Oliver Burkeman:
I agree with the AI boosters that there’s no reason to assume AI won’t match the output of a human in any given field. But this misses the point. The point about a good novel produced by a human (or a song, or painting, or dare I say it, an email newsletter) isn’t that only a human could ever have produced it. It’s that a human did in fact produce it.
@tinyroofnail this quote from Burkeman's recent newsletter (I subscribe to it too!) made me think of a post from The Convivial Societya while back:
When I turn to Bruegel or Rembrandt, what I find, whether or not I am fully conscious of it, is not merely technical virtuosity, it is another mind. To encounter a painting or a piece of music or poem is to encounter another person, although it is sometimes easy to lose sight of this fact.
@willtmonroe Yes! “Technical virtuosity” sounds like such a lonely, uninviting thing. Thanks for that. I get Sacasas’s emails but sadly rarely get to them. I always start out the new year keeping up and fade by March