Dear all,

There is a post-script to this letter which makes it a bit longer than normal. Apologies.

A few weeks ago, the Nobel-prize winning writer Olga Tokarczuk, who has written more than one book I love, declared quite unashamedly that she used AI. Notably, she seems to have said this:

“Often I just ask the machine, ‘darling, how could we develop this beautifully?’”

As a staunch anti-AI type (I’m anti-many-things, as you can imagine), this was a great disappointment. But why is it a disappointment? Let us briefly put aside the concerns regarding plagiarism, the way it is gutting the internet, even the incredibly high power requirements. What about Tokarczuk saying she used AI specifically did I find disappointing?

I first heard about clipping. when I was talking to a friend about Daveed Diggs. His is the breakout performance of the musical Hamilton (I’m also anti-Hamilton, but that’s for a different letter). My friend told me that Diggs was in a band called clipping.

This is where my need to be correct and appropriate gets me in trouble. The fact is that their first album, clppng, was not exactly for me. I couldn’t understand it. I tried. But I decided that maybe I just didn’t get it, and I moved on. I didn’t try their later work. I couldn’t let myself skip the work like that.

Then clipping. released a Tiny Desk Concert. This concert lives rent-free in my brain. If anything I pay rent via my views to NPR. This concert is the reason that I am now fully converted to the religion of clipping. Splendor & Misery is incredible. There Existed An Addiction To Blood makes my brain bounce around the room.

The concert, if you haven’t or don’t want to listen to it, stars about one thousand gadgets and doodads on the Tiny Desk, each of them connected to some random item. A Webby award. A little metal chain on a cardboard box. What appears to just be some plastic.

They’re all connected to MIDI-triggered robots that are operated by Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson, Diggs’ fellow band-members. Noise that should be cacophony emerges from this tableau. It is not. It is music. It is music made by people who had a sharp, specific, deep interest and skill. They know what kind of noise they want. They know what kinds of things their instruments can do. So they know the possibilities of what noises are possible. Which means they can make music.

This is craft. It is not the use of something we cannot see inside in order to make something we think we like. It is the use of something we understand to produce something we want to see - and maybe surprise ourselves along the way. Probably Diggs, Snipes, and Hutson don’t know the internal makeup of every MIDI robot, though maybe they do. But they know how they respond to the world. That learning is in them. That learning is what drives this insane concert. It’s live in the weirdest way. It’s made of the things they found when they got there.

Large-language models take patterns and attempt to recreate them. These recreations are now a very good facsimile of human work. But I didn’t enjoy clipping.’s Tiny Desk Concert because it was a facsimile of their studio songs. I enjoyed it because they were engaging in a fundamentally human endeavour. They were making music, emphasis on making.

Diggs, Hutson, and Snipes, joined in this concert by Sharon Udoh and David Rothbaum, are not asking a machine how they can develop something beautifully. They are asking each other. And they are finding joy, surprise, and undeniable skill in each other’s answers. Later in the concert, the DJ Kid Koala jumps in. Diggs says: “It is the coolest shit in the world that he is here right now, holy fuck.”

I don’t even know anything about Kid Koala. But Diggs’ naked enthusiasm makes me nakedly enthusiastic. What enthusiasm can an LLM instill in me, except for myself? What cool shit can it show me, when I don’t know its judgment and in any case I can never find out? That’s not the point of craft.

Look, I know Tokarczuk has craft. The statement she released backtracking from her use of AI included this sentence:

I am sometimes inspired by dreams, but before this sentence too is cornered and torn to pieces by the experts, I hasten to report that they are my own dreams.

It is such an incredible sentence. I laughed when I saw it. It’s the sentence of a writer tired of criticism she feels is unwarranted. It comes from the heart. I have no doubt that AI could conjure this sentence if you made enough specific ritual offerings to it. But I feel sure that she said it exactly like this.

Next week, something about weaving handspun, naturally-dyed cotton. My favourite kind.

Cheers,

mvs

PS

In anticipation of this email I decided to do something I personally consider unethical. I thought I’d use AI. I mean, if I’m going to write about why I think it sucks I should at least give it something of a fair shake.

And the thing is, I can see it. The draw is powerful. Write anything, and you’ll get a response. It won’t just agree with you and save you the work of thinking, it’ll do other things too. I found myself wondering about whether you could use it to hate yourself. To really feed all those impulses in you that whisper poison in your ear.

You really can. You can do it pretty easily too. If I had this kind of technology at my disposal when I was depressed and unable to cope, I shudder to think what I might have done to myself with it. I also shudder to think what others who are in that position now are finding themselves doing. LLMs are an incredibly diverse poison.