There can be no struggle for the future without a memory of the past.
| Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
The Writing Life
I read an interview by Sari Azout with David Perrell, who shut down an experimental writing project — Write of Passage — that involved a large number of student writers. I found several of his comments compelling and disheartening, most specifically his assertion that algorithmic feeds have broken the internet:
DP: AI is part of a bigger story which is that the internet is in a new era. Write of Passage was based on a simple idea: write consistently, get a following on social media, build an email newsletter, and your life will change. It worked. Our students had amazing outcomes.
But then the internet changed, starting with TikTok. We went from a follower-driven graph to a content-driven algorithm. Instead of distributing content based on who follows you, platforms now look at the content itself and spread it to anyone who might be interested. This has caused the value of a follower to go way down. On Twitter, I have people with a fraction of my followers who get more impressions than me. On YouTube, what matters is your click-through rate and average view duration, not subscriber count.
This reminded me of the recent piece by Derek Thompson about how all media are turning into TV: social media, podcasts, AI.
My work on the “Antisocial Century” traces the rise of solitude in American life and its effects on economics, politics, and society. My work on “the end of thinking” follows the decline of literacy and numeracy scores in the U.S. and the handoff from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. Neither of these trends is exclusively caused by the logic of television colonizing all media. But both trends are significantly exacerbated by it.
[…]
When Putnam was writing Bowling Alone, many of his critics insisted that he was being histrionic about the decline of social capital in America because the Internet was going to solve all our problems.
Well, to steal from Joni Mitchell: ‘that was just a dream that some of us had.’
The decline of literacy and the eclipse of reading, combined with algorithmic feeds breaking the ‘traditional’ follower model of the blogosphere and pre-TikTok social media, may be the death of newsletters, and ultimately, writing.
But Perrell makes a distinction between two kinds of writing: quality writing versus personalized writing.
When we think of writing quality, we think of two things. The first is intrinsic quality, like the poetry of Joan Didion. I agree that AI will probably never write poetry like David Whyte. But the second is how tailored a piece of writing is to our exact interests. For example, I’m moving to the West Village in New York and I’m gonna wanna learn all about the neighborhood, so I’m gonna do deep research reports to learn about the West Village, not because the writing is better than the best book written about the West Village but because it can answer my specific questions immediately. The personalization is much better, even if the intrinsic quality is lower.
That personalization by AI makes it more of a tour guide or a tutor. But Joan Didion and Seamus Heaney are intensely singular, masters of the craft and wonder of writing. Perrell argues — like many who are intoxicated by the spells of AI — that someday AI might become better than even the best human writers. I hope not.
Ted Chiang spells out the wrong-headedness of looking to AI for art:
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. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
I hold that people concerned with living intentionally will continue to read human writing.
I am more worried by the world that Thompson foresees, when most people only watch TV — of one flavor or another — and forego reading, at all.
In the near term, while the streams of video and AI slop seemingly are clogging every available orifice in the body public, I will continue living the writing life, even if it doesn’t lead to fame or fortune.
Factoids
Major AI slowdown?
Joe Wilkins sums up the decling adoption of AI in business [emphasis mine]:
Artificial intelligence might be booming on paper, but in the real world, there are signs of a major slowdown.
In their latest biweekly survey of AI adoption, the US Census Bureau found evidence of an obvious drop-off in corporate AI use — the largest since the survey began in November of 2023.
The survey, which compiles data from over 1.2 million firms throughout the US, shows usage of AI tools among companies with over 250 employees dropping from nearly 14 percent in mid-June to under 12 percent in August.
While usage appeared to rise slightly in very small businesses with less than four workers, AI adoption also fell or remained flat in mid-sized companies with less than 250 workers but more than 19.
It’s a particularly distressing sign for tech investors and CEOs, whose unfettered spending on AI is now literally holding up the US economy. For the last few years, they’ve held that enterprise AI — stuff that would prop up powerful companies in tech, finance, and beyond — was the key to building a sustainable business model off of AI development.
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