Curating The Week
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Curating The Week: AI’s Conversation Deep Fakes, Notre-Dame’s (New) Acoustics, AI and Human Agency, AI and Creativity
• An essay on AI’s conversation deep fakes. “The term deepfake traditionally refers to photos, audio, and video, but when it comes to discussions of consciousness, we need to regard text as a deepfake medium as well. Just as it is vastly easier to generate a realistic video of an astronaut in orbit around Alpha… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI’s Tells, AI’s Uses, The Attributes Of Art
• An essay on AI tells in writing. “When writing is hard, it’s often not just because we are tired, underfed, or inefficient but because our mind is trying to tell us crucial things.” • An essay on figuring out AI’s uses. “it’s time to begin the more specific work of figuring out, in a… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI Slop Prehistory, Lo-Fi Rebellion Against AI, The Attention Economy And Anxiety
• 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… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Playing Mandolin, Sound Design, AI in Writing, AI’s Impact On Artists, Nature and Attention
• An essay about returning to the mandolin at an older age. “Is domestic music a second-class thing? Discovering this history, I felt strongly what a different phenomenon music is when you make it yourself. You’re inside it, living it, experiencing a pleasure so intense that pleasure is perhaps no longer the word. This surely… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Freedom, Exceptionalism, Finishing
• A conversation with historian Timothy Snyder. “If we think about freedom as the task of government, we find ourselves in a much warmer and a much more prosperous place.” • An essay on the disfiguring mentality of American exceptionalism. “I find myself turning to a more thoroughgoing narrative: that Trump is the fulfillment of… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI and Human Touch, AI and Writing, AI and Taste
• 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,’… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: The Brand Age, Selling Out, Sync Music
• An essay on the brand age. “Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.” “Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.” “One obvious lesson is to stay away… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Blogging, Music and Truth-Telling, Memory
• An interview with Cory Doctorrow. “When anything seems important to me, in any way, I write a blog post about it. There’s a lot of advantages to that. When I write for a public audience, I apply rigor necessarily that I wouldn’t apply to notes to myself. So that creates a kind of mnemonic… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Light, Musical Variations, DJing, Joep Beving
• An essay on light in the paintings of Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour. “When one looks at La Tour’s paintings, it is hard not to see signs of the devotional culture of his time: a Counter-Reformation Catholic world that valued stillness, interior reflection, and meditative attention, and that found spiritual meaning in restraint… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Consicousness, AI, Writing Rooms, Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force
• An interview with Michael Pollan. “Our consciousness is being polluted, and protecting ourselves against that at the same time we preserve the ability to act politically is a difficult balancing act. Consciousness is a very precious realm. It’s the realm of our privacy and our freedom to think. So I think we need some… Continue reading
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