Texts as Toys

We can (notionally and provisionally) guess that the three groups constituted roughly a third each, and that the breakdown generally correlates with both age and maturity in the older skills (cf: Douglas Adams’ three laws of technology adoption).

Yeah, I made up a word. I didn’t misspell lucidity .

Ludicity is the ludic quality of an embodied behavior or modality. In this case, text-toy making. You’re allowed to make up words if you’re in the business, just as Lego engineers are allowed to make up new parts.

Even a few hours of playing — that’s the operative verb — with AI reveals something that fearful critiques from a distance seems to miss. The primary mood of the medium is playfulness. The message of the medium, at its current stage of evolution at least, is let’s play.

AI is a ludic technology.

I haven’t had this much fun with a new technology sin... See more

There is always some recoding going on when you read, even if you’re not aware of it. In AI-speak, you’re embedding the work in your own context, and inevitably applying some perceptual filters in the process. When these filters constitute a conscious stance that characterizes you as a reader, you’re doing non-trivial, and perhaps skillful kinds of... See more

And the last third will pivot and learn to enjoy toy-making, and do increasing amounts of it. These are the ones we are interested in. I count myself in this set.

This differences in the ludic qualities of pre-AI and AI textualities leads me to make a prediction: The people who will be enjoy writing with LLMs will not be the same kinds of people who enjoy writing without them, except by accident, as in my case.

By reading with LLMs, I mean either loading a specific text into an LLM and accessing it indirectly ( interrogative play ), or using an LLM on a parallel track to support direct reading ( perspectival play ), with the relative loading of each mode being a function of your expertise and/or enjoyment level in the subject.