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Andrew Grassie (British, 1966), Mr & Mrs Makesack-Leitch’s House, 1995

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Louis Fratino, Laughing Gull (2021)

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Amanda Baldwin (American, 1984), Banded Tangerine, 2019

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Adrien Moreau, Return from market

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Yuko Murakoshi

Alexandre Pelletier, "Le Yack"
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Keiko Masumoto, Ceramic octopus
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Susan Carlson, Quilts - Crescent Moonfish, Ocean Tide Grouper

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A.I. Is Coming for Culture

In the 1950 book “The Human Use of Human Beings,” the computer scientist Norbert Wiener—the inventor of cybernetics, the study of how machines, bodies, and automated systems control themselves—argued that modern societies were run by means of messages. As these societies grew larger and more complex, he wrote, a greater amount of their affairs would depend upon “messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine.” Artificially intelligent machines can send and respond to messages much faster than we can, and in far greater volume—that’s one source of concern. But another is that, as they communicate in ways that are literal, or strange, or narrow-minded, or just plain wrong, we will incorporate their responses into our lives unthinkingly. Partly for this reason, Wiener later wrote, “the world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

The messages around us are changing, even writing themselves. From a certain angle, they seem to be silencing some of the algorithmically inflected human voices that have sought to influence and control us for the past couple of decades. In my kitchen, I enjoyed the quiet—and was unnerved by it. What will these new voices tell us? And how much space will be left in which we can speak? (...)

Podcasts thrive on emotional authenticity: a voice in your ear, three friends in a room. There have been a few experiments in fully automated podcasting—for a while, Perplexity published “Discover Daily,” which offered A.I.-generated “dives into tech, science, and culture”—but they’ve tended to be charmless and lacking in intellectual heft. “I take the most pride in finding and generating ideas,” Latif Nasser, a co-host of “Radiolab,” told me. A.I. is verboten in the “Radiolab” offices—using it would be “like crossing a picket line,” Nasser said—but he “will ask A.I., just out of curiosity, like, ‘O.K., pitch me five episodes.’ I’ll see what comes out, and the pitches are garbage.”

What if you furnish A.I. with your own good ideas, though? Perhaps they could be made real, through automated production. Last fall, I added a new podcast, “The Deep Dive,” to my rotation; I generated the episodes myself, using a Google system called NotebookLM. To create an episode, you upload documents into an online repository (a “notebook”) and click a button. Soon, a male-and-female podcasting duo is ready to discuss whatever you’ve uploaded, in convincing podcast voice. NotebookLM is meant to be a research tool, so, on my first try, I uploaded some scientific papers. The hosts’ artificial fascination wasn’t quite capable of eliciting my own. I had more success when I gave the A.I. a few chapters of a memoir I’m writing; it was fun to listen to the hosts’ “insights,” and initially gratifying to hear them respond positively. But I really hit the sweet spot when I tried creating podcasts based on articles I had written a long time ago, and to some extent forgotten. (...)

If A.I. continues to speed or automate creative work, the total volume of cultural “stuff”—podcasts, blog posts, videos, books, songs, articles, animations, films, shows, plays, polemics, online personae, and so on—will increase. But, because A.I. will have peculiar strengths and shortcomings, more won’t necessarily mean more of the same. New forms, or new uses for existing forms, will pull us in directions we don’t anticipate. At home, Nasser told me, he’d found that ChatGPT could quickly draft an engaging short story about his young son’s favorite element, boron, written in the style of Roald Dahl’s “The BFG.” The periodic table x “The BFG” isn’t a collab anyone’s been asking for, but, once we have it, we might find that we want it.

It’s not a real collaboration, of course. When two people collaborate, we hope for a spark as their individualities collide. A.I. has no individuality—and, because its fundamental skill is the detection of patterns, its “collaborations” tend to perpetuate the formulaic aspects of what’s combined. A further challenge is that A.I. lacks artistic agency; it must be told what’s interesting. All this suggests that A.I. culture could submerge human originality in a sea of unmotivated, formulaic art.

And yet automation might also allow for the expression of new visions. “I have a background in independent filmmaking,” Mind Wank, one of the pseudonymous creators of “AI OR DIE,” which bills itself as “the First 100% AI Sketch Comedy Show,” told me. “It was something I did for a long time. Then I stopped.” When A.I. video tools such as Runway appeared, it became possible for him to take unproduced or unproducible ideas and develop them. (...)

Traditional filmmaking, as he sees it, is linear: “You have an idea, then you turn it into a treatment, then you write a script, then you get people and money on board. Then you can finally move from preproduction into production—that’s a whole pain in the ass—and then, nine months later, you try to resurrect whatever scraps of your vision are there in the editing bay.” By contrast, A.I. allows for infinite revision at any point. For a couple of hundred dollars in monthly fees, he said, A.I. tools had unlocked “the sort of creative life I only dreamed of when I was younger. You’re so constrained in the real world, and now you can just create whole new worlds.” The technology put him in mind of “the auteur culture of the sixties and seventies.” (...)

Today’s A.I. video tools reveal themselves in tiny details, producing a recognizable aesthetic. They also work best when creating short clips. But they’re rapidly improving. “I’m waiting for the tools to achieve enough consistency to let us create an entire feature-length film using stable characters,” Wank said. At that point, one could use them to make a completely ordinary drama or rom-com. “We all love filmmaking, love cinema,” he said. “We have movies we want to make, TV shows, advertisements.” (...)

What does this fluidity imply for culture in the age of A.I.? Works of art have particular shapes (three-minute pop songs, three-act plays) and particular moods and tones (comic, tragic, romantic, elegiac). But, when boundaries between forms, moods, and modalities are so readily transgressed, will they prove durable? “Right now, we talk about, Is A.I. good or bad for content creators?,” the Silicon Valley pioneer Jaron Lanier told me. (Lanier helped invent virtual reality and now works at Microsoft.) “But it’s possible that the very notion of ‘content’ will go away, and that content will be replaced with live synthesis that’s designed to have an effect on the recipient.” Today, there are A.I.-generated songs on Spotify, but at least the songs are credited to (fake) bands. “There could come a point where it’ll just be ‘music,’ ” Lanier said. In this future scenario, when you sign in to an A.I. version of Spotify, “the first thing you hear will be ‘Hey, babe, I’m your Spotify girlfriend. I made a playlist for you. It’s kind of sexy, so don’t listen to it around other people.’ ” This “playlist” would consist of songs that have never been heard before, and might never be heard again. They will have been created, in the moment, just for you, perhaps based on facts about you that the A.I. has observed.

In the longer term, Lanier thought, all sorts of cultural experiences—music, video, reading, gaming, conversation—might flow from a single “A.I. hub.” There would be no artists to pay, and the owners of the hubs would be able to exercise extraordinary influence over their audiences; for these reasons, even people who don’t want to experience culture this way could find the apps they use moving in an A.I.-enabled direction.

Culture is communal. We like being part of a community of appreciators. But “there’s an option here, if computation is cheap enough, for the creation of an illusion of society,” Lanier said. “You would be getting a tailored experience, but your perception would be that it’s shared with a bunch of other people—some of whom might be real biological people, some of whom might be fake.” (I imagined this would be like Joi introducing Gosling’s character to her friends.) To inhabit this “dissociated society cut off from real life,” he went on, “people would have to change. But people do change. We’ve already gotten people used to fake friendships and fake lovers. It’s simple: it’s based on things we want.” If people yearn for something strongly enough, some of them will be willing to accept an inferior substitute. “I don’t want this to occur, and I’m not predicting that it will occur,” Lanier said, grimly. “I think naming all this is a way of increasing the chances that it doesn’t happen.”

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Edward Hopper, Second Story Sunlight

Inge Schuster
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Juarez Machado
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Wu Guanzhong, Hometown of Lu Xun

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Yuko Murakoshi
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Cao Yang

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Peter Doig, Milky Way, 1990
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Writing Workshops Are F**king Useless

I am a writer and professor, with an MFA in creative writing, and I detest the writing workshop. The writing workshop is widely considered to be the best means (at least in America) of forging an existence for writers, young and old, of harvesting the best of their work and sustaining their practice. As both a writer and a professor, and furthermore as a reader, this is something I find simultaneously ridiculous, infuriating, and depressing. In a field, perhaps the only field, quite literally named in the spirit of “creativity,” how is it possible that one mode of instruction, taught most notably at a small school in Iowa, has entirely won the day when it comes to the education of artists? How has the market been so cornered? How have the options become so limited? How have professors become so convinced that this method—in a field, it needs be mentioned, constantly being asked whether it’s something that can even really be taught; and this by writers, readers, professors, deans, parents and everybody else—that this method of instruction is simply the way? Especially when we’ve got mountains—almost all of literature produced ever—of evidence to the contrary? (...)

I think that workshops represent a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of what ought to be encouraged in the experience and expression of any young artist. They all seem tethered to history with very selective gaps that ignore the solitary plight of so many artists we now recognize as geniuses; they simply ignore what has made literature so vital and so powerful across time, and in my estimation they do so at their peril. Programs are still enjoying the novelty of their existence today—as I said, the numbers of applicants seem just fine, on the uptick even—but unwillingness to adapt and improve will almost certainly begin to strangle off this pink cloud, and reading accounts of bad experiences only hammers this home with vengeance.

Bearing this reality in mind, what are some feasible adjustments that might be made to the workshop model if this kind of discipline is not to become more of an homogenous soup than it already is, dense with justifiable complaint and dissatisfaction? If we can accept that there is a fundamental misunderstanding inherent in the model of sitting a beginning artist in a room of their peers and having their nascent works critiqued in a rote, occasionally praiseful, occasionally scornful, always misguided effort to uphold an arbitrary connection to a school in Iowa, then it would behoove us to look at that misunderstanding to find any clarities. How have writers, before the existence of any writing workshop ever, done what they did? How did Herman Melville write? How did Virginia Woolf? And here it’s important to not simply throw out the whole enterprise, because 1) I like my job, and 2) We exist in a culture already entirely hostile to this pursuit, and academic disciplines make adjustments constantly, so it doesn’t pull any rug of legitimacy out from under us to say we’re adapting, implementing new models, exploring other paths than the one that’s grown stale, and repetitive, and actively harmful in countless circumstances.

What do I do? I am presently adapting. What I’ve tended to do is preface my class with a note that workshopping is technically a requirement where I teach these courses, and thus I will give them demonstrations of the workshop experience, and I will work with them to comment on things in a useful manner in one another’s work, but that the whole of the class will not be tethered to this model. Instead, we do these things, but then I’ll introduce this notion of the literary/arts “salon,” an open environment, wherein we’re all struggling, all trying to figure shit out, and whether we might wish to share something one day, or talk about something we’ve read recently, or simply complain about how impossible it seems to be to get published, these are all treated as the real, useful stuff of writing, because, once they leave school, they are. I did this in a course where everyone tried, over the semester, to write a novella. I wrote one with everybody, based on a set of three possible prompts each week. Everybody attempted 1,000 words per week. Some days we all simply came to class and wrote. Some days we talked about novels we’d all been reading per the class list. Some days we’d circle up and share from our work, but never was it the case that one person found their work being the focus of critique for any prolonged period. This has nothing to do with discomfort. The simple fact is that art is not made by committees. Even in the cases of film, where arguably a group, i.e. a committee, is wielding influence over the whole, there are inevitably voices exerting more influence on the entire process, if not one single voice, and we as audiences are better off for this. This is an undeniable truth when it comes to writing. Writers are people, and thus they can occasionally benefit from social interaction as regards their work. Some of them might thrive on it, and might be highly receptive to critique, and might be able to implement those critiques in ways that endlessly benefit the work. This concoction of human being has yet to cross my path, but I’m sure they exist. For the rest of us, perhaps simply fostering a community where we feel comfortable pursuing our interest is the thing. Perhaps that’s plenty.

by Republic of Letters |  Read more:

Image: Unterberg Poetry Center (404)

[ed. Writing workshops - a niche topic for sure. What I found most interesting is the promotion of 'salons', or something like them ever since reading Hemingway's A Moveable Feast back in college and missing old philosophical/brainstorming sessions (in contrast to rote lecture/test classes). Basically, a more interactive, open-ended, ideas-based approach to learning, with lots of applications beyond basic schooling and education, especially in business. See also: The Salons Project.]

***

Salons were an important place for the exchange of ideas. The word salon first appeared in France in 1664 (from the Italian salone, the large reception hall of Italian mansions; salone is actually the augmentative form of sala, room). Literary gatherings before this were often referred to by using the name of the room in which they occurred, like cabinet, réduit, ruelle, and alcôve. Before the end of the 17th century, these gatherings were frequently held in the bedroom (treated as a more private form of drawing room): a lady, reclining on her bed, would receive close friends who would sit on chairs or stools drawn around. (...)

Breaking down the salons into historical periods is complicated due to the various historiographical debates that surround them. Most studies stretch from the early 16th century up until around the end of the 18th century. Goodman is typical in ending her study at the French Revolution where, she writes: 'the literary public sphere was transformed into the political public'. Steven Kale is relatively alone in his recent attempts to extend the period of the salon up until Revolution of 1848:

A whole world of social arrangements and attitude supported the existence of French salons: an idle aristocracy, an ambitious middle class, an active intellectual life, the social density of a major urban center, sociable traditions, and a certain aristocratic feminism. This world did not disappear in 1789.

In the 1920s, Gertrude Stein's Saturday evening salons (described in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and depicted fictionally in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris) gained notoriety for including Pablo Picasso and other twentieth-century luminaries like Alice B. Toklas.

Roadside Attractions

Man walking his dinosaur, Murdo, South Dakota. June 2018

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May require a larger vessel
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Cressida Campbell, John Dory, 1987
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