That for me is the poetics of encryption. Artists are already using generative AI as a tool to reimagine our relation to the perennial big ideas. Like: What is identity? What is spirituality? What is cultural heritage? How can the human resist the fast-moving disruption to our lives and to our long-standing imaginaries? These are the questions that... See more

Soon, it won’t matter if you have 400 Grateful Dead albums; AI systems will be able to generate live recordings from 1974 that never happened.

And eventually, Netflix will generate TV shows that no one has ever seen, for an audience of one.

The generative long tail will go on and on and on.

Most of the time, it’ll degenerate into slop and banality.... See more

Many insightful cultural theorists and strategists have written about this struggle: Kyle Chayka on the filterworld flattening culture, Matt Klein on cultural stasis amidst creative surplus, and Beth Bentley on meh-ification. The focus has generally been on how algorithms have warped contemporary culture.