Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it

This is exactly what the LLMs cannot do, they can't access the individual's wonderful jumble of knowledge & experience, they cannot do anything startling with language except fail in a mechanical way that might, at times, be interesting. (This lament brought to you by an early train, no coffee yet.)

Aware I am preaching to the choir, but many at my day job and the young people I know are scarily too happy to outsource their writing. Als's essay pulls from all across his vast knowledge, looping and linking and juxtaposing while the language he writes with is both startling and complex and clear.

Not only is Hilton Al's personal history "The Story Part" beautiful and thoughtful and moving, it is a perfect illustration of why we should never ever give creative writing to a statistical-word-order-machine. Language is our tool for explaining thought and wonder; we should fight to keep it ours.