Artificial Art – Taki’s Magazine
Posted by M. C. on January 2, 2023
When, however, I change the word “critique” of my work to “strengths,” I read “He is known for his clear and engaging writing style…and has a wide range of interests [that] gives him a unique perspective.”
As yet, it takes human intelligence, as I hope it always will, to decide which of these assessments is the more pertinent.
https://www.takimag.com/article/artificial-art/
For all of us who scribble for publication, at however low a level, all activities other than writing take on at most a secondary importance. Even meals, necessary as they no doubt are, can come to seem unwanted interruptions of the real business of life, which is writing. We are apt to forget that reading in general, and of our work in particular, is not of the same importance to 99.99 percent of the population, including that part of it that has great power over our lives, as it is to us. It is a humbling thought (humbling, that is, for scribblers) that in many small towns it is easier to find an electronic cigarette or have oneself tattooed than to buy a book.
And now comes another blow to our self-esteem, that mental characteristic that is the most fundamental of all modern human rights. My fellow scribbler in this august journal, Mr. Charles Norman, alerted me recently to a site that, through artificial intelligence, will produce a coherent and even cogent short essay on almost any subject. He illustrated the site’s powers by requesting of it a Marxist-Leninist critique of Winnie-the-Pooh, citing the work of the late Marxist historian and ferocious snob Eric Hobsbawm. The resulting paragraphs, generated in a matter of seconds, were better written than many a contemporary PhD student could manage, and in fact approximated what I myself would have written if I had been asked to produce something on the same subject.
I then tried a Marxist analysis of Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” With true Marxist lack of humor, the answer came back almost instantaneously that, among other things, the oysters in the poem suffered from false consciousness, insofar as they were duped by the Walrus and the Carpenter to go for a walk with them in the belief that their exploiters meant well by them.
Be seeing you
MCViewPoint 
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