Macrodata refinement
Severance, A.I., babies, etc.
I’m rewatching Mad Men right now, a nearly perfect show, a genuine work of art that can actually be considered alongside, you know, “cinema.” At the same time, I’m watching Severance. This show is struggling. You wouldn’t know this from reading the internet, but compared with a masterpiece of Golden Age of TV storytelling (a very unfair comparison), it’s obvious.
Let’s take the best episode of this season, which I think was the one focusing on Gemma/Miss Casey. I liked this episode because it had never occurred to me before that a person could possibly be severed multiple times, and the implications of that strike me as interesting and original. Not interesting and original: showing that a character is pregnant because she declines a drink. Showing that a character has a miscarriage by her bleeding out in the shower. Showing a character in a fertility clinic, then getting an injection of FSH, then showing her husband struggling to build a crib. This is the ChatGPT version of an infertility story.
To my husband, I half-jokingly wonder if the widespread love of this season is evidence of society-wide post-COVID brain damage (add it to the pile). But I actually think what I said in the last paragraph is right: it’s ChatGPT. Not that Severance is written by ChatGPT, but it’s written in a world transformed by the mental laziness of which ChatGPT has taken advantage.
I might be reaching here, which goes against the recently announced ethos of my relaunched newsletter lol. I just want you to imagine a young person who was in college five years ago. They want to be a writer. All their classes are virtual. Little is asked of them. They become used to this. Time passes. ChatGPT is launched. A week ago, Sam Altman tweets this: “we trained a new model that is good at creative writing.” (You can read the very Reddit-voice story it produced here.) The young person stares at the cursor blinking on their empty Google doc. I think, most of the time, that young person probably uses generative A.I. to “help” their “writing.” But imagine they don’t: in this case, I still don’t see them working very hard at it. What, after all, is the point? We are used to taking mental shortcuts these days. We are used to reading them and watching them and having conversations that consist entirely of them.
Anyway.
I like my job. I’m a UX Writer, and I like the way it makes my brain work. It makes you realize how writing has a logic to it, that can dictate any number of surprisingly complicated interactions. A simple flow on a website that you never considered is made up of hundreds of screens; the act of writing can create a network (how many actions should this page have? Where should the actions lead you?). It’s satisfying, creative, mentally taxing work. Someone somewhere wants to replace this with A.I., so I can instead do work that requires less of me, assuming I am employed at all.
One thing you learn from having a child is that it doesn’t take long for art to begin to awe human beings. The first things that newborns are able to see are simple, high-contrast, black-and-white images. They love them. “Love,” in fact, is an understatement—they get Stendhal syndrome from looking at a spiral.
I was moved to tears (postpartum hormones) the first time I saw June look at her first high-contrast image—a crude, black-and-white representation of Earth as seen from space. Her eyes were two moons, full, orbiting this Earth. I refuse to see that moment as pure stimulation, as physical as a low electric shock—she was confronted with the concept of representation for the first time, with something two-dimensional in her burgeoning world of three dimensions. Here, in this little overpriced flashcard for babies, was her introduction to created beauty, to Venus de Milo, Mona Lisa, Starry Night, Nude Descending a Staircase, Guernica.
A baby would also respond to whatever the output of “generate a simple, high-contrast, black-and-white illustration” is. I know that. I wonder if she will ever know the difference, something I am finding it harder and harder to articulate myself.
Links I Like
Big fan of Brady’s playlist this month.
“One morning, Brian asked his guests to call in to tell him about books they had been reading while in lockdown, especially ones they had found moving or helpful during the difficult period. Almost no guest who called him followed this instruction. Instead, New Yorkers streamed in to tell him about books they liked in general, books they thought everyone should read, books they had read but not liked at all. And you read this, maybe since March? Brian nudged one guest, who was raving about a novel. No, the guest replied, clearly unsure of why he was asking, No, no. I read this years ago.”