The world doesn't look like anything
AI hot takes; new story; Robert Frost; the appearance of reality
Newsletter rules demand you sit through self-promotional housekeeping before you get my hot takes on AI.
Self-promotional housekeeping
I have a short story called “Walt by Walt” in the Spring 2025 issue of Santa Monica Review, available for purchase here. If tales of 87-year-old widowers are your thing, it’s nearly mandatory.
The response to the story has been an unexpected delight — thoughtful notes from friends & strangers psychoanalyzing Walt in various deep ways.
As always, my past stories live here.
In March, I had fun interviewing the great Adam Plunkett about his critical biography of Robert Frost, Love and Need. Thanks to all the friends old & new who came to Powell’s for our conversation. You can find it on YouTube and buy Adam’s book anywhere. As I said ninety-six times that night, the book is terrific even for those as ignorant of poetry as I am. Please savor every page, as you have ten years before his next book.
From June 21 to July 12, I’ll have a photo in a group show at the Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis. More on that in my next newsletter.
Merci, Seigneur
Before the next sections, I’d like to borrow a disclaimer from Montaigne:
I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of things that are better and more truly handled by the masters of the trade … These are fancies of my own, by which I do not try to give knowledge of things but of myself.
To disclaim the disclaimer, one should not go around comparing one’s internet newsletter to Michel de Montaigne. His idiosyncratic musings were pretty good! But those sentences capture how I feel.
Artificial art
There are many reasons LLMs may never live up to the fanfare — hallucination & the exhaustion of training material & so on. I remain gently skeptical of trusting them with anything important. But let’s stipulate to the big dreams of AI evangelists in order to muse on what it would mean for art.
I’ve heard it said that no one will read or watch the creative work of AI because they know a human being wasn’t behind it. That would be great by me, but I’m not so sure. If the goal is entertainment, and if AI hits all the beats (this is our enormous stipulation), I can imagine people picking up or tuning into the result without second thought.
Art, though, or so I’d like to believe, is different. Anthony Powell says in his memoirs that “all works of art require an effort at the receiving end,” and I think that’s as good a distinction between art and entertainment as any. Art asks for more than plot figuring or whodunit detecting — if only for us to supply a certain kind of attention and to open ourselves to an aesthetic response.
In particular, art asks us to bring to it what isn’t already there — to see something more than the material in front of our eyes. There is, metaphorically, a negative space that art leaves to the audience. When someone complains that a short story doesn’t say what the hell happened, or points to a Ryman & says “so it’s white paint?” they’re not wrong about what’s there, but they might be missing some of what isn’t.
Which brings me to my take: why would I go looking for the unsaid in what’s in front of me if I know that an algorithm created it probabilistically? Why would I search for my own humanity in what’s implied or danced around? What reason do I have to believe that there’s anything not there? I’m sure a robot can paint an abstract that resembles great art, but why would I ask what those abstractions are saying to me? Well, possibly because I’ve stipulated to too much and the machine is now conscious, in which case I guess I’m intrigued by what art its experience leads it to, why the hell not, let’s call that a new category & I’ll keep the human stuff too.
You could imagine, post-AI, placing a greater premium on “difficult” or “challenging” art — the stuff that’s more than the words or the brushstrokes — which shows how self-serving this take is because that’s the stuff I like.
You can also take these thought experiments too far. If AI were to produce Mrs. Dalloway or The Transit of Venus word for word, like Pierre Menard, that’s not art? Or if AI paints something & you tell me a person did it & I have a profound reaction to it, well, I’m gonna hear about it then. So those are tough questions & it’s time to pull the rip cord with my next take.
Second take: even if AI starts making art in every sense, it’s not going to make your art. For my thank you to David Lynch, I came up with the words “singular,” “particular,” “quirky,” “on such an exact wavelength,” said that “no one else could have made his movies,” and meant it all as high praise. (Of course, the art also needs to be good, and he had that part covered.) A conscious Skynet trained on 60 years of ArtForum isn’t any likelier to be on your singular particular quirky exact wavelength than any of the millions of artistic humans who are already out there.
And if you’re not trying to be on that unique wavelength, what’s the point anyway?
The disclaimer-to-content ratio is unbelievable
The preceding idiosyncratic musings were more than enough for one newsletter. It gets worse from here. My plan for the final section was to complain about the green-screen ads on MLB telecasts, which make the bat flicker in & out of existence & somehow annoy me even more than the automatic baserunner in extra innings.
However, on the topic of wavelengths…
Two a.m. dorm-room musings
I have a number of beliefs about existence that I’ve never managed to successfully explain to anyone. Here is one of them: The world doesn’t look like anything.
I’m going to do my best & if any scientists or philosophers write in to call me funny names, or to say this was all sorted out in ancient Greece, I will publish their letters in full — which will make my next issue a lot easier.
Objects emit or reflect different wavelengths of light, so people tell me. We see those different wavelengths as colors. But the object doesn’t possess color; it’s simply emitting or reflecting the physical phenomenon we know as light. The light doesn’t have color either; it’s energy or electromagnetic radiation (or whatever the hell it is) moving through space at different wavelengths. The light isn’t itself blue. Our eyes and brains are pulling information from the light and presenting it in a form we call vision, such that we see the object as blue. That’s one of many possible ways to process or “display” the information in that electromagnetic radiation.
Which might seem obvious & unimportant, and it is. But it’s also fun to “see” past this persistent illusion. When you look at something, color appears as a quality of the surface of that object — a quality more substantial, more visible, than what it actually is, which is the reflectivity of molecules to certain electromagnetic radiation. Try looking at a tree while reminding yourself that the green you’re seeing isn’t there (points at tree), it’s here (taps forehead). Not just “oh yeah, that’s true,” but really make yourself believe it. All that’s out there is some matter that reflects certain waves. It’s trippy.
When I think this way, I start to “see” the whole world as gray, all objects colorless like unfinished polygons in an early video game. But of course they’re not gray either. They don’t look like anything. (When astrophotographers assign colors to wavelengths of light, they’re using tools to do something like what our mind does with the visible spectrum. Thank you friend of the newsletter N.C., who shares no responsibility for the rest of this nonsense.)
Of course — & you knew this was coming — the world doesn’t sound like anything either. There aren’t sounds out there; there are molecules moving around in response to vibrations. If by “a sound” you mean sound waves, then the proverbial falling tree produces one. But if you mean the crack and impact you would expect to hear, how could it? On their own the molecules don’t sound like that — what would it even mean? Yet somehow people take it poorly when I maintain unbroken eye contact and tap my forehead and say, “The sounds are in here.”
Please don’t confuse this for the standard 2 a.m. musing that I can’t be sure if my blue looks like your blue. True enough, but not the point. Nor is it simply that the world looks different to species that can see other wavelengths of light. That’s likewise a consequence of the deeper truth, which is that the world itself doesn’t look like anything. Now, when you say that bats can see with sound, that’s getting closer to what I’m talking about. No reason someone couldn’t hear with light, though the daytime would get loud.
Next time: Why is there something instead of nothing? I have a good take on this if I can find that napkin.