“In music, as elsewhere, curatorial skill may grow more valuable, along with the ability to write a creative A.I. prompt. (If this sounds to you like a musical dystopia, then you can imagine how Sousa would have felt if he’d learned that d.j.s would eventually conquer the world.) Yet outmoded musical expectations have a way of sticking around: listeners still love the sense that their favorite performers are working hard for them. And so anyone who manages to reliably generate popular A.I. songs will be incentivized to act like a musician—to go out and put on some kind of performance, giving audiences a live version of music that was canned to begin with.”
• An essay on Anthropic’s book scanning project.
“The boundaries of the book (e.g., its covers and materiality, publication information, and author) disappear when the text is ‘homogenized’ and ‘loses all of its relationships that were present in the original book.’ Thus, the very thing protecting A.I. from copyright infringement—its ability to rephrase things—is also the problem: L.L.M.s transform literature into some hybridized, half-dead thing that is far removed, if not completely untethered, from its original source. It creates a product so drastically new that the text as an individual work is effectively destroyed. This less obvious form of erasure is much more hazardous and worrisome than destructive scanning.”
• An essay on the uses of criticism.
“The core act of literary criticism sounds simple. It is sitting down with a bit of writing and thinking about it. Then there should be a head-exploding moment of making connections between its different bits and perhaps bits of one’s own experience or stuff that’s happening in the world now or which was happening in the world around the person who wrote it. Sometimes the thing you’re reading will seem alien or baffling to start with. But the key thing to remember is that it once mattered to someone enough to make them shape it and write it down, so there has to be something there, even if finally you decide it shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did to the person who wrote it, or that it doesn’t really work. You might think about the way it manages to create a particular effect and you might learn how to write from thinking about the way it’s done (are there tricks, bits of compositional magic you can learn from?), or you might just feel a shiver at understanding something you never thought could be understood. Sometimes you get a sense of seeing someone else’s world, or a world that you didn’t think was there. And once you have worked out a way of understanding the poem or the novel or the play then you have to convey it to someone else. A good critic is a kind of lightning conductor who picks out the energy in what they read and passes it on to others.”
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