Greetings from the Porch,

I've been hearing from many subscribers of Local Culture who are enjoying the most recent issue on work and leisure.

• In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about St. Brigid, Ozempic, and Stehekin.

• Neil Peterson wonders what it takes to make a real century farm: "You can’t have a farm divorced from community, and you can’t have community without people. A farm isn’t a farm without a farmer."

• Elizabeth Stice points out that plenty of teachers never abandoned tried-and-true pedagogy methods that can mitigate the temptations AI poses: "We may ask ourselves how we can defend academic integrity from AI, but we should first ask how we became so vulnerable to AI in academia."

• Dennis Uhlman commends Stanley Hauerwas as a guide to strengthen local communities: "The path to a more moral society begins with bringing a neighbor a meal."

• Michael J. Sauter reviews Martin Shaw about his new book: "Traveling westward evokes not merely geographic displacement but a deep interior unmooring. This sense of dislocation animates Liturgies of the Wild’s central concern: what happens to a people when story and place are severed."

• Christian McNamara analyzes Wake Up Dead Man and its portrayal of conversion: "The film's mystery is a satisfying one, but its pleasures are secondary to the consideration of the larger mystery of the Christian faith."

• Michial Farmer listens to songs about angels (and 1998?) this week.

One book on AI that’s been getting some buzz is AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can't, and How to Tell the Difference by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor. It’s not particularly original or well written, but it is levelheaded and offers a good, accessible description of how algorithmic and AI systems work and where they are most dangerous. For instance, they warn that doomsdayer “criti-hype” can distract attention from the immediate consequences of generative AI:

The real impact of AI is likely to be subtler: AI will shift power away from workers and centralize it in the hands of a few companies. For instance, we’ve seen how companies building text-to-image AI have used artists’ work without compensation or credit. Pausing new AI development does nothing to redress the harms of already-deployed models on creative workers. One way to do right by artists would be to tax AI companies and use the proceeds to fund the arts. Unfortunately, the political will to even consider such options is lacking. Feel-good interventions like hitting the pause button distract from these difficult policy debates.

Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,

Jeff Bilbro