AI writing reminds me of Tennyson’s description of the beautiful Maud in the titular poem:
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more
If you’re dyslexic and just trying to communicate more clearly in writing, or you’ve got a bullshit job and you just want to get your bullshit job’s bullshit tasks out of the way so you can move on to more meaningful endeavors, or at least move past the day-to-day slog that permeates your workday and serves no real purpose other than to pay the bills, then I cede; I cannot fault you.
But if, say, you’re a “writer” and you’re using an LLM to “help you” “write” or “think” because it’s easier and takes less time and thought, then I stand my ground; I can and do fault you.
Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This knocked me for six when I read it back in 2022:
It’s like a slow-building sucker punch.
Like my other favourite book of that year—A Ghost In The Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa—it’s hard to classify. I think it’s autofiction. Not quite autobiography. Not quite fiction.
Will There Ever Be Another You is also autofiction. I think. It might also be poetry (which shouldn’t be surprising as Patricia Lockwood is a poet after all).
I can’t say that this one had the same emotional impact of No One Is Talking About This for me but then again, very little could.
The writing feels very impressionistic, with each chapter trying on a different mode. It’s kinda Joycean …if James Joyce was stuck indoors during a global pandemic.
The narrative—such as it is—revolves around The Situation from 2020 onwards. That was a surreal bizarre time so it makes sense that this is a surreal bizarre book.
I think I liked it. I can’t quite tell. I just let the language wash over me.
- I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work.
- I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist.
- People in general are burning out on “AI.”
- I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work.
- “AI” is Probably Sticking Around In Some Form.
- “AI” is a marketing term, not a technical one, and encompasses different technologies.
- There were and are ethical ways to have trained generative “AI” but because they weren’t done, the entire field is suspect.
- The various processes lumped into “AI” are likely to be integrated into programs and applications that are in business and creative workflows.
- It’s all right to be informed about the state of the art when it comes to “AI.”
- Some people are being made to use “AI” as a condition of their jobs. Maybe don’t give them too much shit for it.
Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.
I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.
And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.
So much truth in one story:
They built a machine to gentrify the English language.
They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.
They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.
See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.
Ah, the circle of life!
A great interview with Ted Chiang:
Predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable. Over the past couple of years, there have been some papers published suggesting that training LLMs on more data and throwing more processing power at the problem provides diminishing returns in terms of performance. They can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. And you can bolt tools onto the side of an LLM, like giving it a calculator it can use when you ask it a math problem, or giving it access to a search engine when you want up-to-date information, but putting reliable tools under the control of an unreliable program is not enough to make the controlling program reliable. I think we will need a different approach if we want a truly reliable question answerer.
God, I love the way that Denise writes:
On the train there’s an ad for Adobe Express: “Commercially safe AI. Trusted results”. The ad shows a photo slotting in to a design. Commercially safe for everyone but photographers and designers. I couldn’t get a seat facing forwards, so I head backwards into the future like some half-arsed AI metaphor.
I was going to save this announcement for later, but I’m just too excited: Harry Roberts will be speaking at Web Day Out!
Goddamn, that’s one fine line-up, and it isn’t even complete yet! Get your ticket if you haven’t already.
There’s a bit of a story behind the talk that Harry is going to give…
Earlier this year, Harry posted a most excellent screed in which he said:
The web as a platform is a safe bet. It’s un-versioned by design. That’s the commitment the web makes to you—take advantage of it.
- Opt into web platform features incrementally;
- Embrace progressive enhancement to build fast, reliable applications that adapt to your customers’ context;
- Write code that leans into the browser, not away from it.
Yes! Exactly!
Thing is, Harry posted this on LinkedIn. My indieweb sensibilities were affronted. So I harangued him:
You should blog this, Harry
My pestering paid off with an excellent blog post on Harry’s own site called Build for the Web, Build on the Web, Build with the Web:
The beauty of opting into web platform features as they become available is that your site becomes contextual. The same codebase adapts into its environment, playing to its strengths, rather than trying to build and ship your own environment from the ground up. Meet your users where they are.
That’s a pretty neat summation of the agenda for Web Day Out. So I thought, “Hmm …if I was able to pester Harry to turn a LinkedIn post into a really good blog post, I wonder if I could pester him to turn that blog post into a talk?”
I threw down the gauntlet. Harry accepted the challenge.
I’m sure you’re already familiar with Harry’s excellent work, but if you’re not, he’s basically Mr. Web Performance. That’s why I’m so excited to have him speak at Web Day Out—I want to hear the business case for leaning into what web browsers can do today, and he is most certainly the best person to bring receipts.
You won’t want to miss this, so be sure to get your ticket now; it’s only £225+VAT.
If you’re not ready to commit just yet, but you want to hear about more speaker announcements like this, you can sign up to the mailing list.
I read recently read two books that had writers as their main protagonists:
They were both perfectly fine. But I found it hard to get really involved in either narrative. The stakes just never felt that high.
Not that high stakes a pre-requisite for a gripping narrative. I enjoyed the films The Social Network and Like A Complete Unknown. Those stakes couldn’t be lower. One is about a website that might’ve ripped off its idea from another website. The other is about someone who’d like to play different kinds of music but other people would rather he played the same music. It’s a credit to the writers and directors of both films that they could create compelling stories from such objectively unimportant subjects.
Getting back to those two books, maybe there’s something navel-gazey when writers write about writing. Then again, I really like non-fiction books about writing from Ann Lamott, Stephen King, and more.
Perhaps it’s not the writing part, but the milieu of publishing.
I’m trying to think if there are any great films about film-making (Inception doesn’t count). Living In Oblivion is pretty great. But a lot of its appeal is that it’s not taking itself too seriously.
All too often when a story is set in its own medium (a book about publishing; a film about film-making) it runs the risk of over-estimating its own importance.
The most eye-rolling example of this is The Morning Show, a television show about a television show. It genuinely tries to make the case for the super-important work being done by vacuous morning chat shows.
I write here for you, not for the benefit of building the machines producing a firehose of spam, scams, and slop. The artificial intelligence companies have already violated the expectations of even a public web. Regardless of the benefits they have created — and I do believe there are benefits to these technologies — they have behaved unethically. Defensive action is the only control a publisher can assume right now.
I wanted to quote an excerpt of this post, but honestly I couldn’t choose just one part—the whole thing is perfect. You should read it for the beauty of the language alone.
(This is Anthony Moser’s first blog post. I fear he has created his Citizen Kane.)
Ethan tagged me in a post. I didn’t feel a thing.
“I’d love to invite a few other folks to share their favorite newsletters”, he wrote.
My immediate thought was that I don’t actually subscribe to many newsletters. But then I remembered that most newsletters are available as RSS feeds, and I very much do subscribe to those.
Reading RSS and reading email feel very different to me. A new item in my email client feels like a task. A new item in my feed reader feels like a gift.
Anyway, I poked around in my subscriptions and found some newsletters in there that I can heartily recommend.
First and foremost, there’s The History Of The Web by Jay Hoffman. Each newsletter is a building block for the timeline of the web that he’s putting together. It’s very much up my alley.
On the topic of the World Wide Web, Matthias has a newsletter called Own Your Web:
Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. ❤✊
On the inescapable topic of “AI”, I can recommend Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter by Professor Emily M. Bender and Doctor Alex Hanna.
Journalist Clive Thompson has a fun newsletter called The Linkfest:
The opposite of doomscrolling: Every two weeks (roughly) I send you a collection of the best Internet reading I’ve found — links to culture, technology, art and science that fascinated me.
If you like that, you’ll love The Whippet by McKinley Valentine:
A newsletter for the terminally curious
Okay, now there are three more newsletters that I like, but I’m hesitant to recommend for the simple reason that they’re on Substack alongside a pile of racist trash. If you decide you like any of these, please don’t subscribe by email; use the RSS feed. For the love of Jeebus, don’t give Substack your email address.
Age of Invention by Anton Howes is a deep, deep dive into the history of technology and industry:
I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers.
Finally, there are two newsletters written by people whose music I listened to in my formative years in Ireland…
When We Were Young by Paul Page recounts his time in the band Whipping Boy in the ’90s:
This will be the story of Whipping Boy told from my perspective.
Toasted Heretic were making very different music around the same time as Whipping Boy. Their singer Julian Gough has gone on to write books, poems, and now a newsletter about cosmology called The Egg And The Rock:
The Egg and the Rock makes a big, specific argument (backed up by a lot of recent data, across many fields), that our universe appears to be the result of an evolutionary process at the level of universes.
There you go—quite a grab bag of newsletter options for you.
This website is for humans, and LLMs are not welcome here.
Cosigned.
Following on from my earlier link about AI etiquette, what Trys experienced here is utterly deflating:
I spent a couple of hours working through my notes and writing up a review before sending it to my manager, awaiting their equivalent review for me.
However, the review I received back was, quite simply, quintessential AI slop.
When slopagandists talk about “AI” boosting productivity, this is the kind of shite they’re talking about.
For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.
Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. … Any text can be AI slop. If you read it, you’re injured in this war. You engaged and replied – you’re as good as dead. The dead internet is not just dead it’s poisoned.
I think that realistically, our main weapon in this war is AI etiquette.
When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom. And yet, boredom: the great engine of creativity. I now believe with all my heart that it’s only in the crushing silences of boredom—without all that black-mirror dopamine — that you can access your deepest creative wells. And for so many people these days, they’ve never so much as attempted to dip in a ladle, let alone dive down into those uncomfortable waters made accessible through boredom.
The foreword to the O’Reilly book on creating inclusive experiences.
Are you looking for a book that explains why you should care about web accessibility?
This is not that book.
Manuel Matuzović has too much respect for your intelligence to waste time trying to convince you of something you already know. You already know that web accessibility is important.
What you really need is a guidebook, a handy companion to show you the way through a tangled landscape.
This is that book.
If you want, you can read it cover to cover. That’s what I did, and I enjoyed every moment of the journey.
But you might not have time for that. That’s okay. The way that this book is subdivided means you can deep into any chapter and it will make perfect sense by itself. It really is like a cookbook. Every chapter is like a standalone recipe.
Whether you read this book linearly or dip in and out of it is up to you. Either way, Manuel is going to massage your brain until something new takes shape in there. An understanding. Not just an understanding of web accessibility, but of the very building blocks of the web itself.
See, that’s the sneaky trick that Manuel has managed with this book. It’s supposed to be an accessibility cookbook but it’s also one of the best HTML tutorials you’ll ever find. Come for the accessibility recipe; stay for the deep understanding of markup.
Best of all, Manuel manages to do all this without wasting a word. Again, he has too much respect for you to waste your time. The only unnecessary words in your Accessibility Cookbook are the ones you’re reading now. So I’m going to follow Manuel’s example, respect your time, and let you explore this magnificent book for yourself.
Enjoy the journey!