Well written Santi. This was a far better use of my time than listening to that conversation with Tyler (which as a finite being I did not do). From your essay, I gather he's too utilitarian to be much good for anything. I'd rather stick to my search to find meaning than spend time writing everything off as technically meaningless, but perhaps useful.
On the other hand if there's a blade-runner style pogrom for hunting AI in the future, I might sign up for that, and maybe even write a poem about it.
I loved this. I loved reading about your sentimental attachment to Pablo Neruda. I loved reading about you trolling your aunt with Pablo Neruda. I loved reading your tongue-in-cheek repentance for being an “insensitive Catholic provocateur.” And no, this would not have been just as good if an LLM wrote it.
There’s something fundamentally solipsistic about acting as though the main thing that matters about other people is their effect on you. We’re all prone to that sort of self-centredness at times, but we’d lose something pretty big if we lost the possibility of actually caring that, as Iris Murdoch puts it, “something outside of ourselves is real.” Personally, I wouldn’t be succumbing to doomerism on that count just yet.
I think the last part is key: the moment AI writes all poetry is the moment we lose any desire to read poetry. There is no static “poetry-consumer” out there who wants more “poetry content”; it’s more dialectic, the poetry readers and the poetry writers.
We tend to automate things we want more of—things we value. But it’s not always guaranteed that “value” can survive automation. Value can be hard to isolate: something derived from the process of creating something rather than the output of that process.
Loved this. Enjoyed the conversation with Tyler immensely although I disagree with him about many things. I too was disheartened by his comments about AI Neruda. I think he fails to recognise that art has value beyond its effect on those who consume it. Our society is poorer in so many ways without the presence of those who distil their unique experiences into art. Neruda was a man who lived in the world, had a family, friends and colleagues. He left ripples in this life no GPT could ever hope to emulate.
I’m skeptical of Tyler’s claim that most people in the future won’t care whether a work has a human author or is AI-generated because it seems like most people have a pretty good sense that authorship matters now. Lots of people read and enjoy fan fiction, but I’ve never met a fan fiction reader who doesn’t see fan-authored work as different in an important way from canon work by the original author. Similarly, if a person came along and had absolutely mastered Milton’s style, steeped herself in his cultural context, deeply understood his thematic fixations, and then announced she had written a new “Milton” work, people might think it’s interesting but I doubt anyone would claim it’s effectively the same as an actual Milton work (maybe it would be better! Regardless people seem to assign importance to the author regardless of whether they’ve grown up with fan fiction). I’m not really sure why reactions would be different for AI-generated work, though I allow the possibility that my anecdotes about fan fiction readers are limited and perhaps not generalizable to a population level.
Well written Santi. This was a far better use of my time than listening to that conversation with Tyler (which as a finite being I did not do). From your essay, I gather he's too utilitarian to be much good for anything. I'd rather stick to my search to find meaning than spend time writing everything off as technically meaningless, but perhaps useful.
On the other hand if there's a blade-runner style pogrom for hunting AI in the future, I might sign up for that, and maybe even write a poem about it.
Unchartered territory
I loved this. I loved reading about your sentimental attachment to Pablo Neruda. I loved reading about you trolling your aunt with Pablo Neruda. I loved reading your tongue-in-cheek repentance for being an “insensitive Catholic provocateur.” And no, this would not have been just as good if an LLM wrote it.
There’s something fundamentally solipsistic about acting as though the main thing that matters about other people is their effect on you. We’re all prone to that sort of self-centredness at times, but we’d lose something pretty big if we lost the possibility of actually caring that, as Iris Murdoch puts it, “something outside of ourselves is real.” Personally, I wouldn’t be succumbing to doomerism on that count just yet.
I think the last part is key: the moment AI writes all poetry is the moment we lose any desire to read poetry. There is no static “poetry-consumer” out there who wants more “poetry content”; it’s more dialectic, the poetry readers and the poetry writers.
We tend to automate things we want more of—things we value. But it’s not always guaranteed that “value” can survive automation. Value can be hard to isolate: something derived from the process of creating something rather than the output of that process.
We see AI everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
Loved this. Enjoyed the conversation with Tyler immensely although I disagree with him about many things. I too was disheartened by his comments about AI Neruda. I think he fails to recognise that art has value beyond its effect on those who consume it. Our society is poorer in so many ways without the presence of those who distil their unique experiences into art. Neruda was a man who lived in the world, had a family, friends and colleagues. He left ripples in this life no GPT could ever hope to emulate.
I’m skeptical of Tyler’s claim that most people in the future won’t care whether a work has a human author or is AI-generated because it seems like most people have a pretty good sense that authorship matters now. Lots of people read and enjoy fan fiction, but I’ve never met a fan fiction reader who doesn’t see fan-authored work as different in an important way from canon work by the original author. Similarly, if a person came along and had absolutely mastered Milton’s style, steeped herself in his cultural context, deeply understood his thematic fixations, and then announced she had written a new “Milton” work, people might think it’s interesting but I doubt anyone would claim it’s effectively the same as an actual Milton work (maybe it would be better! Regardless people seem to assign importance to the author regardless of whether they’ve grown up with fan fiction). I’m not really sure why reactions would be different for AI-generated work, though I allow the possibility that my anecdotes about fan fiction readers are limited and perhaps not generalizable to a population level.
Sanguino ergo sum.
Soon all we will have is our suffering.
There’s a 2000yo app for that.
Still works.