AI Has Nothing to Communicate

Cory Doctorow:

As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I’ve concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist’s mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel – a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc – in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else’s mind.

Art, in other words, is an act of communication – and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens – if not hundreds – of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren’t even conscious, but they are definitely decisions, and I don’t make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete. One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is definitely is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.

I’m reminded of Dorothy Sayers’ comments on the artistic act in The Mind of the Maker. Worth looking into.

Twitter and Emotional Sabotage

Rigney mentions social media early in his book, acknowledging that such technologies “amplify and reinforce our spiritual and social sickness.” But the problem, he says, “runs deeper than Twitter, Facebook, and cable news.” He’s right that social media is not the source of our problems. Delete your account and you will still wrestle with sin. But practically speaking, using Twitter and other social media eats away at the qualities that make a person a good leader. The more time you spend on Twitter, the less sober-minded, or differentiated, you become.

My essay on Twitter is now live on the Theopolis blog.

Of Knights and Pilgrims

Well, I have joined the herd and started a podcast.

Of Knights and Pilgrims cover

Of Knights and Pilgrims is an audio commentary on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. If you read this blog, you probably already know that I’m a big fan of the book. Unfortunately for the world of podcast listeners, one of my coworkers is also a big fan, and lo! unto you a podcast was born.

Episodes will be posted every Wednesday starting next week (Feb. 5). The first two are introductions to the poem, and the rest will be our summary and analysis of each of the twelve cantos in Book I. If we’re feeling especially spry, we may sally forth into Book II this summer and publish new episodes in the fall.

If you’re new to Spenser, we highly recommend starting at the shallow end. Roy Maynard has a very accessible modernized version here, and Thomas Copeland’s audio recording is fantastic. With great works of literature, there are no such things as spoilers, so you might even try dipping your toes into a children’s version. (Project Gutenberg has some for free. Personally, I’m excited about this new prose edition, assuming it ever actually comes out.)

One last thing: podcasting is a cheap hobby, but it isn’t free. If you’d like to sponsor a future episode, drop some coins in my Ko-fi coffer.

What I Read in 2024

No commentary this year, though I did send a newsletter with a few highlights.

*Asterisks mark books I read on Kindle.

For School (6)

  • The Odyssey, Homer (trans. Emily Wilson)
  • Watership Down, Richard Adams
  • The Tombs of Atuan, Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Gilgamesh the Hero, Geraldine McCaughrean
  • The God Beneath the Sea, Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen
  • The Oresteia, Aeschylus (trans. Ted Hughes)

Children’s (11)

  • Penrod, Booth Tarkington
  • *Children of the New Forest, Francis Marryat
  • *The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest, Charlotte M. Yonge
  • *Moonfleet, John Meade Falkner
  • Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
  • The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
  • *Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
  • The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, Julie Andrews Edwards
  • The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
  • Teddy’s Button, Amy Le Feuvre
  • *The Midnight Folk, John Masefield

Fiction (8)

  • The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
  • Have His Carcase, Dorothy L. Sayers
  • The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
  • *The High Window, Raymond Chandler
  • *Penny Plain, O. Douglas
  • *The Mystery, Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
  • *We Did Not Reason Why, H. W. Taylor
  • Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan

Non-fiction (14)

  • *Hills and the Sea, Hilaire Belloc
  • Poetics, Aristotle (trans. Kenneth A. Telford)
  • Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubnar
  • A Nature Diary, Richard Adams
  • The Theopolitan Vision, Peter J. Leithart
  • Good to Great, Jim Collins
  • The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt
  • The One Thing, Gary Keller
  • *Leadership and Emotional Sabotage, Joe Rigney
  • Schaeffer on the Christian Life, William Edgar
  • Apocalypse Never, Michael Shellenberger
  • *Men and Marriage, George Gilder
  • Hospitality, Mark Brians and Drew Knowles
  • The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton

Read-Alouds (2)

  • Brave Ollie Possum, Ethan Nicolle
  • The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

Total: 41

Books and Seasons

Robin Sloan is reading The Green Knight on New Years Day. I plan to read it over the Twelve Days of Christmas. That puts me in mind of other books I try to read at specific times of the year.

  • Advent: Auden’s For the Time Being
  • Christmas: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever; The Green Knight; A Christmas Carol
  • Lent: Piers Plowman; Hamlet

I wonder what other book/season pairings there are in my life. Maybe I’ll add Dandelion Wine to read over the summer.

Support the Finishing

Sometime I think that, even amidst all these ruptures and renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, and those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms and institutions that support the finishing of things, and those that don’t.

Finishing only means: the work remains after you relent, as you must, somehow, eventually. When you step off the treadmill. When you rest.

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. […] Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a book, an album, a video game: at least you are TRYING.

Robin Sloan

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was surely the impetus behind Good Work, a reaction against the endless “now” of social media. A print magazine must be finished before it be mailed to subscribers. When it’s finished, it’s done. It exits. The work has ended for now. You can rest.

In the new year, I plan to start a crowdfunding campaign for a limited run of Good Work. I think that’s the way forward: plan the issues, raise money, write, print, send. I’m sure I’ll cite Robin’s newsletter here in support of the project.

An Ambassador from the Transcendent World

Teacher: The modern world isn’t the only world there is, though. There is another world and it is at play right now—it’s a world behind the modern world, beneath it, beyond it—and you might need to walk around in this world “for more than ten minutes” in order to understand how things work there. [This book] is an artifact from this other world, and the way I’m interpreting it for you is a skill born of this other world. Every day during class, I do my best to present this world to you—to create entrances into it, so you can spend a little time there and see “how they do things there.” But, it’s difficult.  

Student: Why? 

Teacher: Because it’s not a physical place and I can’t force you to go there. It’s an intellectual place, a spiritual place, and the only way to enter this place is to genuinely want to be there—and you have to want to be there before you fully understand what it is.  

Student: I’ve never heard anyone say anything like this before.  

Teacher: That’s because it’s a bit alarming to hear it stated in such terms, even though it’s the most accurate way of describing it. 

Student: What is it? What is this other world? Does it have a name?  

Teacher: Yes. Your world, the modern world, is the immanent world. The other world is the transcendent world.    

Student: And what’s your relationship to the transcendent world? 

Teacher: As a classical teacher, I’m an ambassador of the transcendent world. My job is to present the transcendent world to you in such a way that you’ll want to take up residence there, be naturalized, and become a subject.   

~Gibbs

Obviously a conscious choice to use “subject” instead of “citizen” in the final sentence.