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Matt Stone's avatar

Did anyone else have a visceral negative reaction to the smiling quartet of tech bros in the photo. These aholes will destroy anything for money.

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Peter C. Meilaender's avatar

I am teaching a little course on Orwell's journalism and just this week came across some interesting comments from him that seem to foreshadow AI publishing.

"It is just thinkable that books may someday be written by machinery, and it is quite easy to imagine poems being produced partly by fortuitous means--by some device similar to the kaleidoscope, for instance." (From a review of Herbert Read. Orwell is not claiming that this development would be desirable.)

"Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.... [T]he history of totalitarian societies, or of groups of people who have adopted the totalitarian outlook, suggests that loss of liberty is inimical to all forms of literature.... Probably novels and stories will be completely superseded by film and radio productions. Or perhaps some kind of low-grade sensational fiction will survive, produced by a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum. It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.... Imagination--even consciousness, so far as possible--would be eliminated from the process of writing." (These are widely scattered quotes from his essay "The Prevention of Literature.")

And of course this, from his invaluable "Politics and the English Language": "A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you--even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent--and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself." I read that last passage rather differently this time than I have read it in the past.

Ted, thanks for helping keep us abreast of this rapidly changing landscape.

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