a medieval illustration of the virgin mary punching a horned, claw-footed, bestial devil

virgin mary punching the devil, england, 13th century

"The Palm House is a funny book. Part of me wants to write blackly funny; darkly funny — but in truth, it’s the humour that operates the levers of complexity."

@marrrtha.bsky.social on Gwendoline Riley's The Palm House

review31.co.uk/article/view...

A new request for editing: 'I have used AI to help make sure that the emotional tone, pacing, transitions, and narrative is smooth and consistent. This is all my own work, AI did not write ANY of it.'

Again – what does this tell us about what people think the work of being a writer is?

'And why, in the first place, have the machines been deployed to dispose of creative labor and not manual labor?'

Paragraph from an article by Daniel Tutt, titled 'Freud, Aesthetics and the limits of AI': 'AI can master the content of art, but it cannot capture or ever produce this intricate social basis of the form of art. This is why debates about art and AI seem to revolve around a one-sided question, namely, can AI effectively trick us into thinking its art quality exceeds human artists? To accept this conclusion not only undermines the artist’s social role by assuming art exists solely as content, disconnected from engagement with the audience. But it also creates an uncritical relationship towards AI as a technological force and thereby threatens to harm the basis of artistic exchange and dynamics in our wider culture. The psychoanalytic conception of aesthetics not only introduces a singular subjective factor as the very core of the creative process, but it also adds that the true novelty of artistic creation is found in the way it links the subjective dimension of the artist to a dynamic set of social and political relations.'

Daniel Tutt: 'Freud, Aesthetics and the limits of AI'

danieltutt.substack.com/p/freud-aest...

'the point is the process'

Screenshot of a paragraph from a short essay by Becca Rothfeld, titled 'You Don't Have to Use AI'. Text reads: Of course, it’s long seemed obvious to me (and, I presume, basically everyone I care about or respect ) that the use of AI in most humanistic endeavors is beyond the pale. Even if it were good at writing prose or doing philosophy—and thus far it isn’t —to use AI to write or philosophize would be to render those activities futile. In some of the sciences, some of the time, the point is the outcome—the vaccine, the medicine, the finding, the technology. In the humanities, the point is the process. The point of writing is to make something beautiful or interesting; the point of reading a book or a philosophy paper is, at least in large part, to make contact with another human mind that has strained to make something beautiful or interesting, whether or not the human mind has succeeded or failed. There would be no reason to read a novel that an AI had written, even if AI got to a point where it could write “well,” as perhaps it will if it keeps cannibalizing the greatest fruits of human endeavor with impunity. Writing a book with AI would be like driving a car to a marathon finish line, then claiming the title. Even considering using it to write evinces a complete misunderstanding of the enterprise. I can’t stress it enough: if these claims are not obvious to you, you are not “in my world and not of my flesh,” to paraphrase a remark of Stanley Cavell’s in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy.” I hope you are ashamed of yourself and your dwindling humanity, and I think it should be legally required for people to say when/if they’ve used AI in the process of writing something so that I can avoid it at all costs.

Becca Rothfeld: 'You don't have to use AI'

open.substack.com/pub/afetewor...

Night Vision by Jean Sprackland: An essay collection filled with light and shade An evocative and ambitious study of a state that makes up half of human experience

Night Vision by Jean Sprackland: An essay collection filled with light and shade

Can anyone add to my reading pile – specifically, poems about beer, *not* written by men?

🍻

It's the Book Machine. Chuck your rough idea in the top, turn the big handle, set it to 'editing', pull the AI-generated cover lever, and wait for the machine to squirt out your work of art. Hard-won. Meaningful. A real labour of love.

Coda: a prospective client insists in a message to me that they only used AI 'to translate, restructure and edit' the text – 'the part of the process that is purely mechanical'.

Moving past the bollocks you need to say that to an actual translator and editor – this is part of the problem, isn't it?

I'm wondering where all this will leave us, in five years or so. I'm not doomy, actually – I think it's like Tamagotchis or Pogs or something, and we'll find ways of reprioritising human feeling and human effort and human writing.

But god, this bit is boring, isn't it.

I feel like a dinosaur, when I tell these people why I won't be sending them an offer to work on 'their' book. I feel like a rube, a throwback, a fucking hayseed they look on with a mixture of pity and disdain.

This isn't even the point, but I feel pissed off that my years of editorial experience and genuine, lifelong enthusiasm for the work is being channelled into a new role as a professional fluffer for a large-language model.

But also creatively, intellectually, personally.

Where's the reward? Where's the pleasure, where's the pain? Just like the text it generates, the experience, too, is frictionless, humourless, effortless, dull, unfelt, literally predictable. The whole thing frigid as a robot's bare metal arsecheek.

It's depressing. It's wrongheaded to pay an editor – not cheap! – to make your computer-generated text sound less like it was generated by a computer, and more like you wrote it yourself.

How can it possibly be worth it? Financially, sure – they're not getting that money back.

At its heart, it feels like a symptom of an industry that has insisted on the idea of personal material as intellectual property; that a book is only its blurb, that it can only do one thing, that it can be reduced to KPIs, that there's no value in prose style, no value in the very act of writing.

This concept that an idea is all that matters – that writing is secondary, is an afterthought, is best outsourced to a machine – I can't get my head around it.

What do we think writing IS? What is an author? Why bother, if you don't want to write, if you are not challenged and exhausted and exhilarated and electrocuted in the doing of it?

'The words are AI, but the idea is all me.'

'This is MY story, I just needed telling it.'

'The voice is authentically my own.'

'The novel is mine, but I used AI to write it.'

They weren't trying to hide it, to 'trick' someone into working on the text. They were quite open about it when challenged. What's fascinating to me is the narrative they employ in justifying it – it's always the same.

Of these manuscripts, two were generated by AI in their entirety; two were 'edited' by AI, one was 'translated and polished' by AI.

None of those five prospective clients disclosed their use of AI in their original brief, but when I pressed them (AI writing is quite easy to spot!) they explained.

I've been on Reedsy for about six years. This previously rare phenomenon is now completely commonplace – almost the norm, in fact.

Of the five new requests I've received in the past two days, I've had to turn away four of them for using AI.

Some of my editorial work comes via Reedsy. Over the past year it's become completely overrun by people (I can't call them authors) who are asking for editorial help on manuscripts that have been generated by #AI. Often, what they want is for someone to make the text sound more human.

A rare Sprackland double-header – Jean and I will be co-tutoring a course at Hawkwood @hawkwoodcft.bsky.social in March, on drawing poetry out of personal raw material.

Open for booking now.

www.hawkwoodcollege.co.uk/our-programm...

Penguin Books webpage showing the cover of Dark Night: Poetry and Selected Prose of St John of the Cross, with a cover detail by El Greco.

A quote from one of the poems: ‘Oh living flame of love, how tenderly you scorch me’

The blurb text: The poetry of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, St John of the Cross, has inspired and consoled for hundreds of years, influencing writers from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill to T.S. Eliot. This new edition of his essential works, in a sensitive and luminous translation by Martha Sprackland, gathers John of the Cross’s complete poems and a selection of his prose, including from his extended commentary on the poem ‘Dark Night’. In his immediate, sensual writing, we see a soul searching for meaning and union with the divine: both meek and bold, deserving and undeserving, oscillating between light and dark, soaring and falling, desperation and salvation. Dark Night gives us a picture of faith at once confronting and inspiriting, and of the power of words as a means of spiritual transcendence. Translated by Martha Sprackland, with an introduction by Colin Thompson.

Three years of work on this — my new translation of the poetry and selected prose of sixteen-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross for Penguin Classics.

•

You can preorder it via all the usual bookshops or links here. www.penguin.co.uk/books/462137...

Text of article in today’s Observer, headlined ‘Our fear of the dark is built in — but we need it.’

Continuation of article

Cover of ‘Night Vision: In search of the true dark’ by Jean Sprackland

Little piece on darkness by Sprackland mère, ahead of the publication of her new book, Night Vision.

www.penguin.co.uk/books/453167...

@theobserveruk.bsky.social

Birkbeck, University of London, is seeking an Editorial Assistant (paid) to support the development of a new anthology on the influential British photographer and activist, Jo Spence.

cis7.bbk.ac.uk/vacancy/edit...

A new partnership with BBC Writers to deliver a six-month mentorship scheme for emerging Muslim writers. Four mentees will benefit from tailored guidance, industry insight, and one-to-one support from experienced writers.

ukmuslimfilm.org/bbc-writers-...

Bee Box by Martha Sprackland The runner-up in this year’s Moth Short Story Prize, chosen by judge Evie Wyld

If you are tall enough to see over the paywall, my story 'Bee Box' is up on the @irishtimes.com now, after coming second in @themothmagazine.bsky.social The Moth Short Story Prize.

www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...