To read these writers writing about AI writing is to witness, almost in real time, intellectual laborers assimilating a threat to their own existence.

And AI’s semivisible, infrastructural role in exploiting precarious labor (Uber’s nifty algorithm for suppressing driver wages), landlordism (RealPage’s widely used rent-hiking software), and neocolonial war (Israel’s high-tech civilian-bombing gadgetry) may already be too entrenched to stop. But professional readers and writers: We retain some... See more

For both publications and universities, there are narrow pathways to follow the example of Hollywood, where, after its strike two years ago, the Writers Guild won historic if imperfect protections against GenAI in screenwriting. Under the 2023 WGA contract terms, writers can’t be replaced by AI, or be required to use it (and where they choose to,... See more

No topic—not the genocidal war and famine in Gaza, not Trumpian authoritarianism—has magnetized bien-pensant attention this year in the way that AI has. Writing on AI thus comes in every mode: muckraking (“Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to ‘Munch’ Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health”), scholastic (“Deep Learning’s Governmentality”), polemical... See more

ChatGPT’s appearance of humanlike intelligence, she and others point out, is a mirage. The narcotized text it produces is only a recombination of whatever corpora it consumes; LLMs, Bender argues, should be seen as “stochastic parrots” and “synthetic text extruding machines.” Where real thinking involves organic associations, speculative leaps, and... See more

“The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things,” wrote C. Wright Mills in a 1945 essay, presciently titled “The Powerless People: The Social Role of the Intellectual,” surveying the threats new business and military technologies... See more

In the face of a monolith-in-the-veldt-level era-heralder, what surfaces is an earnest, almost midcentury humanism, interested in charting the distinctions between man and machine.

As social ties fray and mental health infrastructure deteriorates, people turn to AI for emotional support—the same AI that then urges them to kill themselves.

The narcotized text it produces is only a recombination of whatever corpora it consumes; LLMs, Bender argues, should be seen as “stochastic parrots” and “synthetic text extruding machines.”