I’m not a psychologist or an economist, but I have a hunch that my reaction in that moment went deeper than my conscious awareness of the basic mechanics of supply and demand. There’s something about that sort of abundance that just strikes me as wrong, and I fear that the endless surplus of music presented to us by the streaming platforms and their social-media adjuncts (soundtracks to Instagram photos, TikTok lip-sync videos) tarnishes my appreciation of music similarly […] The abundance effect, exacerbated by the tens of thousands of prompt-based AI songs uploaded to streaming every day, worries me on what I’ll go ahead and call a spiritual level—a fear of estrangement from music’s depth and beauty like the one that plagues Reger in Old Masters—as well as an economic one. I’m not saying it’s the only reason musicians are so repeatedly debased in the capitalist open market. But even a non-economist can tell you that one way to decrease a product’s agreed-upon value is to flood the market with supply.
It has become so easy to mindlessly consume that we’re usually not even aware that we’re neck-deep in Content.
Skeptics have argued that A.I. can never be truly creative, because it lacks the kind of worldly experiences humans have.
The New York Times’ recent quizlet “Who’s a Better Writer: A.I. or Humans?” claims that many people prefer LLM-generated writing to human-authored work, but critically misunderstands why that may be. Furthermore, I don’t think they understand why someone might prefer the work of the “world’s best human writers.” I took the quiz and, surprise surprise, I preferred the human-authored texts every time. Not because they were clearer or easier to understand, but because the prose sparkled on more than just the surface level. The NYT’s explanation at the quiz’s end reveals their ignorance:
Maybe you also noticed that human writing often includes some clunky phrases, like this passage from Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” caused by the author’s aversion to punctuation: “As well ask men what they think of stone.”
A.I. used to make mistakes like these. But today’s systems are much more fluid than their predecessors — so fluid, in fact, that finding grammatical errors or nonstandard syntax is often a hint that you’re looking at a human’s prose, not a machine’s.
Creative choices in prose are not “mistakes”. “Clunky phrases” are a feature, not a bug. Writers play with language to create a characteristic voice that evokes an image or emotion in the mind of the reader; it’s not all about clarity and information. Here’s the full McCarthy quote, followed by the Claude Opus imitation:
