AI is good, actually*

my short list of fab writing about art, creativity, and human reasoning in the age of slop

Every girl has her divas. One of mine is the legendary jazz, pop, and enka singer Hibari Misora, perhaps most famous for “Kawa no Nagare no Yō ni.” While I can’t understand the words, I love it almost as much as Misora’s countrymen, who voted it the greatest Japanese song of all time back in 1997.

If you’re not familiar with Misora, you’re in for a treat. In a few short minutes, “Kawa” demonstrates the range of her velvety versatility, with a voice at turns strong and delicate, capable of belting, crooning, and keening¹. She is very technical, with a precision that enhances, rather than limits, her emotion; ignorant as I am of the lyrics, I can tell that “Kawa” is a painful, though not humorless, reflection on loss and feminine resilience. We in the business like to call this a cat-5 cuntquake.

Like Edith Piaf, whose “Non, je ne regrette rien” inspires similar feelings, Misora’s “Kawa” is—I imagine, I trust—an aging woman’s insistence that, as hard as her life has been, she regrets nothing! That she did it her way! Her suffering has proven her strength, she who has more than once looked down the barrel of a gun and found it within herself to soldier on. While both singers died decades after World War II, it’s no coincidence that their legacies are so deeply intertwined with the pain of those who survived it.

Like American divas Judy Garland and Whitney Houston, Misora’s life was too short and too sad. A popular entertainer from a young age, her talent for communicating both joy and yearning resonated with her many gay fans. I got into Misora years before I learned that there was evidence suggesting a closet of some kind for the singer herself, but regardless of the reality, she was and remains a gay icon, as one of her international admirers can attest.

I tell you this because, on our phone call this week, Bambi—the person who turned me on to Misora so many years ago—informed me that Yamaha recently used AI to resurrect her with a “new” song. The worst part? It’s not bad. More catchy than moving, “Arekara” is a fairly convincing simulation of Misora’s voice and style, although its accompanying “live performance” looks like total shit.

It’s blood-chilling, isn’t it, when you have to hand it to AI? And I often do, these days. Over the past six months or so, I’ve been obliged to incorporate Claude into production at my day job. To my dismay, I’ve discovered that it has some use cases, provided that you:

1. have a strong working knowledge of English grammar

2. understand that just because Claude is programmed to address you as if it were conscious doesn’t mean that it is

3. keep in mind that no query will return without a solution amenable to the manufacturer—even if Claude has to create a problem in order to provide it

Unfortunately, these are not common qualities among LLM evangelists. And this isn’t to speak of its other issues—the plagiarism, the harm to people, animals, and the environment, and the cartoonish evil of the corporations selling them to us.

AI is a problem for everyone, but the reason it’s a problem for me personally is that this technology, ostensibly designed to replace me, has actually just given me way more to do. It’s in the process of transforming my work as a copywriter, something I’ve been doing for over 10 years now, into something more like editorial or archiving, with a heaping ladleful of project management and a dash of executive assisting. Claude is the gaggle of junior copywriters that I oversee, only I haven’t gotten a promotion; when my subordinates fuck up—by “hallucinating” inaccurate data, for example—it’s on me, while any successes they may have are all evidence of my fungibility.

I have no reason to think conditions will improve. The prospect of being made redundant by a really good pattern-recognition system is turning my hair grey, but I know better than to complain in an economy like this. And perhaps it was always my fate, as a feminized member of the American precariat, to be de-skilled by automation.

While I’m not optimistic about the future of my money job, this is not because I believe that AI’s ability to bust labor is the same as AI’s ability to replace artists or replicate what we do. I’ve recently been newly inspired to reject creative pessimism á la John Paul Brammer, who wrote about this topic in an essay about performative reading:

I think this is an incredibly exciting time to be a reader or a writer. We who work with language are being asked to contemplate, and to take seriously, the power of language. We can make genuine contributions. Despite its attendant perils, technology has undeniably opened many doors for writers to discover each other.

The other day, when Claude gave me a perfectly usable block of copy in a fraction of the time I myself could have written it, I got to thinking about what writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick wrote about the concept of readability back in 1959: “[it’s] a cozy little word [that] has taken the place of the old-fashioned requirement of a good, clear prose style, which is something else. All differences of excellence, of position, of form are blurred by the slumberous acceptance.” She was writing about the decline of book reviewing due to, among other things, the commercialization of literature, and I think it more than applies here: there is technical, functional, readable writing, the equivalent of road signage or printer assembly instructions², and then there is art.

Like Brammer, I’m inclined to search for the silver linings: if AI has done nothing else, it has inspired a lot of great writing about AI—about the nature of art, creativity, humanity, consciousness, style, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. And much of it has been really fun to read! So without further ado, I’ll share some of my favorite new writing about AI, LLMs, and slop’s impact on the arts, sciences, and human reasoning. (And if you have any recommendations of your own, please drop them in the comments.)

Stop asking whether AI can write good by Elvia Wilk

Who’s a better writer: AI or me? by Artificial Whimsy

On Large Language Models, aesthetic sense as knowledge, and the material limits to “artificial intelligence” by J. Arthur Boyle

List and Shout: How the book review became book list slop by Lydia Kiesling

AI=B+ by Ben Parker

The Chess Master and the Computer by Garry Kasparov

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art by Ted Chiang

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1. And she covers American jazz standards brilliantly. Thanks to her, I’m now a fan of Nat King Cole, whose voice has been so Muzaked that I overlooked him for most of my life—to my own detriment!

2. Although AI has ruined manuals, too! It’s a fucking nightmare! I take back everything I said and apologize to my comrades in UI/UX!!!