artificial-intelligence
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Curating The Week: Creative Mindsets, Perceiving Time, AI’s Effects On Writing
• An essay on creative mindsets. “The three years of solitary work at Montpellier had not been wasted in the least: that intellectual isolation was what had allowed [mathematician Alexander Grothendieck] to access the cognitive space where new ideas arise. He had made himself at home there.” “This might look wasteful if you think what… Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Cory Doctorow’s “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI” (2026)
“Art is what happens when an artist has a big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling in their mind, which they infuse into some artistic medium—a book, a song, a dance, a painting, a photograph, and such—in the hopes of making a facsimile of that big, numinous, irreducibly complex feeling materialize in the minds of people who… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI as System, AI’s Didacticism, Vermeer’s Art
• 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… Continue reading
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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 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: Artistic Toil, Aphoristic Intelligence, AI Slop, Reclaiming One’s Mind
• An essay on artistic toil. “…instances of just how willing the great artists are to undergo tedious, repetitive, finger-cramping work—toil—in the service of their craft. In some of these examples, such as the stonework of a cathedral, there was a higher purpose to justify the toil. But often it seems that the artists engaged… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI and Search, AI in Music, Perfectionism
• An essay on AI and search. “There is a road that must be crossed, by Google and also by the rest of us. On one side is a digital world with its largely familiar structure, fuelled by familiar kinds of advertising, in many of whose forms Google excels. To make liveable whatever lies on… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI and Thinking, Sound Designing, AI and De-Skilling
• An essay about AI and thinking. “It can seem unnatural, even repulsive, to imagine that a computer program actually understands, actually thinks. We usually conceptualize thinking as something conscious, like a Joycean inner monologue or the flow of sense memories in a Proustian daydream. Or we might mean reasoning: working through a problem step by… Continue reading
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Curating the Week: Jack Dejohnette, AI and the Sublime, AI and Cognition, Apple TextEdit, Writing as Thinking
• A tribute to Jack DeJohnette. “The idea of improvisation is tied up in the very nature of our existence. We don’t expect our life to evolve without changing and we never know what’s round the corner – why should music be any different?” • An essay on AI and the sublime. “Sublimity isn’t an… Continue reading
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