So to conclude: what we are currently seeing with text AI is the equivalent of the neo-medieval slop that rulers tried to build 100 years ago, not realising that they were not speaking the same language as their audience any more.

Many projections about the impact of generative AI assume a passive audience just waiting to be fed with familiar content. But popular tastes will change and adapt.

So what will a functionalist turn in text production look like? I think we will have to consider a lot more closely what actually works in terms of teaching and engaging readers.

Many books nowadays are sold based on the position of their authors in a hierarchy of cultural production.

Things will not remain constant! Many AI boosters are like the Spanish rulers in the 16th century looking at all that new silver.

So I think much discussion of the effects of generative AI miss the mark because they don't understand how mass industrial production also devalues the status of the form, and shifts focus to whether a functional goal has been reached.

With industrial building came a turn away from building as expression and towards functionalism. We can expect the same thing to happen with text production.

Le Courbusier said, a house is a machine for living in. Soon we will see books even more as machines for accomplishing a particular goal.

So today, text production is no longer a craft activity. Generative AI can produce the equivalent of mass-produced concrete buildings. This means they express something different: Producing a book will soon no longer be a claim to a particular kind of craft status.

As building methods became industrialised, peaking with the development of poured concrete focus shifted instead to the functional.

Dictators who tried to speak in the old language of cathedrals using the new medium of concrete were rightly mocked.

To solve this problem we need TikTok to discover Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster, and start cancelling each other for being non-U.

My framing doesn't disagree with yours, but I am centring certain historical dynamics of practice and internal constitution rather than a sensibility or hostility.

This is their constitutive social and ideological base. This is who they are and what they do, and they will defend this to the death. So hitting universities hard, in my framing, is simply an extension of past practice of "hitting people like us, because they have nowhere else to go."

I'd add in reply to your and Sara's points that it is also not necessarily about hatred as such, so much as indifference (which is worse). The international centre left is defined for 30+ years by a theory and practice of*triangulation overseen by PR consultants.*

Det låter som att han även avsky sina läsare och har noll respekt för deras kunskaper och tror att han kan få betalt genom att mata dem med Boris Johnsonfasoner

Alla 'stoiker' som väljer Jordan Peterson framför Greta är oseriösa stoiker.

You place your smaklökar at risk if you confuse the two.

You can tell Boromir is a 1,000 point character by how he kept making all those HT rolls to stay conscious despite being at -40 from a bunch of arrows.