no humans here

I have a new piece out in Mother Jones, about AI.

Specifically, it’s about advertisements for generative artificial intelligence, which are a crucial part of the process of building a market for such products. The construction of this market, I argue, is premised on the aggressive and persistent corrosion of our relationship to our own intelligence, our own knowledge, and, ultimately, reality. Here’s a little preview:

Older ads for chatbots didn’t shy away from showing the technology: In one, a man asked Google’s Gemini to write a letter from his young daughter to an Olympian the girl admires; in another, a woman asked Meta’s AI for help organizing a book club meeting to discuss Moby-Dick, which we come to understand she likely hasn’t read. But in OpenAI’s latest spots, the interaction with the technology itself is conspicuously missing. We don’t see the protagonists using a phone or a computer. We don’t see anyone struggle, stop, consult the bot, then return to their activity. The chatbot’s presence is unseen and entirely frictionless; it is an organic part of the process of trying to do anything at all.

You can read the whole thing here.

(I was delighted to see Grace Byron is also in the issue, with a great piece about the idea of the “natural” in political culture.)

In talking to people about this article I found that we are all exhausted of AI—talking about it, thinking about it, worrying about it. The scale of the threat, the problem, the power of the companies, the investment in the technology, vastly eclipses our individual abilities to think and worry about it—like many problems it can only be dealt with collectively.

Even if you’re exhausted of AI—especially if you’re exhausted of AI—I hope you read the piece. Going forward, I plan on sharing more of the writing I do elsewhere via this newsletter.