Severin Matusek

Today, the artistic prompt typed into a chatbot is itself becoming a form of expression. The difference between a clunky query and an inspired one is as wide as the gap between a finger painting and a Van Gogh. Ask an LLM to “write a poem about sadness,” and you’ll get bland, derivative, sentimental drivel. It takes skill and creativity (not to... See more

This has turned communicators of all kinds – from fashion influencers to public health specialists – into Kremlinologists who obsessively analyze the behavior of social media algorithms in the hopes of learning how to please them and (more importantly) how to avoid their punishments.

Hence algospeak. Social media users have learned the hard way that... See more

The past hundred years a canon that defined modernity, post-modernity, and our world was established, celebrated, illuminated, and constantly revised by critics and appreciators who used the pen to make their case. They’re the ones who helped establish cultural significance. They’re the ones who remind us to marvel not at demographics, but at... See more

Amid the breathless techno-optimist awe of artificial intelligence—and ahistorical dismissal of its novelty—it is easy to forget that the current crises of reading and writing are unprecedented in degree, but not in kind. “After Words” considers what’s actually different about today’s information overload and whether we’ve been postliterate for far... See more

AI boosters argue that, while, generative technologies are new and shiny, they’re at root no different from the digital technologies an artist like Fincher uses, or the practical ones an artist like Carpenter used. They argue that AI is just another tool.

But I can’t get past the fact that, for something to count as a tool, it has to help you do... See more

“Like we’ve created a really positive space on the internet,” Wylie added. How many people can really say that? A place where earnestness was a function not a bug, while managing to retain its cool. An almost impossible task, in other words, which Blackbird Spyplane continues to make look easy.

Influencer culture, self-enhancement medicine, cheatware, min/maxing... the signs were coming for a while, but now we have legit, permanent systems at the heart of everyday life that force the decoupling on all of us.

The word for world is forest1. The word for world is mother2. The world is made, and remade, through ‘worlding,’3 ‘worldmaking,’4 or ‘worldbuilding’5. The world is rendered by empire, destroyed, and remade forever after. The world is a model, a simulation, an ‘infinite game’ that is open all the way up to its borders. The world is autonomous and... See more