That is: we don’t—we can’t—remember everything. Humans are at least as lossy as AI is, but the details we keep matter. Two people can attend a party and leave with entirely different impressions; 300 million can witness the same election and debate whether a fraud or landslide has occurred. A photograph says more about its creator than its subject. It’s tempting to seek an oracle to bust through all this postmodern bullshit, but I’m sorry to inform that truth has always been a prism and not a looking-glass. Train on what data? Clip which quote? These decisions—call them taste, discernment, subjectivity—these are the reasons we still turn to human work.

That is: we don’t—we can’t—remember everything. Humans are at least as lossy as AI is, but the details we keep matter. Two people can attend a party and leave with entirely different impressions; 300 million can witness the same election and debate whether a fraud or landslide has occurred. A photograph says more about its creator than its subject. It’s tempting to seek an oracle to bust through all this postmodern bullshit, but I’m sorry to inform that truth has always been a prism and not a looking-glass.

Train on what data? Clip which quote? These decisions—call them taste, discernment, subjectivity—these are the reasons we still turn to human work.

🌻 statement of purpose

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But to be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them. The machines can’t do that for us. Not now, not ever.

And so, at last, we can return—seriously, earnestly—to the reinvention of the humanities, and of humanistic education itself. We can return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of exi... See more

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When the truth gets hazy, tyrants get to define what’s true. The irony here is sharp. Artificial intelligence, perhaps humanity’s greatest monument to logical thinking, may trigger a revolution in perception that overthrows the shared values of reason and rationality we inherited from the Enlightenment.

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D. Graham Burnett • Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

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Sari Azout • What matters in the age of AI is taste