So, a short links for the weekend in terms of links.
Saturday, June 13, 2026
more riff on AI and the arts from June 2026
https://thewalrus.ca/the-real-scandal-isnt-that-ai-wrote-a-prize-winning-story-its-the-response/
…
Granta, in an
even more remarkable response, fed the accused text to Claude, asking if it was
AI generated, seemingly unaware or unworried that they were submitting
(potentially) literary work to the very kind of system at the heart of the
scandal. Claude is a general-purpose chatbot and not an AI detector, but it
nonetheless concluded that the text was “almost certainly not produced unaided
by a human.” This is not striking, but what is striking is
that Granta then included Claude’s cautionary note as if it
were an expert opinion, surrendering to an AI its own opportunity to pass a
reasoned judgment:
“The strongest
evidence against pure AI authorship is the small number of passages that don’t
fit the pattern . . . Those passages carry the kind of off-shape specificity
that models still struggle to produce unprompted. If the story has a human
core, it is concentrated there, and the AI has been used to elaborate around
it.”
It would be laughable,
if not such a bad omen, that Granta thought it was acceptable
to ask a large language model—operated by a company sued for the widespread use
of pirated books—to draft its response to allegations of AI-generated text in a
literary prize. Is there no “human core” at Granta? Surely there
are people there—editors, aspiring writers—who also have some skin in this
game? Why has this storied literary organization been unable to answer a
literary question in its own voice?
…
…
Generative AI, instead
of liberating writing from the human, liberates textualist antihumanism from
the theoretical edifice of poststructuralism. Derrida’s dictum il n’y a
pas d’hors-texte (“there is no outside-text”) takes on an interesting
new meaning in a world where all of reality has become so much training data
for LLMs. With the launch of ChatGPT, moreover, the “death of the author” goes
from scandal to banality; Foucault’s “indifference” to “who is speaking” goes
from a liberating escape route from bourgeois individualism to a necessary
adaptation to a world in which most text production is automated, bypassing the
individual; and engagement in “automatic writing,” once an avant-garde pursuit,
is integrated into the daily lives of average people as a form of
entertainment, as well as a means of enhancing efficiency and productivity
…
The doctrine of the “death of the author” was not
formulated to serve as a blank check for large language models more than half a
century later but the zinger has its place.
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