brettworks

• An essay on AI, music, and the demand for the human touch.

“Echoing AI commentary today, some musicians viewed the player piano as not just replicating human playing, but exceeding it. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky explained that he wrote pieces specifically for the machines because ‘there are tone combinations beyond my ten fingers,’ and argued that ‘there is a new polyphonic truth in the player-piano … There are new possibilities. It is something more.’”

“How could humans possibly compete? Yet today you are more likely to encounter a piano player than a player piano, despite the job being successfully automated a very long time ago. The automatons have been relegated to museums and the rare curiosity. Pianists can be found any night of the week in hotel lobbies, Italian restaurants, and concert halls.”

• An essay on how writing skill eludes AI.

“When a practiced human writer reaches for a particular turn of phrase, they aren’t aiming for some single standard of great writing. Rather, the best metaphors come from the author’s specific blend of experiences or expertise. A writer’s diction, their citations, and the stories they share all reflect a singular, irreplicable perspective. Authorial voice emerges from the specificity of a life.”

“The models—although technically proficient and grammatically pristine—cannot live, cannot feel, cannot smell, cannot taste, cannot sense. They cannot spill raw emotions onto the page, or place abstract concepts in rich physical settings. Close readers of AI writing will notice that the metaphors are uncanny: LLMs assign weekdays tastes and give mirrors seams. They generally seem terrified of biology: They do not like to speak, even metaphorically, about blood and sex and death. Their output lacks stakes, as a creative-writing instructor might say.”

• An essay on AI and taste.

“Taste is not about what you like. It’s about what you’ve seen. It comes from studying great systems, watching bad ideas fail, understanding where complexity accumulates, knowing which shortcuts age badly, and internalizing what users actually experience. Taste is judgment compressed by time.”