For those of us working in reading- and writing-heavy fields — chiefly media and academia

While spoken in the voice of an individual author, each piece in this emergent corpus stages a more collective drama.

The single, vital aspect of humanity that LLMs can never match, the essays assert again and again, is our imperfection.

According to the logic of market share as social transformation, if you move fast and break enough things, nothing can contain you.

With every click and prompt, every system-tweaking inch we give to the spectral author, we help underwrite AI profits (or at least the next round of equity funding; no major AI product has yet come close to actually making money).

The way out of AI hell is not to regroup around our treasured flaws and beautiful frailties, but to launch a frontal assault. AI, not the human mind, is the weak, narrow, crude machine.

Notice the poverty of the latter’s style, the artless syntax and plywood prose, and the shoddiness of its substance: the threadbare platitudes, pat theses, mechanical arguments. And just as important, read to recognize the charm, surprise, and strangeness of the real thing.

Until AI systems stop gaining in sophistication [..]

Whatever nuance is needed for its interception, resisting AI’s further creep into intellectual labor will also require blunt-force militancy. The steps are simple. Don’t publish AI bullshit.

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 hand over our autonomy, at the very moment of emerging American fascism.

A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a “stereotype” — a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake — of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.