Stella

Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in the first place.

making art is hard. there is no cheat code that would make it easy. excavating the soul should be hard; it would be alarming if it wasn’t. the satisfaction you feel, however, when you see the words trooping along the page exactly as you dreamed them up, melodic and honest; it is heaven made real.

ai is the one issue in our modern politics that feels representative of all that is bankrupt and ugly in the world. it’s an environmental issue [the substantial energy consumption for training and using these machines averages the energy consumption of what multiple american households would over the course of a year, emitting tens of thousands of... See more

to love something enough to be moved to fire and upset in your defense of it is proof of that love.

“I think since I wrote ‘The Poppy War’ I’ve had this enormous fear of arrested development. I think it is really dangerous for professional success to come to you too early, because then you start thinking, Oh, what I did when I was a child is sufficient. The only way around this is to be deeply critical of everything I’ve done before and try to... See more

“I actually am afraid of being totally happy with my work, because, if you are perfectly satisfied with your abilities, there’s nowhere else to go. You might as well be dead.”