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The cult of virtuality encourages superstition, subjectivity, & myth
Generative AI gives us a parody of Eliot's creative process. Tradition is replaced by a vast statistical model constructed of digital representations of the works of the past. Individual talent is replaced by a prediction function that mindlessly extracts patterns of data from the model and serves them up in the form of text, image, or sound. "Poetry," Eliot wrote, "is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." He immediately added a crucial clarification: "Of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things." from How Big Tech killed literary culture
posted by chavenet on Jan 20, 2026 at 12:01 AM
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Ah, another piece on Unherd which seems like it's going to talk about left-wing stuff, only to tack hard right, avoid any controversial ideas (like 'rich people should pay taxes to support the education system') and end up bolstering the conservative worldview.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:22 AM
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"Technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive. We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human."
It's incredible how this meshed perfectly with the mumbo-jumbo community of crystals and "energy". At least from my lived experience. I guess it liberates from even pretending to think
posted by mayoarchitect at 3:10 AM
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Archive link:
Ungated "How Big Tech Killed Literary Culture"
posted by zirconium_encrusted at 4:09 AM
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"The rise of generative artificial intelligence, as both a practical technology and a popular obsession, crystallises Big Tech's cultural takeover. AI turns reading and writing into automated industrial routines, optimised for speed and efficiency. It instrumentalises intellect, allows the critical and creative work of the mind to be outsourced to machinery."
This is wrong. This is question-begging. AI doesn't allow the critical and creative work of the mind to be outsourced to machinery because the critical and creative work of the mind cannot be done by machinery. Criticism is done in human minds. Creative work is done in human minds. AI is, at best, a tool that can be used by someone with a human mind capable of critical and creative work.
posted by zirconium_encrusted at 4:16 AM
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Who are the actors who are hidden by the passive voice in the FPP text? Who is doing the replacing
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:34 AM
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avoid any controversial ideas
It's true, the notion that we should put rich people in jail and make them read novels is no longer controversial.
posted by mittens at 5:04 AM
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Friedman may not read, but apparently his partner in scam Caroline Ellison does. Gates does. Or says he does. So also Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. Andreessen ("for pleasure" need not be fiction only). I see no reason to doubt them. Friedman becomes the outlier, seemingly to rejoice in his provocative otherness. I wouldn't read too much into that.
the number of Americans who read for pleasure plummeted by 40%, according to a University of Florida study published last summer.
Just to be contrarian, but did Florida factor in that Spotify clocked 36% increase in audiobook listeners over the past year?
posted by BWA at 5:09 AM
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zirconium_encrusted: "AI doesn't allow the critical and creative work of the mind to be outsourced to machinery because the critical and creative work of the mind cannot be done by machinery. Criticism is done in human minds. Creative work is done in human minds. "
That's it. That's all there is to say to ridiculous "creative" AI claims. Using AI is not "being creative." YOU will have created nothing, and be ever more empty for it.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:14 AM
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Listen I know that writers often aren't responsible for their own headlines but "How Big Tech killed literary culture" is ridiculous. Literary culture has issues and AI is one of them to be sure, but it isn't dead by a long shot.
posted by joannemerriam at 5:20 AM
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I checked out of this pretty early, so please someone let me know if I'm wrong, but I think the huge fallacy here is that "public intellectuals" like, I guess, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal and other writers you used to see on TV fifty years ago have been replaced by dipshits like Elon Musk, because the culture has shifted from literary to tech-driven...right? So, this is bullshit. First of all, Elon Musk isn't a tech guy any more than someone like Steve Jobs was; Musk is a tech booster who isn't actually a tech creator, and thinking of him as a technology guy is like thinking of a 60-year-old alcoholic Steelers superfan as a football player. Second, people like Musk have replaced, if anyone, actual scientists in the cultural conversation. "Public intellectuals" in the arts have been replaced, maybe, by TV showrunners and popular writers, people I see profiled all the time, interviewed all the time, to say nothing of people like Ta-Nehisi Coates who, if that isn't a public intellectual, who is? So, in short, this article seems full of shit.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:26 AM
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I think some of the problem here is that Carr is setting up a false dichotomy: Remember when our high culture was ruled by prissy Anglo-Catholics? Now all that's under threat by tech giants. And like...that's two separate worlds, not in CP Snow's sense of two cultures, but more like two industries. Nobody has taken away literature. If anything, the tech gods would like to sell us even more literature because to them it's a commodity with no marginal cost. You can buy so much literature! You can buy it in so many forms! You can read everything from the most obscure and difficult modernist poetry on down to the most hastily cobbled-together amish mafia reverse harem. It's all there for you.
I mean, this is Carr's beat. He's been telling us for years that technology's only going to make things worse. But it doesn't do us any good to imagine a golden age we are descending from. That's some shifting sand on which to base your argument.
posted by mittens at 5:37 AM
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I have a lot of trouble imagining that, when it comes to future art history (so to speak), there somehow isn't... anything... on the other side of AI, when all the dust settles. It's really hard to not see the current struggle as akin to that of photography and "conventional" visual art. For an extremely long time in history, especially after the development of really good perspective and lighting techniques, one of the major purposes of painting (not the only one, to be sure!) was to give people a sense of what certain things and people "really" looked like. Suddenly that was obliterated by a new technology.
Now, I'm totally aware of all the arguments for why, on an "It is art rather than not art" scale, photography is supposed to be close to a ten but AI is supposed to be close to a zero; I personally oscillate on whether I agree with this consensus. But my point is that, setting aside its merit as art, what photography wound up doing to conventional visual art turned out to be the exact opposite of murder! It just looked like murder in the same way that a caterpillar can't understand what's happened to all of its caterpillar friends who have been swallowed up by mysterious objects.
20th-century visual art (at least within the Western context I'm taking for granted here, etc) entails diversity like nothing before it, and that probably couldn't have been anticipated until it happened. And even today, it's extremely normal for ostensibly uncultured people to complain that their five-year-old could have painted that; the sense that fealty to observed reality is the natural benchmark for visual art is still extremely common, even as art-enjoying people like me "know better".
In that vein, I think the assumptions whereby True Art is derived from a kind of individual, unfettered, authentic genius (who could never be confused with your five-year-old) are... problematic to say the least. A lot of great art is kind of like that, yes, but we have to acknowledge that everyone stands on the shoulders of giants and every work of art you've ever experienced is a derivative of millennia of influences. Generative AI makes people uncomfortable by making that kind of thing more explicit, dissolving the magic. We like to pretend that a discrete human soul called Wolfgang Mozart composed every Mozart symphony; it's a lot cleaner. (I've been on a Buddhism kick lately.)
I'm not a booster, to be clear. My feeling about AI is that it's probably bad for us the same way any superstimulus can be. So while I don't think it can be wholly "refuted" with a philosophical argument, just as one (probably) can't make a good philosophical argument that nobody should ever eat marshmallows, I also worry that over the next several decades, the major art/entertainment diet of most people most of the time is going to be marshmallows. And in a sense that is me agreeing with the doomers! But, ah well. If the net result is that AI becomes about as ubiquitous as photographic imagery is now, but other, previously unimaginable kinds of art exist because AI delivered the needed kick in the pants to art, I'll begrudgingly accept the tradeoff. (Begrudging because even though I was born in 1988 I'm still not sure the tradeoff of television was worth it, to be frank.)
posted by InTheYear2017 at 5:57 AM
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A lot of great art is kind of like that, yes, but we have to acknowledge that everyone stands on the shoulders of giants and every work of art you've ever experienced is a derivative of millennia of influences. Generative AI makes people uncomfortable by making that kind of thing more explicit, dissolving the magic.
But generative AI does the exact opposite. We know artists stand on the shoulders of giants because they were often taught by someone else or they studied other works. There are countless examples of up-and-coming artists imitating or straight up copying other artists that came before them. One of the most interesting threads to follow in art history is tracing which works someone may or may not have been familiar with. It's generative AI that dissolves that link and outsources learning to the LLM.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:44 AM
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it's not the effect on ai on literature that worries me, it's its effect on journalism. this hot take could have been written by one of those, mr carr, & it wouldn't have been much stupider.
posted by graywyvern at 7:21 AM
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everyone stands on the shoulders of giants and every work of art you've ever experienced is a derivative of millennia of influences. Generative AI makes people uncomfortable by making that kind of thing more explicit
Not any more than a photocopier does (it doesn't at all). And this is just a really big photocopier with an added feature to jumble up the pieces.
posted by KMH at 7:41 AM
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Just to be contrarian, but did Florida factor in that Spotify clocked 36% increase in audiobook listeners over the past year?
to be fair, listening linearly and passively to an audiobook is not the same as taking advantage of the random-access feature (for instance) of text, or the enhancement to working memory that text offers and audio/video doesn't.
it's not that most of us are doing most of our pleasure reading in critical and engaged ways either, and most reading is presumably reading for pleasure, but the fact remains that one can read in "attack mode" much more easily than one can listen in "attack mode" (who actually pauses the audio to think something through, rewinds to a certain spot to re-listen, etc.?).
so it's not at all a like-for-like thing and hence hard to factor in.
posted by nobody_truncates at 7:53 AM
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Not any more than a photocopier does (it doesn't at all).
A photocopier is just a kind of printing press, and I can assure you printing presses have caused (and continue to cause) plenty of discomfort.
posted by plagued out moggies at 8:16 AM
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yeah say what you want about gutenberg democratising bible access but that sure did kick off some shit.
to say nothing of the discomfort caused to our feline friends who got wedged in those glorified printing presses.
posted by nobody_truncates at 9:13 AM
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"This is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; [...] in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat." (Claude Levi-Strauss)
posted by mittens at 9:53 AM
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I will probably just keep linking to this every time anyone talks about generative AI, but suffice it to say the technology has been with us for many years.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:28 AM
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Just to be contrarian, but did Florida factor in that Spotify clocked 36% increase in audiobook listeners over the past year?
to be fair, listening linearly and passively to an audiobook is not the same as taking advantage of the random-access feature (for instance) of text, or the enhancement to working memory that text offers and audio/video doesn't.
Are you suggesting that a primary means of interfacing with text is often random-access? That does not comport with my experience, excluding perhaps Dictionary of the Khazars. I'm not an audiobook person, but I am a person who primarily reads books in a linear fashion. Am I the weirdo out here?
the fact remains that one can read in "attack mode"
I have no idea what this means, either. Attack mode? Do you just mean a more engaged reading technique in which the reader grapples with the text rather than just passively consuming it word-by-word? I'm not sure that always applies, depending on the nature of the text. If I'm reading say a sci-fi book, there's a greater degree of passive consumption than say poetry, I'll certainly grant that. But I imagine that for most people, "pleasure" reading implies not attempting to aggressively wrestle with text.
posted by axiom at 11:25 AM
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to be fair, listening linearly and passively to an audiobook is not the same as taking advantage of the random-access feature (for instance) of text, or the enhancement to working memory that text offers and audio/video doesn't.
To be fair, this is ablest bullshit.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 11:37 AM
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Are you suggesting that a primary means of interfacing with text is often random-access?
I think the point is that, with text, you can fairly easily jump forward and back to see what's up ahead or to check something you read previously, which is extremely difficult and time-consuming with audiobooks.
I mostly consume fiction by audiobook these days due to persistent visual difficulties. Saying that the medium is worse for skimming or hunting for specific bits of information is far easier in text than audio formats isn't ableist, it's identifying the limits of the medium. An audiobook with a good reader can often make complicated passages more comprehensible by the reader's intonation and stresses, which is a plus for the medium.
I'm trying to imagine what an effective skim/review feature in audio format would be like. Not saying it's impossible, but I'm struggling to imagine it.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:53 AM
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Or says he does.
Did you know that rich people can just lie about how much money they have, how hard they work, how few hours of sleep they get, and how many books they read and no one actually checks?
posted by AlSweigart at 1:29 PM
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Remember when our high culture was ruled by prissy Anglo-Catholics?
As an Anglo-Catholic, I'm don't know if this has been true in my lifetime, but I'm also prepared to say, yes, this would be better than whatever it is we're in now. Maybe I'm just old, but robust public institutional support for the humanities and fine arts would be better than leaving it to Netflix and ChatGPT.
As for the article itself, I am not really sure he's saying anything controversial? There's a lot of evidence to support that AI is making people dumber and this isn't a good thing for artistic production of consumption. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm also not seeing the hard right turn at the end.
posted by The_transcontinental at 1:31 PM
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To be fair, this is ablest bullshit.
no, it in fact is not. there are modes of engaging with text that are much more difficult in other media, at least in the most typical ways of using those other media. therefore, use of those other media will discourage those modes of engagement on average, relative to text.
it is true, for instance, that someone who, say, has low visual acuity, or adhd, like i do, may well find it more difficult or impossible to avail themselves of those features of text without extra effort or well-designed adaptive methods, and will in some cases find it impossible no matter what.
that has nothing to do with the fact that the inherent features of the two media tend, on average, to foster different skills and habits.
you will in particular remain ignorant of a pending major social problem, which many educators will tell you about, whereby on a population level, a bunch of skills and habits that in this culture have hitherto been foundational for basic functioning of democracy are atrophying at a disturbing rate.
you may also be ignorant of the historical fact that, in relatively recent history and in a wide variety of cultures, a wide variety of approaches to human development and human liberation have focused intensely on literacy. there are concrete reasons for that. if you think the idea that on average literacy empowers people (i.e. inculcates specific skills and habits) in ways that nothing else, on average, in aggregate achieves, then i don't know what to tell you.
you can seriously misuse notions like ableism as thought-terminating cliches if you wish, but you will remain wrong.
posted by nobody_truncates at 2:06 PM
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some of y'all have never taught a class in a text-based subject to a room full of students who watch the automatically-caputured videos of lectures about complicated shit at 1.5x speed, memorise a few catchphrases, don't take notes, don't read the notes they're given, and then wonder why they are no better-equipped to work with the material than they were before they took the class. because everything in their prior experience, terrifyingly, told them that video is a substitute for structured text in every context.
for someone who needs to make it a substitute, it can be, if implemented correctly. on a population level, that's simply not the case, because the media are too different. this is just a fact.
(edit: previous comment is missing "don't". "if you don't think...". see?)
posted by nobody_truncates at 2:15 PM
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finally: i wasn't joking about the printing press thing, either, and i meant something very definite by "in every culture" in the other comment. the advent of mass literacy was just as destructive to existing modes of social organisation and reproduction (especially oral traditions that do not require text to achieve what they need to achieve) as its potential disappearance would be.
however, there's always path-dependence: if you remove literacy from our culture, you are not going to get a well-developed, functioning set of oral traditions as exist in cultures that did not use text or did but were not so dominated by it. you are going to get (even more) cacaphonous asemic howling punctuated with (even more) frequent mass murder.
therefore, in our cultural context, forces that militate against widespread serious literacy are an existential problem even though certain types of literacy are not literally universally available.
to argue that that's ableist is roughly the same thing as being an anti-vaxxer because a small proportion of people really can't take certain vaccines due to allergies etc.
posted by nobody_truncates at 2:40 PM
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1) back off. 2) you never said anything about aggregate effects, you simply said that, and I quote, "the enhancement to working memory that text offers and audio/video doesn't". Which is simply false.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 2:45 PM
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it's pretty weird to start some shit and then tell the other party to back off.
anyway, if i know where various pieces of information are in a book (books have various features to make this easy, as do many forms of digital text), then i can, for instance, start to construct an argument relying on those pieces of information without having to remember the exact details, because i can easily refer to them and check the details, and i can do so in any order i want. that's a de facto improvement to my working memory that is (1) extremely typical of the way people use text, and (2) very hard to replicate with any sort of linear playback medium. not impossible, just hard enough that those media are unlikely to be used in those ways unless easier alternatives are unavailable.
since the thing i was responding to was about a statistical question, i assumed it was understood that we were talking about aggregated effects.
posted by nobody_truncates at 3:04 PM
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heading obvious bullshit off at the pass: "extremely typical" is not intended to suggest that that's some sort of majority or most frequent use of text, just one of the many ways that significant numbers of people habitually use text (most of whom do not use any other medium in that way to the same degree of complexity).
posted by nobody_truncates at 3:07 PM
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Kinda wish somebody would truncate. More isn't always more, y'know?
posted by Lenie Clarke at 5:12 PM
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presses have caused (and continue to cause) plenty of discomfort
I blame Big-Photocopier
posted by ovvl at 5:34 PM
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Kinda wish somebody would truncate.
that's genuinely hilarious, it's true.
but the initial comment I was responding to was outrageous, both the obnoxious mimicry thing and the devaluation/sowing of confusion about ableism. people often don't take accessibility considerations seriously as it is; it is annoying for someone to mire the matter in further confusion by enlisting it as a punchline in a drive by snark attack based on, at best, a complete misreading of a minor low-effort comment making a pretty obvious point, which, while admittedly apparently unclear (misreadings are largely the author's responsibility), didn't warrant the aggressive response (consideration of the possibility of a misreading being the reader's responsibility). and then they doubled down, so.
posted by nobody_truncates at 6:18 PM
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> complete misreading of a minor low-effort comment making a pretty obvious point
It's not obvious. It's also not correct (just because you or even a majority of readers find text easier to access randomly doesn't mean everybody does, and doesn't make it obvious or correct).
> the fact remains that one can read in "attack mode" much more easily than one can listen in "attack mode"
Also not a fact. Also slightly baffling that you think reading printed text is the only way to engage with content in "attack mode" like debate hasn't existed since well before written language.
Photography and how it upended art then happily evolved to coexist (then film, then video art, then...) is exactly what's happening. Imagining the result as a photocopier is willfully ignoring every previous emergent art. The learning still happens in our meat brains, the signal is interpreted through our dense math tricks and looks and sounds like meaning because to our meat brains it is.
The whole notion of the sanctity and primacy of the author and artist is a fairly new and not universally respected concept. Copyright and other mechanisms are about money and are enforced mostly by those who can afford to - the ones who actually invent art are seldom the ones credited and crying about it up until the last half century or so. They learned enough to imitate jazz and reproduce it palatably then claim to own it.
Imagine a model trained on all the known information in our world but not paywalled (or otherwise monetized just to extricate the concepts). The information it encodes includes billions of ideas and works that can't ever be said to be "owned" by a creator in the distant past. Some potentially valuable percentage of that training data might expose the model to concepts like "studio Ghibli" but those concepts describe both frames of anime and thousands of pieces of fan-created art imitating the style to varying degrees and purposes. The model once exposed captures descriptions of the works to a resolution that sometimes it can recite them nearly exactly - so can the dude who churns out perfect Mona Lisa or Lisa Simpson pieces (forgeries? except LLMs make no claim to be the "original", regardless of how humans use them).
If America is a land of temporarily embarrassed future billionaires the reflexively and angrily anti AI cohort might be described as conveniently forgetful new landlords desperate that their claim be respected before anybody finds out they squatted their way to ownership.
Do not mistake my exhaustion with anti AI reductionism for wanting the greedy megacorps to suffer no consequence or that I think they're responsible stewards of the training data of the world. They should be regulated and otherwise brought to heel - but the cries of plagiarism and copyright are like the weakest possible arguments. The argument that the mechanism is somehow the problem is so bafflingly both parochial and misguided it's signing up to be a useful idiot for the bad guys.
The problem is using machines to ablate responsibility and diffuse consequences, make fatal decisions and perpetuate autocracy. It's not that some people feel uncomfortable that human creativity has competition (which will end up incubating new and different art processed by these highly adaptable meat computers).
posted by Lenie Clarke at 7:02 PM
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Lenie Clarke: "The whole notion of the sanctity and primacy of the author and artist is a fairly new and not universally respected concept. "
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:29 AM
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Lenie Clarke: "y. It's not that some people feel uncomfortable that human creativity has competition "
Human creativity will never have competition because computers cannot be creative.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:31 AM
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but the initial comment I was responding to was outrageous
Are you miffed that I used the word 'bullshit'? You can re-read what I wrote. I prefaced it with "to be fair". And your response was to say, nut uh, and rattle of some stoned dorm room shit about how I'm ignorant of literacy and democracy? cmon.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:17 AM
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But like it wasn't actually ableist. That was a weird thing to say.
posted by mittens at 7:02 AM
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> Human creativity will never have competition because computers cannot be creative.
Humans with computers will, have, and do absolutely find new ways to be creative in ways that humans who reject them for parochial reasons choose not to.
But also, good luck with those universal predictions of a negative. I look forward to you moving the goalposts until they're just tautological.
posted by Lenie Clarke at 7:09 AM
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But like it wasn't actually ableist. That was a weird thing to say.
Reasonable people can disagree.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:20 AM
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Reasonable people can make a case for their assertions.
posted by plagued out moggies at 8:08 AM
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Lenie Clarke: "> Human creativity will never have competition because computers cannot be creative.
Humans with computers will, have, and do absolutely find new ways to be creative in ways that humans who reject them for parochial reasons choose not to.
But also, good luck with those universal predictions of a negative. I look forward to you moving the goalposts until they're just tautological."
You just changed what you said! Humans are upset there is competition for creativity - from what are we talking about? Computers. Then you say it's humans being creative. I'm not the one moving goalposts.
Parochial? A narrow view, my dear? I'm PROUD of that view, so thank you! A computer, an AI generated anything, is not creative. I'm fine with that.
posted by tiny frying pan at 4:31 AM
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I think the disappointing thing about AI is, here we are several years in, and we really haven't seen the fun creative stuff we might have with other art forms. Think about how quickly Bayard gave us his 'Self-portrait as a drowned man'. In my recent gothic reading I was kind of shocked by how quickly writers began parodizing the tropes. People immediately recognize and begin pushing against the boundaries of a medium and making neat new things. Have we seen that, with AI? What would it even look like?
posted by mittens at 4:45 AM
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