AI on rkempe’s blog

AI art isn't for artists (third time's the charm?)

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:52:34 -0400

You know what the missing piece of the puzzle was? It was that AI art isn’t for artists.

Like, it can be. But for the most part it isn’t.

Okay so here’s a “thread” I wrote back in October, in the pre-ChatGPT era, right when everyone was freaking out about AI art, and I’m pulling it out for a third time to add some commentary on which of my thoughts have shifted and which I still think are relevant.

I’m becoming increasingly concerned by this trend

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:46:26 -0400

I’m becoming increasingly concerned by this trend where we’re letting these AI companies convince us that we can use these systems to streamline our lives by flattening the complexity out of them, as if our problems are a standard dataset we can summarize our way out of instead of this massive nightmare jumble of causes and effects we don’t always see and that we definitely do not understand.

And I find it paradoxical how the word “context” has become so associated with the use of LLMs when context is precisely the thing that they are stripping out of our lives. Knowledge isn’t supposed to exist in a vacuum; it’s supposed to be developed through being in conversation with other people and their needs and with the real world and with other knowledge, and it is through the specificity gained through that kind of conversation that information becomes more meaningful. We act as if this act of seeking and internalizing context is grunt work that should be offloaded toa machine in order to make room for the real work, when it is, in fact, the real work.

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #5

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:00:04 -0500

I am still trying to get rid of my backlog of links I wanted to post about, so please bear with me.

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #4

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:04:20 -0500

I am currently doing what I am going to call “spring cleaning” on my blog. What this means is that I want to get rid of a huge backlog of articles and things I started writing about in the past because I have lots of ideas for new things I want to do here (how shocking), and I’m honestly not super happy with the direction this blog has been taking. I don’t think I write enough about my own ideas, or about the things I spend hours learning about. In fact, I don’t think I write enough at all.

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #3

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:20:43 -0500

Hi! Here is a linkdump. I told myself I would post these with really minimal context because I am too busy to summarize these things and have a really giant backlog of links I’ve been wanting to post, but uh, the writer in me won out and I failed. Some of these have way more description than others. But I do also have quotes I’ve pulled for some of them, so maybe that will help make this post more interesting.

Help, I’m Drowning in Articles About the Dumpster Fire That Is AI (Ep. 1)

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 22:54:34 -0400

I have been compiling a list of articles and academic papers I come across about AI, since trying to understand what it’s doing to society is now one of my obsessions. There is, alas, no good way to review all of these articles. I now have a four page document filled with links to articles about AI, and it’s still getting things added to it at least on a weekly basis. So, uh. This might become an ongoing series.

Linkdump: Interesting Things I Looked At (Very) Recently (2025-08-12)

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 23:07:33 -0400

Most of these are from today, but some are from yesterday, and a few are from last week. The descriptions will be short, since I am short on time.

Thoughts on writing with generative AI

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:19:20 -0400

I’ve been attempting to use generative AI to help me write documentation because there’s so much pressure to be able to say you’re using it right now, and I honestly think the outputs are unusable without essentially rewriting the whole thing.

I find the outputs are:

Excessively verbose (please get to the point)
Subtly incorrect, and I’d rather just research and write correct information than spend time fact checking AI
Not quite what I want, because the machine can’t read my mind, and I feel like prompting it correctly and then fact checking and editing the output would be more time consuming than just writing the damn thing
Just like, tonally weird

I don’t know, it’s a weird experience. I will give it this:

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read Lately, Episode 3

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:23:47 -0400

You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #2

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 15:34:26 -0400

Here’s another linkdump—a list of links to stuff I thought was interesting but likely won’t get to properly reviewing any time soon.¹

I reserve the right to more fully review any of these article at a later date, of course. (Though at this point, it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen.)

We need more cross-disciplinary interaction than ever

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 17:53:56 -0400

In this day and age, we need more cross-disciplinary interaction than ever, because technology has rapidly become everyone’s problem in a way it wasn’t before, and we all need to have common language to discuss what is happening.

I was listening to an English grad student talk about the environmental impact of “algorithms” during an academic panel today, and while I know that what he was talking about was really generative AI, technical people aren’t going to take you seriously if while critiquing them, you start conflating generative AI with algorithms in general.

Getting to the End of the Thought; or, Why Write in the Age of AI?

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:14:25 -0400

I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of writing recently, especially in regard to how it’s been influenced by the advent of generative AI. In the past few months, I’ve had a lot of conversations in which people claimed that generative AI is just as good at writing as humans now, or better, in many cases. While I agree that AI generation tools are, at this point, better at the mechanics of writing than the average person, I have always found their outputs to be shallow and devoid of interesting surprises.

AI was never about democratizing creativity

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 21:15:34 -0400

I’ve started thinking a little bit about creativity in the context of AI. If you’ve known me for several years, you might be aware that I’m really not a fan of the word “creativity” or of its noun and adjective form “creative”. I’ve mellowed on it a little bit over the years, but generally speaking I still believe that it’s a wildly misused buzzword with dubious meaning in the average colloquial setting, and that lots of people actually have no idea what creativity is. It really bothers me when people conflate creativity with artistic ability, or when people act like it’s some sort of gene you either have or don’t, instead of understanding that it’s a skill you can improve. But in a lot of ways, it’s the best word we have, and so I’m going to use it today.

Generative AI devalues process work

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:10:54 -0400

Part of why Generative AI is bad is because it devalues process work. It devalues actually using your brain to think through problems, it devalues conversations, it devalues expertise, and in losing process work you also lose all of the other interesting directions/ideas/work that would have come out of it. Generally speaking I am quite concerned about this.

Some Interesting Things I’ve Read/Watched: Link Dump #1

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 22:07:57 -0400

I keep coming across articles (and occasionally videos, and occasionally fiction or poetry) online that I want to share and comment on, but I recently realized that I will never have time to fully comment on everything I read that I find interesting. So I’m pulling another page out of Cory Doctorow’s book: here is a dump of links to cool stuff, along with some (hopefully very) brief descriptions of why I found these articles interesting. (Also, here is a link to a link dump where Doctorow ¹ talks about link blogging. It might be interesting for you to look at.)

The idea of AI-assisted writing is absolutely terrifying to me

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 10:33:55 -0400

The idea of AI-assisted writing is absolutely terrifying to me, not because I’m worried about the future of writing as a career – that has been slowly dying for decades anyway - but because writing is the process of figuring out what you actually think, and that is a skill that is slowly dying.

I found 1984 to be an extremely disturbing novel, because the premise involved slowly limiting the types of thoughts the populace was able to have by limiting their language. I can’t help but worry that we’re headed on a different, more insidious path to the same end result.

AI art isn't for artists (redux)

Tue, 16 May 2023 01:19:50 -0400

You know what the missing piece of the puzzle was? It was that AI art isn’t for artists.

Like, it can be. But for the most part it isn’t.

Here’s a “thread” I wrote back in October, in the pre-ChatGPT era, right when everyone was freaking out about AI art, and I’m pulling it out again to add some commentary on which of my thoughts have shifted and which I still think are relevant.

AI art isn't for artists

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 23:35:23 -0400

You know what the missing piece of the puzzle was? It was that AI art isn’t for artists.

Like, it can be. But for the most part it isn’t.

Like, when you think about it, if you need a bowl, you can commission a ceramic artist to make a beautiful one for you, right? Or you can make one yourself, which will give you varying results depending on how skilled of a potter you are. Or you can just go buy a bowl at Dollarama, because you need a bowl, don’t have (or don’t want to spend) a shit ton of money, and Dollarama gives you enough choice that it’s not really worth dealing with a potter or becoming one. It’s just a bowl, for god’s sake. Who cares?