Carly

As we train our sights on what we oppose, let’s recall the costs of surrender. When we use generative AI, we consent to the appropriation of our intellectual property by data scrapers. We stuff the pockets of oligarchs with even more money. We abet the acceleration of a social media gyre that everyone admits is making life worse. We accept the... See more

A generation before Hesse, Whitman, after boldly declaring that he contains multitudes, recognized across them “a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.”

We call this consciousness, this higher unity of personhood, soul .

After 20 years of reporting on migration I’ve come to learn that practically every migration story is also, in one way or another, and somewhere along the way, also a story of climate change. To migrate, particularly from south to north, is to move through a multitude of ecosystems that are also migrating and mutating as a matter of survival.

I’m very often lost in a maze of my own making, seeking in my thinking and reading to constellate divergent things until they feel naturally conjoined, at the very least in the realm of images, following models like those of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, the Dutch scholar and spiritualist, and Aby Warburg, the founder of the wholly unclassifiable Warburg... See more

ChatGPT can instantly summarize classic texts, notes Rothman, but “the human version of reading involves finitude,” and it’s this quality—the impossibility of true optimization—that makes a literary life, or any life, interesting.

“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 a widely cited study by MIT researchers published in June, participants who wrote SAT-style essays with the assistance of ChatGPT engaged a narrower spectrum of neural networks while writing, struggled to accurately quote what they had just written, and—thanks to generative AI’s inbuilt tendency toward cliché—used the same handful of refried... See more