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.

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.

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.

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.