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The article cites the book Everything and Less by Mark McGurl (on the state of the publishing business) that describes how publishers require fiction to be inst

by Vecr 3y ago

The article cites the book Everything and Less by Mark McGurl (on the state of the publishing business) that describes how publishers require fiction to be instantly gratifying and "therapeutic" (not presenting challenging ideas, I assume), and calls it "fiction as a service", and this essentially prevents books from being published that could be seen in new light in the future as values on literature change, even if they don't immediately please a group of vocal Internet users today, even sometimes ones who've not even read the book.

nathan_compton 3y ago
It is kind of interesting to me how much the commodification of text per se dovetails with the appearance of generative AI for text. Generative AI excels at producing this kind of pabulum and if you think about how it works, it sort of makes sense - these AI generate what comes next based on statistics in their corpus. They are, fundamentally, backward looking and non-ruminative. Before the AI weirdos pile in, I don't think this is a fundamental limitation on AI, just an interesting reality of the current strategy. But to respond to your comment in a larger sense, McLuhan once wrote that everyone sees reality in the rear view mirror and only artists look out the window to see what is really happening and what is coming. (I always think of Paul Verhoeven and Robocop when I think about this, since Robocop is uncannily prophetic,or even Die Hard, which in two hours seems to contain the conceptual ingredients of the 2000s in a little over two hours.) The point is that artists are by nature alienated from the public anyway - most truly enlightening messages are the kind of thing few people want to hear. It has always been the trick of good artists to smuggle those ideas into people's brains via one Trojan Horse or another, penetrating whatever guardrails exist at the time to police the mental life of the culture. So, in that sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

by Vecr 3y ago

nathan_compton 3y ago

It is kind of interesting to me how much the commodification of text per se dovetails with the appearance of generative AI for text. Generative AI excels at producing this kind of pabulum and if you think about how it works, it sort of makes sense - these AI generate what comes next based on statistics in their corpus. They are, fundamentally, backward looking and non-ruminative. Before the AI weirdos pile in, I don't think this is a fundamental limitation on AI, just an interesting reality of the current strategy. But to respond to your comment in a larger sense, McLuhan once wrote that everyone sees reality in the rear view mirror and only artists look out the window to see what is really happening and what is coming. (I always think of Paul Verhoeven and Robocop when I think about this, since Robocop is uncannily prophetic,or even Die Hard, which in two hours seems to contain the conceptual ingredients of the 2000s in a little over two hours.) The point is that artists are by nature alienated from the public anyway - most truly enlightening messages are the kind of thing few people want to hear. It has always been the trick of good artists to smuggle those ideas into people's brains via one Trojan Horse or another, penetrating whatever guardrails exist at the time to police the mental life of the culture. So, in that sense, the more things change, the more they stay the same.