Authenticity doesn’t interest me. It’s a way of marketing subpar material: this might not be any good, but at least it’s sincere. You can always tell when a book is going to be dogshit because the blurb copy describes it as ‘raw’ or ‘unflinchingly honest.’ In my personal experience, the writers who make a big show of authentically portraying themselves in their writing, warts and all, raw and authentic, are all actually portraying an entirely separate set of more interesting personality defects that they wish they had. In person, they’re unbearable. Authenticity is exactly the same as phoniness. Good writing is never authentic to the self, because a good writer needs to know that the self is fundamentally unknowable: it’s the ‘wedge-shaped core of darkness’ that Virginia Woolf saw humming beneath the surface of daily life, and definitely not anything you can write autofiction about.

From Sam Kriss, there is more of interest at the link, on varied topics, some of the remarks being quite “off.”  Via Isaac.

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Pope Leo XIV recently tweeted that there is “an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others.”

As a description of how today’s models work, that’s fair enough. AI learned to paint by looking at our paintings.

Paul Graham (also a painter!) notes that this is about to change. Robots wired into the world will soon perceive it for themselves. A robot or AI that learns from its own sensors isn’t borrowing images from others. LLMs were founded on our words but their words will dominate the future.

So picture a robot on a beach at dusk. It watches the sun go down, then paints what it saw. Is it art? The Pope would no doubt still assert an ontological difference. But once the factual distinction between borrowing and perceiving fades, what makes that more than a statement of faith?

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