A law professor friend tells me that LLMs have completely transformed the way she relates to grad students and post-docs - for the worse. And no, it's not that they're cheating on their homework or using LLMs to write briefs full of hallucinated cases.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
pluralistic.net/2025/03/25/com…
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The thing that LLMs have changed in my friend's law school is *letters of reference*. Historically, students would only ask a prof for a letter of reference if they knew the prof really rated them. Writing a good reference is a ton of work, and that's rather the point: the mere fact that a law prof was willing to write one for you represents a signal about how highly they value you. It's a form of proof of work.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But then came the chatbots and with them, the knowledge that a reference letter could be generated by feeding three bullet points to a chatbot and having it generate five paragraphs of florid nonsense based on those three short sentences. Suddenly, profs were expected to write letters for many, many students - not just the top performers.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Of course, this was also happening at other universities, meaning that when my friend's school opened up for postdocs, they were inundated with letters of reference from profs elsewhere. Naturally, they handled this flood by feeding each letter back into an LLM and asking it to boil it down to three bullet points. No one thinks that these are identical to the three bullet points that were used to generate the letters, but it's close enough, right?
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Obviously, this is terrible. At this point, letters of reference might as well consist solely of three bullet-points on letterhead. After all, the entire communicative intent in a chatbot-generated letter is just those three bullets. Everything else is padding, and all it does is dilute the communicative intent of the work.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
No matter how grammatically correct or even stylistically interesting the AI generated sentences are, they have less communicative freight than the three original bullet points. After all, the AI doesn't know anything about the grad student, so anything it adds to those three bullet points are, by definition, irrelevant to the question of whether they're well suited for a postdoc.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Which brings me to art. As a working artist in his third decade of professional life, I've concluded that the point of art is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that fills the artist's mind, and attempt to infuse that feeling into some artistic vessel - a book, a painting, a song, a dance, a sculpture, etc - in the hopes that this work will cause a loose facsimile of that numinous, irreducible feeling to manifest in someone else's mind.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Art, in other words, is an act of communication - and there you have the problem with AI art. As a writer, when I write a novel, I make tens - if not hundreds - of thousands of tiny decisions that are in service to this business of causing my big, irreducible, numinous feeling to materialize in your mind. Most of those decisions aren't even conscious, but they are *definitely* decisions, and I don't make them solely on the basis of probabilistic autocomplete.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
One of my novels may be good and it may be bad, but one thing is *definitely* is is rich in communicative intent. Every one of those microdecisions is an expression of artistic intent.
Now, I'm not much of a visual artist. I can't draw, though I really enjoy creating collages, which you can see here:
flickr.com/photos/doctorow/alb…
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Pluralistic collages
Cory Doctorow (Flickr)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I can tell you that every time I move a layer, change the color balance, or use the lasso tool to nip a few pixels out of a 19th century editorial cartoon that I'm matting into a modern backdrop, I'm making a communicative decision. The goal isn't "perfection" or "photorealism." I'm not trying to spin around really quick in order to get a look at the stuff behind me in Plato's cave. I am making communicative choices.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
What's more: working with that lasso tool on a 10,000 pixel-wide Library of Congress scan of a painting from the cover of *Puck* magazine or a 15,000 pixel wide scan of Hieronymus Bosch's *Garden of Earthly Delights* means that I'm touching the smallest individual contours of each brushstroke. This is quite a meditative experience - but it's also quite a communicative one.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Tracing the smallest irregularities in a brushstroke definitely materializes a theory of mind for me, in which I can feel the artist reaching out across time to convey something to me via the tiny microdecisions I'm going over with my cursor.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then - by definition - the only part that carries any communicative freight. The AI has taken one sentence's worth of actual communication intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling and diluted it amongst a thousand brushtrokes or 10,000 words.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I think this is what we mean when we say AI art is soul-less and sterile. Like the five paragraphs of nonsense generated from three bullet points from a law prof, the AI is padding out the part that makes this art - the microdecisions intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling - with a bunch of stuff that has no communicative intent and therefore *can't* be art.
If my thesis is right, then the more you work with the AI, the more art-like its output becomes.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If the AI generates 50 variations from your prompt and you choose one, that's one more microdecision infused into the work. If you re-prompt and re-re-prompt the AI to generate refinements, then each of those prompts is a new payload of microdecisions that the AI can spread out across all the words of pixels, increasing the amount of communicative intent in each one.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Finally: not all art is verbose. Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" - a urinal signed "R. Mutt" - has very few communicative choices. Duchamp chose the urinal, chose the paint, painted the signature, came up with a title (probably some other choices went into it, too). It's a significant work of art. I know because when I look at it I feel a big, numinous irreducible feeling that Duchamp infused in the work so that I could experience a facsimile of Duchamp's artistic impulse.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There are individual sentences, brushstrokes, single dance-steps that initiate the upload of the creator's numinous, irreducible feeling directly into my brain. It's possible that a single *very good* prompt could produce text or an image that had artistic meaning. But it's not likely, in just the same way that scribbling three words on a sheet of paper or painting a single brushstroke will produce a meaningful work of art. Most art *is* somewhat verbose (but not all of it).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
So there you have it: the reason I don't like AI art. It's not that AI artists lack for the big, numinous irreducible feelings. I firmly believe we *all* have those. The problem is that an AI prompt has *very little* communicative intent and nearly all (but not every) good piece of art has more communicative intent than fits into an AI prompt.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*.
Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2:
exileinbookville.com/events/44…
And in BLOOMINGTON on Apr 4:
morgensternbooks.com/event/202…
More tour dates here:
martinhench.com
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Authors on Tap: Cory Doctorow and Peter Sagal
exileinbookville.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Image:
Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
eof/
File:HAL9000.svg - Wikimedia Commons
commons.wikimedia.orgIris
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Ooh, I have some essays on this (or well, related to these themes)! Apologies for the post, but I'm kinda proud of them and want to share with a writer whom I very much respect.
deadsimpletech.com/blog/altman…
deadsimpletech.com/blog/altman…
My Immortal is a better story than Altman's AI slop
deadSimpleTechNick Fox-Gieg
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Did Marcel Duchamp steal Elsa’s urinal?
Julian Spalding (The Art Newspaper - International art news and events)Mike Anderson
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
William Denton
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That reminded me of Alfred North Whitehead's definition of art: "Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern." A biographer of Elgar put it as: "Art is the imposition of form on experience."
miskatonic.org/2025/03/18/art/
Art is the imposition of form on experience
Miskatonic University PressCory Doctorow reshared this.
SubductionRheology
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •FoolishOwl
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There's been some enthusiasm for "AI GMs" for role-playing games.
It is pretty common, in published role-playing games, to roll on a few tables and get a prompt for some situation that a GM can flesh out, like you've encountered goblins with a stolen artifact.
AI GMs can produce an entire scenario out of that.
But it will be a generic one, not reflecting a human GM's interests or style, or the other players' interests or style, or the tone of the campaign.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Merc
in reply to FoolishOwl • • •@foolishowl "Campaign" is a key word there. Even a GM who's merely "decent" will use any opportunity to foreshadow things he/she has a vague plan to use later in the campaign.
But, foreshadowing is planning, and planning requires consciousness, not just an uncanny ability to autocomplete text.
I wouldn't be surprised if an AI GM is among the harder AI challenges. A GM has to continuously adapt their narrative based on player choices and dice rolls, while still keeping the major future plot points they want to hit in mind.
craignicol
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Vrrroooom (gravy era)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Phil
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •With LLMs being utilized to be done with "annoying" writing by many, I have started to think about the necessity of things.
Using LLMs to turn some bullet points into bloat and then recipients use LLMs to turn the bloat back into bullet points, is showing you can skip the (now) useless steps and just use the bullet points, because the rest is meaningless. It might not have been before, but it is now.
Cory Doctorow reshared this.
Cykonot
in reply to Phil • • •@h0ru2 effectively decreasing the bandwidth of media. Real "information economy" hours
Edit: I tried to explain to a manager how using LLMs to fluff up quarterly performance pieces isn't actually adding VALUE, but they couldn't see past the Taylorist nicety of it
Cykonot
in reply to Cykonot • • •@h0ru2 ah, this is Taylorism for business communication. The appearance of value via professional presentation, without any additional value
Maybe this could help generate more human-readable reports — but only for people not properly qualified to parse them. Like, if the bullet points don't effectively communicate what you needed to know, the failure to contextualize is on you (or HR). Also, an old-school expert system could plug-and-play data points for a report
Kiytan
in reply to Phil • • •Dubi is here
in reply to Kiytan • • •Vincarsi
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Cory Doctorow reshared this.
arno
in reply to Vincarsi • • •ikesau
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •did you read Ted Chiang's essay on the subject?
He writes "art is something that results from making a lot of choices", which chimes a lot with your piece.
newyorker.com/culture/the-week…
Cory Doctorow
in reply to ikesau • • •ikesau
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •same! 😀
respectfully: i'm surprised that you didn't include a link to his piece, as your post's thesis is very similar. would have been nice to give intellectual credit where it's due, and also perhaps develop the idea further?
Cory Doctorow
in reply to ikesau • • •Ben Delarre
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •foxyoreos (they/it) (🔞)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I've argued exactly this before, and it's refreshing and validating to hear another artist make the same point.
Art is a lossy compression algorithm. There's not a piece I've ever drawn where I have not put more thought and more information into it than exists in the final piece.
Imagegen is the opposite. It takes a small amount of information and *expands* it. But doing this causes the intention to be drowned in noise. The prompt itself would be more communicative.