words

Needed to rant a little after one too many people asked me this recently about my book reading habit. 

I mean, maybe they should consider watching AI summaries of their TikTok Feed...

Writer | Book lover | Hobby Classical Guitarist | Marketing /subsquid | /classical music nerd and /postcards lady

Ah yes I already saw some video speculating that Spotify is using generative AI to make a bunch of songs, put into playlists of all of the same, make them popular as background music. 

That aside, I find it just so outrageous that this small slice of people - if you go by numbers - is supposed to have so much say about all the rest of us. When their biggest motif isn't human thriving but simple money and power at best. 

If it was they'd do much more on figuring out how ai could supplement education settings, without replacing teachers - just adding to the experience by customizing for certain kids' weaknesses and strengths. 

I don't think an AI mentor will ever replace a real passionate human teacher entirely.

> This forgets completely that the process we go through to understand, to empathize, to reflect on the world created by the author contributes to how fulfilling literature can be. 

> Difficulty is not always the enemy. Having to put in effort is not a bug. It's often feature. 

Thanks for writing this. I loved the whole piece, but these two quotes really resonated with me. It feels like perfect timing. They’re def coming for music too, nothing’s safe at this point. I totally agree with you that AI is a tool, not a replacement for everything. But you know how tech people are, if we leave it up to them, they’ll have us downloading books straight to our brains, just like Neo learned kung fu in The Matrix

Have realized that I have no idea what I’m doing - again!
https://www.musicto.com/andrew/

Aaah a fellow Schubert enjoyer. 

I'm big fan of his uncompleted symphony, and some of his Liederzyklen.

Loved this - and yes - the "difficulty is a feature not a bug" resonates.  I suspect we're in one of those pendulum shifts where AI grokkable constructs are delivering an advantage for people in some kind of "social" way - but it's a dangerous move.  It's been my experience that the world is getting more complex, not less - core ideas remain the same but the level of complexity that technology has created around them makes them harder to work with. If we're training ourselves to only understand distillable ideas we're going to lose out to people who understand the nuance of more complex ideas.  All that to say - thanks for the rant - the writing and that Schubert's D.956 has the same effect on me as the Brahms!

A rant is good for the soul every now and then, I'm sure of it. The preacher's and the choir's.

(Heartily enjoying the way articles now show inline on desktop.)

Bookmarked so I can read and then respond after time's done with basting it.

Bookmarked for tomorrow morning with my coffee