Mastery of banal style is losing its usefulness \u2013 but language is more powerful than ever. It\u2019s up to the writer to do what machines can\u2019t<\/p>\n
I recently heard an exchange at a playground that should worry the executives at AI companies more than any analyst\u2019s prediction of a bubble. A boy and a girl, maybe 10 years old, were fighting. \u201cThat\u2019s AI! That\u2019s AI!\u201d the girl was shouting. What she meant was that the boy was indulging a new and particular breed of nonsense: language that sounds meaningful but has no connection to reality. The children have figured the new world out quickly, as they do.<\/p>\n
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, neither as an apocalypse nor as the solution to all life\u2019s problems, but as a disruptive tool. The recent scandal over Shy Girl<\/a>, the novel by Mia Ballard, was doubly revealing. Hachette cancelled its publication amid claims it was reliant on AI generation (Ballard has said that an acquaintance who edited the self-published version used AI, not her). But the book was originally self-published. Apparently readers and editors didn\u2019t mind until the use of AI was pointed out to them.<\/p>\n Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mastery of banal style is losing its usefulness \u2013 but language is more powerful than ever. It\u2019s up to the writer to do what machines can\u2019t I recently heard an exchange at a playground that should worry the executives at AI companies more than any analyst\u2019s prediction of a bubble. A boy and a girl, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70679\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}