Matthew Kirschenbaum

💅

It’s likely because it’s late and it’s been a long day, but I apologize, I’m just not following that.

Congratulations: your experience of writing is *qualitatively different* from the vast majority of what gets written, which is so dreary and workaday that the courts have repeatedly ruled the authors of such work are not authors but employees, nor can they claim copyright or profit from said work.

When you sit down to write an essay or a long overdue email to a friend or even a snappy post for this website, you relish the feeling of the words at the tips of your fingers, tumbling into place like the tumblers in a safe. We say “it clicks”for a reason, right? It’s unique and it’s you, right? —>

Most people don’t win prizes for their writing, nor do they aspire to such. That writing is or should be that is itself a historically and culturally conditioned view of what writing is.

This is the needed corrective to the new round of "when humans write it's like music, every word carefully chosen and precisely placed" which is simply not the reality for most people and situations. Much of writing is a tedious task that we have to slog through to simply keep our job/day/etc going.

+1 to everything above. You can’t actually know something about writing in its varied historical and social contexts and cling to the notion that it’s some form of exceptional activity. It *can* be, but that is itself the exception.

😚

Born-Digital Collections Coordinator #00220 - Richmond, Virginia, United States Title: Born-Digital Collections Coordinator #00220 State Role Title: Library Specialist III Hiring Range: $78,000 - $88,000 Pay Band: 5 Agency: The Library of Virginia Location: The Library of Virgini...

Apply to join my team by 3/16!

Be the Library of Virginia's born-digital collections coordinator, leading planning and management of electronic gov/manuscript records. We're looking for a techie archivist type who can help improve access to our born-digital wonders.

$78k-$88k in Richmond VA.

Okay, sorry. Been a long day here. ;-)

Why this article is cited _in this very thread_.

Honestly, I’m exhausted.

The warfighters who are currently fighting are not fighting a war.

“fact-based feeling” is unfortunately an instant classic

Absolutely. (Once again, is/ought.)

Apologies for the nerfed links in this thread. Blame the auto-verification systems.

And on the literary side, you might not like knowing how the sausage really gets made, especially historically. For more on this, see @sarahebull.bsky.social: muse.jhu.edu/article/910951

Computer scientists understood this as early as the 1950s, when we began to see regular experiments with machine-generated poems. For more on this see: read.dukeupress.edu/american-lit...

The opposite of AI is not poetry or literature.

Most of the writing in the world is not poetry. And, most poetry is itself not very good, indeed often formulaic,
highly stylized, and cliche-ridden. For more on this see: +

U.S. sub sinks Iranian warship off Sri Lanka, killing 87 and expanding war zone A U.S. submarine sank an Iranian warship off the southern coast of Sri Lanka, killing dozens of sailors and dramatically widening Washington's pursuit of the Iranian navy.

A US submarine sinking a lonely, dinky Iranian surface ship an ocean away from the theater of the main conflict—and 9000
miles from North America—makes it pretty clear the US is fighting a general war, without the declaration required by the Constitution. www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...

Rare Book School!

Watching my corner gas station’s price ticker climb higher by the day, thanks Biden

It’s neither interesting nor uninteresting but assuming every conversation about writing is about student writing is a category error only academics make.

I’m not talking about what we tell students.

Yup

👌

I think we’re done here don’t you?

Also, if we’re going to scold one another about rereading, you might reread my post and see that I’m not calling *you* an idealist but rather I think you may be thinking of me as one.

Exactly.

Well, since you’re posting here under a (robotic) pseudonym, I don’t know anything about you at all so 🤷‍♂️

They might, indeed they very well might. What is your point? That that’s undesirable? Of course it is! Do you think anyone reading here thinks otherwise? But that determination has nothing to do with the reality of how these tools are and will be deployed.