brettworks

• An article on fake AI bands.

“The internet has fragmented and flattened subcultures. The Velvet Sundown’s puppeteers present the band’s soft pastiche of genres—psychedelic, folk, indie—as sophisticated fusion, but of course it’s nothing more than a careless smear of stylistic averages. Psychedelic, folk, and indie rock each in their own way have something to say, musically and lyrically—about musical convention, spirituality, introspection, or social and political circumstances. The Velvet Sundown doesn’t seem to care about any of those things.”

“Anonymous and mild sensibilities have currency because today’s music—whether created and curated by humans or machines—is so often used to make people feel nothing instead of something.”

“This music—perhaps most music now—is not for dancing or even for airports; it’s for the void.”

• An essay about AI’s effects on writing.

“As ChatGPT begins to sound more human, will we reconsider what it means to sound like ourselves?”

“Education, particularly in the humanities, rests on a belief that, alongside the practical things students might retain, some arcane idea mentioned in passing might take root in their mind, blossoming years in the future. A.I. allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human. I often tell my students that this is the last time in their lives that someone will have to read something they write, so they might as well tell me what they actually think.”

• An essay on AI’s effects on reading.

“I can’t help wondering if the intrinsic integrity of writing might prove to be less powerful than it seems. There was a time when it was hard to imagine that whole songs might someday be composed around, or of, samples; today, sampling is unremarkable, and we perceive the fluidity of musical production as a feature, not a bug. Is it such a stretch to imagine remix culture coming to reading? Which of the many versions of New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ is the real one? Does it matter, as long as you love the song?”

• Another essay on AI’s effects on writing.

“I’ve spent decades writing and editing; I know the feeling — of reward and hard-won clarity — that writing produces for me. But if you never build those muscles, will you grasp what’s missing when an L.L.M. delivers a chirpy but shallow reply? What happens to students who’ve never experienced the reward of pressing toward an elusive thought that yields itself in clear syntax?”

“One of the real challenges here is the way that A.I. undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from that.”

“What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work. I am a writer because I know of no art form or technology more capable than the book of expanding my sense of what it means to be alive.”

“Will the wide-scale adoption of A.I. produce a flatlining of thought, where there was once the electricity of creativity? It is a little bit too easy to imagine that in a world of outsourced fluency, we might end up doing less and less by ourselves, while believing we’ve become more and more capable.”

“When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I’ve stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning — or insight — possible.”