brettworks

• An essay on the prehistory of AI slop.

“text produced by large language models, however remarkable, sophisticated, and even occasionally wondrous, is derivative, average, predictable. It is language without a mind. But is that even language?”

“There’s nothing wrong with nonsense. But it’s not always poetry. And mistaking one for the other is another legacy of how the Cold War foreshortened the humanistic possibilities of the intellectual revolution of the past eighty years—a revolution that has, miraculously, allowed people to communicate with machines using human languages. Shouldn’t this be one of the most exciting times in history to be studying language, literature, and literary theory?”

“Something big is happening, something fascinating: we can talk to machines […] The contention is that something big is happening to us, that someone else, something else, is writing the plot. But shouldn’t we be writing it? Because, so far, that plot is slop.”

• An essay on a lo-fi rebellion against AI.

“What these creations have in common are elements of deliberate casualness, accident, even confusion—qualities that an A.I. tool, trying to satisfy users with clean efficiency, would typically avoid.”

• An essay on the attention economy and anxiety.

“The attention economy’s subsumption of the conventional economy happened so rapidly that many people may only just now be realizing that they’re being farmed.”

“Is it any wonder that so many people are so anxious, so restless, so frustrated about attention these days? The queasiness one feels after a fleeting hour of scrolling could be from a sense of soiled virtue, from mental exhaustion, or from a much more American consternation: the awareness, even if only subconscious, of having sold oneself cheap.”