brettworks

• An essay by L.M. Sacasas on how AI is a system, not a tool.

“AI is not a tool in this sense, it is an environment which envelops the user and works on us from the inside out while we naively think that we remain unchanged by our use so long as we are using it carefully and intentionally. The care and intentionality is beside the point, and our confidence in such vigilance probably works against us in the long run.”

“I have been playing with the idea that one way of framing AI is as a denial-of-service attack on the human psyche. Although this particular observation has less to do with how we use AI than how it is used on us.”

“…the best response to emerging technologies, perhaps especially AI, is not media literacy in a cognitivist mode. Rather, what is required is the training of our perception in an ascetical mode.”

“…we can stand over a tool, as it were, but we cannot stand outside of a system. The system is an environment rather than a singular artifact. And what is at issue is not simply what we are able to do or not to do, nor even what can be done to us. What is most urgently at issue is our perception.”

“We submit ourselves to fantastic degradations of image and sound consumption in order to anesthetize the pain resulting from having lost reality” (Ivan Illich).

• An essay by Adam Kirsch on AI’s didacticism.

“An LLM reflects our expectations back to us, not because it wants to please us—it doesn’t have wants of any kind—but because it produces new text by reproducing patterns it finds in existing texts. The lessons that ChatGPT’s stories taught me—listen to others; don’t give in to fear; guard your independence—are banal because they are the kind of thing human beings say to one another all the time.”

“…when we encounter something genuinely new—an artistic style, an idea, a way of looking at the world—our first reaction tends to be annoyance. Marcel Proust described this phenomenon: ‘As anything new must first do away with the stereotype we are so used to that we have come to see it as reality itself, any new style of conversation, just like any originality in painting or music, will always seem convoluted and wearisome.’”

“A great creative writer is someone who uses language in new ways to communicate new kinds of experiences—who replaces stereotype with reality, as Proust put it. LLMs are incapable of doing this, because they have no access to an experience or a reality that lies outside of language. It’s conventions all the way down.”

• An essay by Clare Bucknell on Vermeer’s art.

“Vermeer’s pictures are often observed to harbor spiritual meanings as well as material ones…”

“Take The Music Lesson, a study of a young woman playing the virginal, closely watched by a gentleman, which Graham-Dixon reads as a depiction of Collegiants chastely performing and singing psalms. The playing of music in seventeenth-century genre paintings often suggests sensuality and pleasure of an easy, familiar kind. But to my eye, this picture’s major quality is tension. There is tension in the orthogonal lines of the window frames and wall on the left; tension in the sharply accelerated perspective (you have the sensation that the background, where the woman and man stand, is rushing at you very fast); tension in the sharp contours and contrasts of the tiled floor; tension in the battery of objects—table, tapestry, chair, viola da gamba, salver, jug—that obstructs our view of the human interaction; tension in the curl of the man’s fingers around the top of his cane; tension in the back of the woman’s neck and in her shoulders. Their relationship is private—we are privy to the woman’s gaze only indirectly, by means of the angled mirror above her (another source of tension in the picture)—but it also seems inscrutable even to them, or still in the process of being worked out. There is a sense, as there often is in Vermeer, that they are in a before-moment: something is about to happen.”