Book reviews status and why AI is worse than drug addiction
There was recently an interesting article published in the New York Times: Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?
It’s a grim business to linger on the numbers. In the 1960s, a good first novel might receive 90 individual newspaper reviews in America and England, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote in his memoir “Ardent Spirits.” By 2009, the year “Ardent Spirits” was issued, he reckoned the number was 20 at best. What would it be now? Two? Three?
A few magazines, of course, still run inspired book criticism; essential trees are still standing though the vast underbrush is gone. And the online discourse has its moments. But here’s another number: Not long ago, someone estimated that there were seven full-time book critics left in America. With The Post’s Book World gone, that number has dropped to five.
As a lonely and shellshocked survivor of this decimation, I find it hard not to envy the critics in London, which still has at least seven daily or Sunday papers in which a serious author might hope for a review. The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.
AI will, naturally, never replace humanity; even if Skynet happens and every single homo sapiens is physically murdered by machines, there's no replacement for people like Toni Morrison, Lester Bangs, Anthony Lane. From the article:
But here’s a catch with A.I. It’s easy to tell when a reference, or a comparison, or a sentence, doesn’t belong to a writer. Erudition and style aren’t forgeable for long; they still must be earned. As for A.I.’s sleek, space-efficient text, we’ve already grown accustomed to what that sounds like — the flat, consistent tone, the pert little summary bits, the repetitions, the impersonal and fluorescent-lit mood. Reading it, you feel you’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name.
At times, I've used Pangram, the AI detector service, to see how much some people are using AI. A former mountebank manager of mine used to answer team chat messages by physically scurrying away and then regurgitating something that AI handed to him without really knowing what he did. It reminds me of this video.
Is there a difference between people who use AI and people who are addicted to drugs? People who do drugs either want to feel something they can't feel without drugs or they want to feel nothing; people who use AI want to outsource thought and also outsource their ability to feel.
When doing drugs, there's a toll on yourself and other people.
When doing AI, the climate catastrophe marches on and you still have to reverse-engineer a pile of slop to be able to use any of what's usable.
Speaking for myself, the use of AI is often far worse than doing destructive drugs. I'm not kidding.