Alan Jacobs

Derek Thompson:

“These language models enable the automation of certain tasks that we’ve historically considered part of the creative process,” Olson told me. I couldn’t help but agree. Writing is less than half of my job; most of my work is reading and deciding what’s important enough for me to put in a paragraph. If I could train an AI to read as I do, and to determine significance as I do, I’d be essentially building a second mind for myself.

So Derek Thompson wants to oursource his research, and, as we saw yesterday, Noah Smith wants to outsource his writing. Is this boredom or frustration with the basic elements of their work universal among journalists these days?

I hope I’m not the only one, but just for the record: I like researching, and I like writing. I like the hard work of making my prose more clear and vivid. I like overcoming my ignorance. I like synthesizing the disparate things I read and then trying to present that synthesis to my readers. I like it all.

UPDATE: As I was walking this morning I suddenly understood the most fundamental thing that’s wrong with the way Smith and Thompson think about these matters: Smith assumes that at the outset of a writing project he already knows what he wants to say and just has to get it said; Thompson assumes at the outset of a writing project that he understands what he needs to know and just has to find a way to know it. But for me writing isn’t anything like that. For me writing is discovery, discovering what I need to say — which often is something I had no intention of saying when I set out. And some of the most important research I have ever done has been serendipitous: I have been looking for one thing and instead (or in addition) found something quite different, something I didn’t know I needed but, it turns out, is essential to me.

“My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer, and I have my mind…and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge. That’s why I read so much, Jon Snow.”

“I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”

Laity looking especially lovely on this cloudy autumnal day.

Gruber: “Mastodon is — deservedly! — getting a lot of attention as people re-evaluate their use of Twitter. But what I’m digging more in our current moment is renewed enthusiasm for blogging, and, on the consumption side, RSS feed reading.” Amen. Pretty much everything that was wrong with Twitter is also wrong with Federated Twitter.

Noah Smith and “roon”:

It’s important to realize exactly why the innovations of the past didn’t result in the kind of mass obsolescence that people feared at the time.

The reason was that instead of replacing people entirely, those technologies simply replaced some of the tasks they did. If, like Noah’s ancestors, you were a metalworker in the 1700s, a large part of your job consisted of using hand tools to manually bash metal into specific shapes. Two centuries later, after the advent of machine tools, metalworkers spent much of their time directing machines to do the bashing. It’s a different kind of work, but you can bash a lot more metal with a machine.

Note the planted axioms here — the governing assumptions that the authors may not even know they’re making:

1. That metalwork is neither an art nor a craft in which humans might take satisfaction but is simply a matter of “bashing” metal;
2. That it’s better to direct machines to bash than to do one’s own bashing, because working with metal is drudgery but overseeing machines isn’t;
3. That more metal-bashing is better than less metal-bashing.

I have, shall we say, some doubts about all those axioms. But let’s move on.

Consider the following, produced in the year 2322:

If, like Noah’s ancestors, you were a writer in the 2000s, a large part of your job consisted of using keyboards to manually bash characters into specific shapes. Two centuries later, after the advent of AI, writers spent much of their time directing machines to do the bashing. It’s a different kind of work, but you can bash a lot more characters with a machine.

What a utopian dream! No one has to write any more — no one has to think of what to say, to struggle for the best words in the best order, to strive to persuade or entertain. You just say, “Hey Siri, write me an essay on why there’s no reason to fear that AI will replace humans.”

Wait — I was being sardonic there but it turns out that that’s what Smith and roon really think:

Take op-ed writers, for instance – an example that’s obviously important to Noah. Much of the task of nonfiction writing involves coming up with new ways to phrase sentences, rather than figuring out what the content of a sentence should be. AI-based word processors will automate this boring part of writing – you’ll just type what you want to say, and the AI will phrase it in a way that makes it sound comprehensible, fresh, and non-repetitive. Of course, the AI may make mistakes, or use phrasing that doesn’t quite fit a human writer’s preferred style, but this just means the human writer will go back and edit what the AI writes.

In fact, Noah imagines that at some point, his workflow will look like this: First, he’ll think about what he wants to say, and type out a list of bullet points. His AI word processor will then turn each of these bullet points into a sentence or paragraph, written in a facsimile of Noah’s traditional writing style.

Behold: an image of the future of writing produced by a writer who quite obviously doesn’t like to write.

What seems to be missing here is the question of why the people who now pay Noah Smith to write wouldn’t just cut out the middleman, i.e., Noah Smith. Maybe that’s the future of Substack: AI drawing on a large corpus of hand-bashed text so that instead of paying Freddie deBoer to write I can just say, “Hey Substack, write me an essay on professional wrestling in the style of Freddie deBoer.” After all, people who write for Substack have limited time, limited energy, limited imagination, but AI won’t have any of those limits. It can bash infinitely more words.

I think Smith and roon don’t consider that possibility because they have another planted axiom, one that can be extracted from this line in their essay: our AI future “doesn’t mean humans will have to give up the practice of individual creativity; we’ll just do it for fun instead of for money.” But we will only do that if we have time and energy to do it, which we will have only have if we’re not busting our asses to make a living. Thus the final planted axiom: AI and human beings will flourish together in a post-scarcity world, like that of Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels.

For some reason I haven’t thought about this passage in years, though it is one of the most glorious things I know:

God made Sun and Moon to distinguish seasons, and day, and night, and we cannot have the fruits of the earth but in their seasons: But God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; In paradise, the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in heaven it is alwaies Autumne, his mercies are ever in their maturity. We ask panem quetidianum, our daily bread, and God never sayes you should have come yesterday, he never sayes you must againe to morrow, but to day if you will heare his voice, to day he will heare you. If some King of the earth have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgement together: He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; he can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frozen, clouded and eclypsed, damped and benummed, smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite his mercies, and all times are his seasons.

That’s John Donne’s glorious sermon for Christmas Day 1624, wonderfuly explicated by Joe Mangina here.