This one took a bit to write. The first piece is long (1,600+ words), and intense. But it needed to be said. I'll be interested to hear what you think. You...
The Breath of the Author
The palpable presence of someone else's mind in our best writing should give us pause about the encroachment of AI text
The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck
Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
A book that redefines both family and narrative for the…
Meditations on Machinic Desire
The philosopher and accelerationist Nick Land writes, in his 1993 essay Machinic Desire, three of the most insight-dense paragraphs I’ve ever encountered:
Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
A reflection on the reading life. What formed it, what threatens it, and what remains.
#784: The absurdity of the apocalypse
Plus: repayment avoidance, the death of “hello,” and a Cinderella story for the algorithmic era
I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment | Micah Nathan
The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words
Literature fans should welcome AI as a fellow wordsmith | Aeon Essays
Strong resistance to AI among writers is understandable. But it obscures what we share with the machines: language itself
The Colonization of Confidence., Sightless Scribbles
A fabulously gay blind author.
The tool, the craft, and the joy
On AI, craft, and building things that matter (1300 words)
Konrad Hinsen's blog
A much cited essay by Bret Victor, "Explorable Explanations", argues for supporting and encouraging active reading in communicating ideas. Explanatory text should thus be complemented by interactive visualizations and computational demonstrations, allowing the reader to actively engage with the ideas. If you haven't read Victor's essay yet, please do so now, and then come back here. It's not very long. What I am going to discuss is a variation on Victor's proposal, and I won't repeat his well-presented arguments.
The Possessed Machines: Dostoevsky's Demons and the Coming AGI Catastrophe
A close reading of prophetic fiction in the age of artificial superintelligence
“The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read.” — Ted Chiang
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
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