disseminator of discontent

“We’ve spent enough time apart, don’t you think?”

Post Airport scene. Ahhh I’m so happy this is done, I’ve been toiling under this idea for weeks and it’s been eating away at my soul. Much better than my initial sketches, I assure you.

I have a mighty thirst but I like quenching it slowly.

Amazon has instituted a feature called “Ask This Book,” which allows you to interrogate the app about the contents of the text, and then, if you so choose, skip reading it altogether. A few months ago, the author and podcaster Tyler Cowan launched his new book, The Marginal Revolution, onto his website, in full, along with an “integrated AI assistant” that pre-digests the prose for you, like a mother bird regurgitating food into the maw of her chicks. As of the time of this writing, almost four months after its publication, the text still contains a typo in its opening lines, suggesting to me that no one close to the author has even bothered to read it with care. I recently embarked on a month-long book tour from Vancouver to Los Angeles. Along the way, I stopped off to meet up with friends and colleagues, some of whom I haven’t seen in years. What nearly everyone I spoke with told me, in one form or another, is that they are feeling the effects of a holographic crisis that extends far beyond the publishing industry. I spoke with a friend who, unable to find time to read whole books, has begun to run PDFs through an AI program that converts them into podcasts, complete with two chatty humanoid voices. I talked with a literary agent who said that her clients, fearing their book proposal will be read first by AI before it ever encounters human eyeballs, are tweaking their proposals to suit robotic tastes, much as magazines tailor their headlines to game social media algorithms. And I talked with a Hollywood producer who caught a studio exec pretending to have read a script, when it was clear he’d used AI to summarize it. (She knew this for a fact, because the LLM had mistaken the plotline of a novel within the script for the plot of the film itself.)

[...]

Nearly every author and editor I know feels that our present holographic crisis is merely a wan prelude of what’s to come: a tsunami of texts wholly written by AI, flooding the earth with books without authors, holograms piled atop holograms, with no ground-truth beneath them. “A fool also multiplies words,” the author of Ecclesiastes warns. “At the beginning their words are folly; at the end they are wicked madness.”

The Rampur Development Authority (RDA) has ordered the demolition of 38 out of 40 buildings at Mohammad Ali Jauhar University in Uttar Pradesh's Rampur, alleging that they were constructed without the required approvals from the competent authority, drawing criticism over the alleged selective targeting of the institution and its potential impact on students.  The university, run by the Mohammad Ali Jauhar Trust chaired by jailed former Uttar Pradesh minister and senior Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan, has been given 15 days to remove the allegedly unauthorised structures, failing which the authorities will carry out the demolition. The demolition order was issued on Wednesday by Rampur District Magistrate and RDA Vice-Chairperson Ajay Kumar Dwivedi under Section 27 of the Uttar Pradesh Urban Planning and Development Act, 1973. According to the RDA, a scrutiny of official records found that only the university's medical college building and one academic block had valid building approvals. The remaining 38 buildings, covering a total built-up area of 82,309 square metres, were allegedly constructed without permission from the competent authority. District Magistrate Ajay Kumar Dwivedi said, "The buildings of Jauhar University were constructed in Gram Singhan Kheda, which falls under the jurisdiction of the Rampur Development Authority (RDA).