Severin Matusek

At one point I was struggling to connect the dots and our moderator, the science fiction scholar Sherryl Vint, made the very astute observation that what seems to capture my interest is the gap between models and reality.

I’d describe my time from 2015-2020 (when the book will be published) in three distinct phases:

• Phase I: 2015-2016: Discovery, exploration, initial research, hypothesis generation (funded by the Ford Foundation)


• Phase II: 2016-2018: Experience, experimenting, hypothesis testing (working at GitHub)


• Phase III: 2018-2020: Refining, summarizing,

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“Everyone’s focused on capabilities – typography, grids, colour theory – but those are the first things AI can replicate,” he says. “Then we pivot to taste, but taste alone isn’t resilient either. You can train a model on what’s tasteful.”

Real differentiation, Forest argues, comes from “taste- making ”, the ability to not only recognise trends, but... See more

This means we can think about our approach with steadier footing instead of vacillating in response to the hype, whether it comes from the top as LinkedIn posts by prepper CEOs or from the bottom by the hustleheads on X.

This point of view – which troubles the official narrative being rolled out by AI companies – is not rare. In his newsletter “How to Survive the Internet” the author and journalist Jamie Bartlett paraphrased a recent conversation he’d had with someone he described as an “AI power user”: “‘So are you producing more stuff per day?’ I ask.... See more

“The model is the art work,”