brettworks

• An article about interacting with AI conversation agents.

“Other modern sciences have constrained themselves in accordance with an emerging code of ethics. There are weapons that physicists have sworn not to build, experiments biologists have agreed not to conduct. Nothing holds back computer scientists from developing talking machines that pretend to be humans.”

• An article on ChatGPT’s writing style.

“When I thought about the psychological experience of writing, I began to see the value of the tool. ChatGPT was not generating professional prose all at once, but it was providing starting points: interesting research ideas to explore; mediocre paragraphs that might, with sufficient editing, become usable. For all its inefficiencies, this indirect approach did feel easier than staring at a blank page; ‘talking’ to the chatbot about the article was more fun than toiling in quiet isolation. In the long run, I wasn’t saving time: I still needed to look up facts and write sentences in my own voice. But my exchanges seemed to reduce the maximum mental effort demanded of me.

‘Not all text is either human-authored or synthetic,’ Alan M. Knowles, a researcher who studies human-A.I. interactions, recently wrote in the journal Computers and Composition. ‘These are both meaningful categories that should not be discarded, but they are insufficient for discussing how writers use GenAI in practice.’ Knowles describes the collaboration between writers and A.I. as ‘rhetorical load sharing.’ A.I. isn’t writing on our behalf, but neither is it merely supporting us while we write from scratch; it sits somewhere in between.”

• An article about Brian Eno’s music production approach.

“Like Rilke, Eno thinks of music in terms of landscape; he might expand the space of his composition by adding low and high elements—wind and birds, metaphorically speaking—that also change over time. The idea is that the music isn’t finished. It will continue growing without him. He is the person who puts the art work into motion, but he isn’t at its center, and he isn’t responsible for every detail of what it becomes. He pushes it out from the dock and lets it find its own way.”

• A video about speed, balance, coordination, focus, and fearlessness: