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This is the last weekend to order signed and personalized copies of my books and get them shipped in time for Christmas. The deadline is Monday, Dec. 15th. (If you miss it, don’t worry: there are more ideas in my gift guide.)
Also: paid subscriptions are currently 20% off! A paid subscription gets you a special Tuesday letter from me and keeps Friday free for everybody:
Here are 10 things worth sharing this week:
“I am so bored by A.I. One of the things I love about the theater is: A.I. can’t do it. I couldn’t be less interested in computers and fake things. I like people. I like the way they smell, I like the way they talk, and I like the way they think. I think of A.I. as a plagiarizing mechanism. That’s all it is. And I know it’s going to change the world, it’s screwing everybody up, and I’m not in denial about any of that. But I’m in open rebellion.” Well put, Ethan Hawke.
As much as I am personally offended on multiple levels — creative, spiritual, political, ethical, moral… you name it! — by A.I. and the tech oligarchs who push it on us, I am also with my friend Alan Jacobs: “Everyone knows. Everyone. We really don’t need any more stories explaining what people are doing to themselves.”
What I am really interested in is how A.I. is pushing people to articulate what they love about art, like Ethan Hein did in his recent post, “AI slop predates AI”:
“I love 1980s hip-hop because there’s no way to predict it from projecting trends in 1970s pop. It questions basic assumptions! It’s missing elements that you might have thought were necessary (like melodies) and it brings in elements you didn’t know you wanted until you heard them (like samples and turntable scratching.) Now the 1980s rap exists, it’s easy to feed it into an AI as training data and get more 1980s rap, but there’s no way that AI could have produced 1980s rap if it was only trained on 1970s pop.”
This is a long-standing obsession of mine: how often it’s what humans leave out — by design or by necessity — that makes their art not average. (Because I’m out here looking for what isn’t average.)
A page from Steal Like An Artist I’m having a ton of fun writing this new series, Tuesday Trio, where I recommend a book, a record, and a movie based on a theme. The latest was “problematic gifts.”
“This is the exciting but harrowing period in the publication of a book when, with the writing all done…the waiting-to-see begins. Will people read it? Will they like it?” George Saunders on being in “the gulp,” a spot we’re both in at the moment. (Watch him read from his new one.)