When Paul Schrader was asked to do a Criterion Collection Top 10, he gave a great response: “As a longtime cinephile I’m familiar with most of the Criterion catalogue. Rather than select ten favorites I’ll choose ten films that I was able to see because of Criterion, films I previously did not know about or were not available.”
I haven’t really used Twitter for several years, but now I’m deleting my account.
x nay
I’ve deactivated my X account and won’t be coming back. I’ve despised Twitter for several years, but I have been willing to keep the account active in order to promote the journals and publishers I write for — my own writing and that of others. But I’m done with that. Why?
- X is now owned by one man.
- That one man doesn't just tolerate but promotes straightforwardly antisemitic discourse — he’s increasingly open about his own hostility towards Jews, and is ready to sue people who criticize him for it.
- That one man also — and let’s think about the merits of a system that grants to one private citizen this power — intervened meaningfully in the Russia-Ukraine war on the side of the aggressor. We could debate whether, and to what extent, the U.S. should directly support Ukraine, but there is no question about who invaded whom, and Musk is directly aiding the invaders.
I don’t see how, in the circumstances, I can keep an account on that man’s platform. So I’m out, for good.
UPDATE: See also this by David French: “Twitter isn’t so much a free speech paradise as the generalissimo’s playpen, and the generalissimo’s values shape everything about the place.”
UPDATE 2: Turns out that Musk did not cut off Starlink service to Ukraine in Crimea: it was already deactivated, and Musk declined to activate it in response to a request from the Ukrainian government. Walter Isaacson, in his biography, got that wrong, and has admitted it. A pretty significant error.
Joseph Horowitz: “So unnoticed are the American arts that a major American historian, Jill Lepore, can produce a wonderfully readable 900-page historical overview — These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) — without devoting so much as a sentence to the arts. No one could possibly dispute her emphasis on present-day issues and needs — the urgency of pondering American race relations and inequality. But it does not follow that there should be no consideration of Walt Whitman or Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson or William Faulkner, Charles Ives or George Gershwin, Duke Ellington or Billie Holiday.”
We see so many tributes when great artists die, but we should do a better job of praising them while they’re still around. So let’s acknowledge a home truth: there ain’t nobody who can sing like Gladys Knight.
Ronald W. Dworkin: “AI without the ballast of intuition represents the tyranny of pure analysis.”
mechanical writing
A university professor friend of mine recently confessed that everyone in their department now outsources their letter-of-reference writing to ChatGPT. They feed the chatbot a few bullet points and it spits out a letter, which they lightly edit and sign.
Naturally enough, this is slowly but surely leading to a rise in the number of reference letters they’re asked to write. When a student knows that writing the letter is the work of a few seconds, they’re more willing to ask, and a prof is more willing to say yes (or rather, they feel more awkward about saying no).
The next step is obvious: as letters of reference proliferate, people who receive these letters will ask a chatbot to summarize them in a few bullet points, creating a lossy process where a few bullet points are inflated into pages of puffery by a bot, then deflated back to bullet points by another one.
But whatever signal remains after that process has run, it will lack one element: the signal that this letter was costly to produce, and therefore worthy of taking into consideration merely on that basis.
See this post by me.
I must admit that I hadn’t thought of this particular use of AI, but it raises an interesting question: When do we turn to AI for help with writing? — especially those of us who are competent writers? We don’t do it for every writing task, only for some — but which ones?
Here’s my hypothesis: Competent writers seek help from AI when they’re faced with
- an obligation to write, in situations in which
- certain phrasal formulas are expected, and
- any stylistic vividness is useless or even unwelcome.
Why write as a human being when humanity is a barrier to data processing?
Oh boy am I excited about what Robin Sloan is up to.
