illusion of understanding, and “mind virus” is itself a fluent phrase that can create the illusion of understanding. It’s such a stupid, reductive way to describe what is going on in this context. It’s fine for polemic, but useless as analysis.

Online polemics

Sculptural Writing

By in ai, aphorisms, books, technology, writing No Comments

Machines are still only in their trial period. One day, perhaps, an electrophonic kaleidoscope will compose musical figures in their thousands — will invent whole series of rhythms and melodies. Man will have machines that create just as he will have machines for precision thinking — His role will be reduced to choosing. Combination factories.

The most intense feeling is only one combination among others.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

The standard complaint about large language models is that they will make writers sound alike, and perhaps eventually think alike. But Valéry’s prescient suggestion makes me wonder about another possibility. What if these machines do not merely automate an existing kind of writing? What if they also call forth a somewhat different skill in writers?

We ordinarily imagine writing in painterly terms. The writer confronts a blank surface and begins putting things onto it. A word, then a sentence, then a paragraph. The work accumulates. Even when we know perfectly well that revision will follow, our basic picture of authorship remains additive: there was nothing here, and now the writer has made something out of his inner resources and aesthetic vision.

An LLM makes possible a more sculptural way of working. Instead of confronting a blank page, the writer can begin with an excess of material. The machine can produce the boulder of text. The writer’s task is to decide what, if anything, is inside it. That sounds close to Valéry’s prediction that our role will be “reduced to choosing.” But choosing may be doing a lot of work there. A sculptor also “chooses.” This part stays; that part goes. This line needs to emerge; that mass is obscuring it. The finished form depends not on the ability to manufacture marble but on seeing possibilities in it that someone else would not see. Two sculptors can begin with approximately the same block and end with objects bearing no resemblance to one another.

Give two people the same serviceable paragraph from an LLM. One may read it and think it’s fine as is. The other notices immediately that the opening sentence is unnecessary, the metaphor in the middle is the only interesting thing there, the conclusion merely repeats the premise, and one odd phrase suggests a better direction for the whole piece. This would shift some of the emphasis in writing from generation toward discrimination. An LLM can give you ten openings before you have finished thinking about the first. It can propose twenty metaphors, five structures, three counterarguments, a dozen ways of phrasing the sentence you are stuck on. Under those conditions, producing another possibility is nearly worthless, but knowing which possibility is promising becomes more valuable. That sounds less like the traditional ideal of the writer and more like the work of an editor.

I haven’t experimented with this yet. I don’t know how it might go in practice. It probably would not go one single way for everybody. But this seems more interesting than treating AI-assisted writing solely as a question of whether the machine has “done the writing.” That formulation assumes we already know where the important part of writing resides. Well, maybe. Or maybe abundance changes where the difficulty lies. The blank page tests one set of capacities; the overflowing page may test another.

In a World of Machines, What Can I Do But to Serve

By in ai, the geist of the zeit, writing

Way back in the day, my mom had a part-time business typing up term papers and dissertations for university students. Well, I did say “way back in the day.” We’re talking about a time when grad students would come in with handwritten theses and manuscripts. They didn’t have their own typewriters, let alone word processors. And yes, I was alive to witness this. Phones were attached to walls and desks, restaurants had smoking sections, cars had paper maps in the glove box, and everything was sepia-toned.

Point is, I’m considering resurrecting the old family business with a modern twist. In ye olden times, students supplied messy handwritten intellectual labor and paid somebody with technological/clerical expertise to turn it into professional-looking typescript. Today they could supply immaculate machine typescript and pay somebody with humanistic expertise to put the mess back in. (I also bet “humanism” will start to acquire new connotations in the age of AI.)

Why not? We have apparently reached the stage where software companies sell machines that generate prose, other software companies sell machines that detect the generated prose, and still other software companies sell machines that make the generated prose look less generated. At some point the cheapest solution will be to hire a human who grew up in a sepia-toned world.

It Seems Strange How We Used to Wait For Letters to Arrive

By in ai, the statusphere, writing

Giles Crouch:

When a human has written something, as I am writing this now, there is a cost (I’ve got a ton of other things on my to-do list), and we inherently know this cost. Just as we are, when reading something, paying a cost with our attention. We like good writers, something I am striving for, because they have thought something through, done the research, crafted and organized the story. If they are good at it, we like that. It’s why we have the Pulitzer Prize or in Canada, the Giller Prize. Most nations have them, or a lucky writer becomes a best-selling author. We are rewarding the cost of their attention to the writing because we are happy to pay the cost of reading their works. Part of Mauss’ gift economy idea.

The labor theory of value was dubious enough when economists used it. I see no reason to resurrect it as a theory of writing.

Years ago, the Lady of the House and I did some freelance corporate copywriting. This was the golden age of SEO, when every business needed a steady supply of “fresh content.” The work was excruciating for me because there was absolutely nothing that needed to be said. It was the ne plus ultra of bullshitting. Good spelling and grammar were important, but every other rule of writing as I understood it was irrelevant. I was simply required to manufacture several hundred new words about an old subject. There was no fact-checking. Hell, there was no audience but Google itself. We were basically just offering generic words up in mass sacrifice to the inscrutable algorithm so that anyone Googling “how do u use dental floss” would find a post for Dr. Yankem’s dentistry services somewhere in the first few results. I labored mightily, but the resulting prose did not thereby become meaningful.

Crouch’s argument about AI writing rests heavily on this connection between effort and value. Good writing costs the writer attention; the reader reciprocates by spending attention on it. AI supposedly disrupts this “gift economy,” a concept he borrows from anthropology, because the machine allows the writer to avoid paying his share. But effort is a fact about production, not a measure of value. We don’t know how many hours a Pulitzer winner spent on a particular chapter. We don’t reduce our estimate of a novelist after learning that he writes quickly; we might even see him as a natural genius. Conversely, my old SEO copy could absorb hours of my attention without becoming worth anyone’s time.

Crouch also describes an “uncanny cognitive valley”: AI prose feels almost human but somehow off, and once readers recognize its tells they resent the writer for not offering them genuine attention. I have heard this complaint before. Writers used to complain about email, text messages, and social media in the same way. In 2010 I wrote about people who called online communication cold and impersonal. My explanation was less exotic: most people are simply unskilled writers. Plenty of intelligent, interesting people are poor at turning their thoughts into nuanced sentences that capture the flavor of their personalities. Their emails were brief, awkward, misspelled, utilitarian. The problem wasn’t email; they just weren’t good at prose.

Sixteen years later, the same people have better equipment. An LLM can remove misspellings, fix grammar, supply transitions and produce sophisticated-looking sentences. What it cannot automatically supply is judgment. A weak writer may not recognize that a metaphor is awkward, a paragraph redundant, an argument too neat, a phrase unlike anything he would actually say. He now produces something different from the clumsy email of 2010: polished generic prose. The underlying problem is the same. What Crouch identifies as machine uncanniness may only be fluency without discrimination. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the animated tool has gotten out of the pedestrian writer’s control. He isn’t skilled enough to shape and direct the output, and the reader can tell: “This doesn’t sound like him.” People who aren’t good at shaping their own thoughts are also not good at shaping prompted thoughts. It’s not because an LLM inherently makes it impossible to produce good prose, it’s that most people aren’t good at it even if an LLM gives them a leg up.

So, if we don’t need elaborate theories from anthropology to explain the extraordinary agitation about AI writing, what would suffice? A cold look at basic human psychology seems good enough to me.

People are conservative in the elementary psychological sense: radical novelty makes us uneasy. Most of us also lack the time or inclination to investigate complicated new subjects deeply, so we glean a basic sense of what our peer groups think and conform to that. Add a nonstop barrage of posts and articles telling us that AI will steal our jobs, drink all our water, eat all our books and perhaps terminate civilization, and a certain amount of reflexive hostility is unsurprising.

But writers, academics, journalists, editors, and other people whose self-conception is bound up with verbal facility have an additional problem. Fluent prose has long functioned as a status signal. It suggested education, wide reading, practice, professional competence, cultivation. You could often locate somebody roughly within a cultural hierarchy after reading a page of his writing.

AI has has abruptly cheapened a form of cultural capital, and the people who accumulated that capital are understandably unhappy. Someone who once advertised his limitations through awkward sentences can now produce something resembling educated professional prose in seconds. The old distinction has become harder to see at a glance. Hence the sudden emotionally-charged obsession with restoring provenance: AI detectors, mandatory disclosures, watermarks, “human-written” certifications, threats to stop reading anyone caught using the machinery. If the clothes no longer reliably identify rank, somebody has to start checking invitations at the door. It’s a linguistic version of sumptuary-law anxiety: “Wait, how am I supposed to know who is entitled to wear the velvet now?”

Harmony’s Gone, the Rhythm Remains

By in ai, aphorisms, religion, writing

An obvious first question: which religion? (Orthodox Christianity, in her case; condolences to all you heretics.) An obvious follow-up question: what about the excluded middle option, that we decided “religion” was useful despite considering and rejecting the possibility of its truth?

And the possibilities aren’t limited to “true” and “useful-but-false” anyway. A religious tradition might contain some true psychological observations, some effective social technology, some beautiful mythology, some destructive doctrines, some historical falsehoods, and some metaphysical claims whose truth remains undecidable. “Is religion true?” is absurdly underspecified.

As much as I love aphorisms, epigrams, etc. as a form, I can never fully relax around them. Their rhetorical tidiness, which makes them so attractively quotable, also makes it easy to overlook all the flaws. We can be swayed by the seemingly-self-contained presentation to think that the matter has been settled. In reality, the compact saying might be a little Procrustean bed, with all the important details littered on the floor around it.

Even there, though, it’s too broad to complain about “aphorisms, epigrams, etc.” There are multitudes of good and bad examples. I’m mainly just inherently suspicious of rhetorical confectionery. Certain formulations arrive pre-glazed. The antithesis is perfect, the cadence closes neatly, the conceptual roles are cleanly assigned, and the reader gets the little reward of understanding before he has actually had to understand very much. The sentence gives the sensation of intellectual completion. When you’re younger, the sweetness itself can register as intensity: Christ, what a line! After enough reading, you start tasting the corn syrup, and your aging taste buds revolt.

A useful distinction might be between compression and reduction. A good aphorism is compressed: there’s more in it than the sentence can explicitly contain, and unpacking it makes it stronger. A bad one is reduced: inconvenient possibilities have been removed so that the sentence can achieve its pleasing shape. Unpacking it makes it weaker because you discover that the apparent depth depended on nobody asking obvious questions.

We have acquired this strange retrospective suspicion that polished symmetry is somehow an artifact of generative AI, when humans have been mass-producing parallelism, antithesis, metaphor, repetition, and strategic omission for centuries. No transformer required. All you need is an ear for cadence and a willingness to let the melody carry you along.

The old anti-sophistic suspicion is that persuasive form can become detachable from truth, belief, or character. Give the skilled rhetorician a proposition and he can make it sound weighty; give him its opposite and, with enough ingenuity, he can make that sound weighty too. The listener experiences the force of conviction without knowing whether any conviction exists behind the performance. This may explain some of the anxiety around LLMs. They demonstrate clearly that the external signs we associate with thought — fluency, balance, confidence, elegant qualification, apt metaphor — can be generated without anything resembling human conviction behind them. But that revelation cuts backward too. We were already too willing to treat those signs as evidence of depth when humans produced them. The clankers merely industrialized a snack food humans had been making at home for millennia.

You Scurvy Scalawag!

By in ai, calvin and hobbes, jests japes jokes jollies, writing

I don’t want to make bruising fun of this poor girl. It’s mainly just sad that she seems to feel she’s committed a mortal sin against the sacred craft by having AI do basic proofreading. But it does make me genuinely chuckle to see her itemize by nationality the fifty-three people she “deceived” like casualties in an international incident. You can practically hear the cello as the map slowly darkens country by country. If she had simply written, “I realized my ‘100% no AI’ statement was technically inaccurate because I used ChatGPT to proofread one post, so I’ve changed it,” there would be nothing to laugh at. Instead she has imagined a blast radius. Fifty-three people walked innocently into her website, believing themselves to be in a pristine human-text environment, and emerged with invisible synthetic shrapnel lodged in their souls. Even funnier, the odds are good that they were mostly search crawlers, link-preview bots, or other automated scanners rather than a solitary Dane sitting thoughtfully by a window, coffee cooling beside him, devastated to discover that the author had used ChatGPT for proofreading. It may instead have been a server in Copenhagen requesting the page for 0.14 seconds.

But as I said, it’s more sad than anything. The “contamination” model has overpowered an individual conscience. Grammarly? Word’s grammar checker? The red spelling squiggle? An editor who changes a comma? Those are presumably compatible with “100% me.” But ChatGPT correcting precisely the same comma introduces some tiny metaphysical admixture of Not-Me. This is how you know a purity regime has really taken hold: you no longer need inquisitors. The prosecution is internalized. Congratulations to all the self-appointed Torquemadas of the online world; your fanatical efforts have made a difference.

Antonette, dear, you’ve done nothing wrong. If I can offer one bit of advice, it would be not to make grand oaths about how you will or won’t write, especially if you’re new at it. Just practice, experiment, and enjoy yourself. Use AI or don’t; that choice is yours, and you’re free to change your mind tomorrow. But don’t let an imaginary audience of suspicious readers turn writing into a purity test, with every new tool or bit of assistance treated as a possible moral failure. You’re learning how you want to work. Give yourself room to find out.

Come Back, Signal, Fill This Void

By in ai, art, foolosophy, music, writing

Me, I’ve been existentially depressed ever since people stopped making music purely by vocalizations and started using artificial “instruments” that don’t exist in nature. It’s all been downhill ever since clicks, hoots and whistles. An animal gut stretched across a resonating box?  Suspicious. Somewhere in the Upper Paleolithic a cultural critic looked at the first bone flute and thought, So this is it. We’re outsourcing the human larynx. That first flute was Big Tech’s war on hooting.

Seriously, though, he seems to feel that either humans “produce” culture or machines do. The actual situation is already spreading itself across a huge continuum. Someone can type “write me a song about heartbreak” and upload the first result. Someone else can write the melody and lyrics, use AI to generate an orchestration, reject half of it, rewrite the rest, sing the vocal himself, and mix the recording conventionally. Somewhere else a musician may improvise against an AI-generated part and discover a musical idea neither input contained straightforwardly beforehand. Which of these is “no longer produced by human beings”?

There is also something revealing about the nostalgia implicit in that phrase. Produced how? Apparently there exists some blessed technological moment at which human cultural production was sufficiently pure. Was electric amplification all right? Photography? Word processors? Photoshop? Sampling? MIDI? Spellcheck? Search engines? Dictionaries? Editors? Session musicians? Ghostwriters? At some point the natural human apparently fell from grace and began cheating with artifacts. AI may be an unusually powerful and strange extension, perhaps strange enough eventually to require new ideas about authorship. But “artificial means entered the creative process, therefore the result ceased to be human” would condemn an astonishing amount of civilization.

A musician may say, “I invented this chord progression,” but in one sense the progression was always latent in the combinatorial space of tonal music. What he really did was discover it as meaningful for this song. Likewise, an aphorist does not invent the English language or even all the conceptual relations inside a sentence; he notices that certain words, placed together under the pressure of a certain thought, suddenly become exact.

AI can widen the field of discovery enormously. But widening the field does not tell you what to notice. If ten people ask for “an unusual chord for the bridge,” they may receive overlapping suggestions. But they will not hear those suggestions identically. One person hears pretension. Another hears melancholy. Another hears the exact pivot the song needed. Another thinks, “Interesting, but if I lower the third and move the bass note…” The machine output becomes raw material the instant it encounters judgment.

The creative act often consists in selection under pressure from a particular project. The musician hears or encounters something and thinks: that. There. Which means the genealogy of the input is often secondary. He might find the chord in a theory book, steal it from Coltrane, stumble into it by mis-fingering, hear an HVAC unit hum a strange interval, or have an AI propose it. Those routes differ historically and perhaps ethically, but they don’t necessarily differ in the part that matters artistically: the musician perceives a fit between an external possibility and an internal intention. The refrigerator compressor making a weird noise is not “collaborating” in any ordinary sense. It has no conception of the song. Yet it can still trigger something decisive because the artist already has a receptivity shaped by the work in progress. A thousand other people hear the same noise and hear only an appliance. One person hears the missing texture in the bridge. That seems very close to what inspiration has always been. The world throws off material constantly; the artist’s mind is a selective field.

AI may be to intellectual and artistic work what the Industrial Revolution was to material production: not the abolition of human agency, but the mechanization of tasks that once consumed large amounts of it. A writer once had to search books, wait on memory, or labor through dozens of possibilities to find the right metaphor or rhetorical device; a musician might spend hours experimenting before stumbling onto the right chord or texture. AI industrializes that search. It can generate possibilities at machine speed and scale, just as machinery multiplied the output of physical labor. That does cheapen some forms of accomplishment and may displace particular skills, but it also shifts the scarce resource elsewhere — from producing possibilities to judging, selecting, combining, and directing them.

The deeper continuity is human temperament. Industrial machinery did not make craftsmanship, ambition, laziness, ingenuity, or mediocrity disappear; it gave them new conditions in which to operate. AI will likely do the same. Some people will use it to avoid effort and become little more than approval buttons. Others will use its abundance as cognitive leverage: more examples, more counterarguments, more metaphors, more experiments, more practice — and thereby enlarge their own capacities. The machine can make fifty suggestions; it still cannot decide which one belongs in this particular human project, or why the project should exist at all.

A chainsaw and a violin are both elaborate artificial extensions of the body, but their social and psychological effects are completely different. A typewriter, a search engine, and an LLM all intervene between thought and finished prose, but they intervene in different places and alter different capacities. So the useful questions become more local: What does this tool make easier? What does it make unnecessary? What skills does it cultivate or atrophy? What new possibilities does it create? What dependencies does it introduce? What kinds of people and institutions tend to form around it? That’s much more difficult than saying “technology went too far after X,” because you lose the clean moral geography. You can no longer live conceptually in the Good Village on one side of the river while the Satanic Mills smoke on the other.

Claudemarking, Claudewashing and Nudereading

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, the feeling of absurdity, writing

Join me, if you will, as I bow my head and give thanks to the trickster god who loves us and wants us to be amused. What’s that? You’re agnostic? Well, let’s see…

I wonder how long it will be until some enterprising coder—oh, really? That was fast.

Let’s sum this up. Claude is beginning to watermark text, and others seem likely to follow. I don’t know if this has an official name yet, so let’s call it “Claudemarking.” If you copy and paste text that has been “processed” by an LLM, it will bear the devil’s clanker’s mark, which others will be able to detect. But the human entrepreneurial spirit being what it is, this will immediately be accompanied by means for removing said clanker’s mark. Let’s call this “Claudewashing” (which will quickly become an epithet for those suspected of evading justice). Inevitably, an online service will appear with a name like “HumanizeMyClaude.ai” and a landing page showing a smiling undergraduate giving a thumbs-up. Philosophically, this is funny because if a mark can be stripped, absence proves nothing. If a mark survives editing, presence proves only that the text passed through Claude at some point. That leaves us exactly where we were: arguing about what “authorship” means, except now with cryptographic confetti scattered over the argument.

So we already have Pangram; soon we’ll have Claudemarking. I’m usually not one for predictions, but I’m going to take a stab at the likely next innovation in digital prophylactics: SynthScreen. I envision this being a new version of that wearable tech that has never quite caught on, like smart glasses. SynthScreen would have a full Iron Man HUD for prose. You’re reading an essay and little red brackets suddenly snap around a sentence:

SYNTHETIC-LIKELIHOOD EVENT DETECTED
Triadic construction: 87%
Em-dash residue: elevated
Metaphorical symmetry: abnormal
Recommended action: discontinue reading and unsubscribe immediately

Naturally there would be different protection levels. Normal web browsing requires only the glasses. High-risk environments — corporate LinkedIn, university DEI statements, Substack during a discourse outbreak — require full Narrative-95 filtration. Then comes the social etiquette. Someone sends you an article and you ask, “Was this SynthScreened?” They say no. “You mean you just sent me raw text?” “They told me it was human-written.” “Did you see the test results?” “No, but I trust them.” “Jesus Christ, man!” Offices establish designated clean-reading zones. Libraries put signs on the door: THIS FACILITY MAINTAINS A LOW-SYNTHETIC ENVIRONMENT.

Eventually, all this fussy hypochondria around reading as a biosecurity procedure produces a counterculture that glamorizes risk and danger. A new (old) practice emerges. Let’s call this “nudereading.” People. Text. No intermediaries. You just read and use your judgment, like they did in the Before Times. Underground book clubs meet without scanners. A dissident magazine announces that it accepts submissions in whatever state they arrive and refuses all provenance testing. I’m picturing scenes like Dead Poets Society, where the students slip away to a cave in the night to read and chant text with no heed of provenance. The elders are scandalized. “You don’t know where that text has been!” “Do you have any idea how many models may have touched it?” “Your cousin’s friend’s co-worker nuderead one newsletter in 2029 and never recovered!” School assemblies feature reformed clankertext addicts describing how it began innocently with a few Claude sonnets and ended with them reading anonymous machine-generated erotica in unlicensed prompt dens. Clankertext culture takes on the most subversive connotations, like gay bathhouse culture of past decades. Soon, somebody, probably the Atlantic, publishes a stern public-health article entitled “The Dangerous Romanticization of Unprotected Reading.”

Then you get the full subculture apparatus: clandestine reading rooms, coded symbols, pseudonyms, bars where the house rule is that nobody asks whether the prose is human or machine. “Don’t provenance me” becomes an assertion of privacy. People wear pendants shaped like em dashes. There are digital zines with manifestos about textual autonomy and the right to unreadability of origin. Meanwhile clankertext itself develops an aesthetic of deliberate excess. Why pretend to be human? Let the machine write six-page sentences, hallucinated metaphors, impossible registers, prose no sane MFA workshop would permit. What began as stigma becomes style. “Human-passing” is now the insult. Young writers sneer at clean, tasteful, provenance-certified prose as “meatsack realism.” You get the idea.

Anyway, the “effort-to-result” ratio of all this bot-sniffing reminds me of nothing so much as watching a dog chase its tail. I think I previously referred to this farce as an arms race, but if so, I retract that. An arms race at least suggests two sides accumulating genuinely greater capabilities. Here a lot of the motion is just circular, like the dog and his tail. We devise a technique for identifying synthetic prose; therefore we create a technique for making synthetic prose harder to identify; therefore we devise a technique for identifying prose that has been deliberately made harder to identify, and round and round we go…until somebody finally publishes a piece in the Atlantic titled, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nudereading,” culminating in a revelation: “I had spent years trying to determine whether the intelligence behind a sentence was artificial. It had never occurred to me to ask whether the sentence was intelligent.” Cue the podcast appearances, and an eventual book titled Raw: Reclaiming Reading in the Age of Synthetic Text.

So, then, as I was saying: Would you like to join me in a prayer of thanks?

The Anxiety of Artificial Influence

By in ai, jests japes jokes jollies, the feeling of absurdity, writing

In the future, the author will be issued a transparent typewriter in a bare room. Every keystroke will be time-stamped. Wastebaskets will be searched for unauthorized phrases. A court-appointed observer will certify that the writer stared helplessly at the wall for the requisite number of hours before producing each paragraph. Any sentence arriving too fluently will be flagged for enhanced interrogation.

Publishers will require a complete chain of literary custody: notebooks, deleted drafts, browser history, coffee receipts, testimony from spouses who heard the author muttering in the shower. “We loved the novel,” the editor will say, “but unfortunately there is an unexplained twenty-three-minute interval during the composition of Chapter Nine.”

If any anomaly appears, the author will lie immobilized in an fMRI machine while a panel of forensic neurologists watches each sentence form in real time. Any suspiciously rapid activation in the metaphor cortex will trigger an alarm. “Subject appears to have generated the rain worried the windows without the customary forty minutes of anguish. Possible neural autocomplete.”

But even that will not settle matters. The chip may have been removed before the scan. The LLM may have planted ideas months earlier. The author may have absorbed machine-generated phrasing without conscious knowledge. Soon publishers will require a full cognitive provenance extending back to childhood: school essays, dreams, overheard conversations, every book ever read, and sworn testimony from the author’s mother that he was already making up stories before ChatGPT existed.

Finally, writers will have to be bred in controlled facilities, raised without internet access, and released into sterile composition chambers under the supervision of the Authors Guild and three independent neurologists. Until then, only one author can meet the standard:

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