Severin Matusek

In 2024, an online experiment with 36 ChatGPT users found that use of AI can expand how many creative ideas an individual user has, but at a group level, “users tended to produce less semantically distinct ideas”. That same year, another study reached similar results; this time it was a group of short-story writers who each managed to independently... See more

Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of... See more

Cyberfeminism—a capacious term the Index seeks to both bring into view and complicate—asks us to consider how the integration of technology into our lives should affect our understanding of the gendered self and how technology itself can serve as a tool of liberation, oppression, and intellectual dissemination.

Is it the writer’s role to be strategic or truthful?

Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficiency become the sole metric by which we judge art? Filterworld represents the idea that the messiness of culture can be optimized and that only what is optimized for shareability is worthwhile. I... See more

The ways to provide context on our digital profiles (e.g. Linktree) are very limited. The creator economy does a poor job at that.

In Lanier’s telling, this digital landscape shifted once the success of Google’s ad program revealed that you could make a lot of money on user-generated creative output, which led to the rise of social-media companies such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Initially, these companies emphasized their simple, elegant-looking interfaces and their... See more

“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