I don’t think it’s a coincidence that movements like expressionism, impressionism, and abstract art took off after the invention of the camera. Photorealistic paintings are impressive, but once they are duplicating what a camera does, they’re less interesting.
We’re due for similar movements in other fields to emerge as reactions to AI. Like writing in a way totally different from how an AI would write- ideally better than an AI would write, but even writing worse than an AI can be interesting if it is at least different.
It’s still early days for both AI and our reactions to it. But since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, what is the good new essay or book that you’re most confident was not written by AI, one that was written in an almost deliberately extra-human manner?
For me, it’s the Atlantic article from this May, “I FOUND IT: THE BEST FREE RESTAURANT BREAD IN AMERICA“, by Caity Weaver. The subject of the article is one that could have easily been phoned in, but instead Weaver made this a real-world quest and the writing is fresh, distinctive, embodied, petty, and personal.
It was hard the choose just a few highlights in an article full of them, but here are a few that give a sense:
“In harvesting this knowledge, I am exposed to countless novel methods through which humans might delight, disappoint, irritate, and surprise one another. Some people invent their own question on the spot and answer that instead: Asked to identify the best free restaurant bread in America, they tell of a great bakery where bread can be purchased for money, or the worst free restaurant bread in America. Others imagine that the question contains some hidden constraint, which they undertake to expose—“It can’t be a chain restaurant,” they declare, or “It has to be a chain restaurant.”
“Do you want to know how abjectly I debase myself, attempting to divine this forbidden knowledge from the impenetrable minds of celebrities? I contact Chris Pratt’s publicist to seek Pratt’s answer, even though—since we’re all being so honest—I don’t especially care to know it. (I am merely asking to be polite.) “We need to politely hold off as there isn’t interest,” comes the reply. Excuse me! That is actually not polite! I don’t need to know that Chris Pratt isn’t interested; and also, how can he not be interested in such an interesting topic? And also, I am the one who is not interested! But this is not even my lowest moment.”
““It’s not even something we could talk about anecdotally,” she responds. I ask if she will tell me what, in her personal opinion, is the best free restaurant bread in America. She never replies to me again. (Neither here nor there, but in 2023, an investigation by The New York Times revealed that this NRA used the $15 fee that restaurant workers pay to attend its mandatory food-safety course to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign against minimum-wage increases.)”
“And that is how I learn that Damola Adamolekun is a snitch.”
“This PR representative is made of steel. Googling her name unearths a YouTube assignment recorded for a college public-relations class a few years ago. In it she coolly addresses the camera while expressing regret for a factory collapse in which, “so far, 1,100 people have lost their lives.” (The crisis-video exercise was apparently inspired by the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, in which 1,134 people were killed while working in a building where clothing was manufactured for retailers including the Children’s Place and Benetton. “I cannot express how sorry I am that this had to happen,” she tells the camera calmly.) I give up trying to penetrate the Red Lobster carapace.”
“Every possible shade of golden retriever, from pale cream to the deepest cognac orange, is represented by some centimeter of this rotund loaf; its floured bottom is the dark brown of all of their paw pads.”
“My Diet Coke is served in the restaurant’s signature mug, which, I learn later, while typing these very words, holds 64 ounces of liquid, and which, I also learn—upon Googling 64 oz x 2 to gallons—means I drank an entire gallon of Diet Coke in one sitting? No???”
In an era when AI is already winning literary prizes, what writing seems most human to you?
Economist Writing Every Day 