Notes on Andy Revkin's chat with the authors of AI and the Art of Being Human (from 4/3/26)
Initial thought: The authors seem credible and serious, but because I've never heard of them, it's harder to trust them fully with my attention. This experience points to the importance of trust and reputation (the rhetorical notion of ethos) in the current milieu. I do trust Revkin, so I guess that gets me in the room.
Also, this book seems to emphasize the practical, with “tools” and “exercises.” This kind of thing tends to turn me off a bit. I'm suspicious of formulas and being a “follower” or joining a “movement.” Echoing the above thought, I suppose I'm slow to trust such things.
A few other quick takeaways:
They used AI (Claude, specifically, which they said was much better than ChatGPT) extensively to write the book, something like I have thought about doing with a book idea.
They (or one of them) sponsors a movement of AI Salons. This seems like a fun idea. I've had the notion of hosting some petite salons and pretending to be 17th century French proto-feminist intellectuals.
Andrew's opening demonstration of Suno (music generation) was pretty wild.
They have tools geared specifically for educators. This is something I plan to explore further.
They seem to be asking many of the same kinds of questions I am, and doing so from a similar standpoint (AI agnosticism). E.g., “What makes me me, if AI can produce everything I can produce?” “What does my individual path toward thriving look like in the world that is emerging?”
They are well aware that AI is not “just a tool” (not that tools are “just tools”).
But as they are drawn back to the default framing of “what it means to be human” that is expressed in their title, I am struck by how rapidly this framing is being reduced to a vacuous cliche. Part of that is the simple ubiquity of the question: the more we hear it, the less it resonates. But beyond the emptiness of the question, there is an almost AI-like sameness and flatness to the answers that are proffered. The discourse of “being human” lacks historical, cultural, and philosophical depth.
Maybe this is an outcome of the imperative to make discourse broadly, even universally, legible (to paraphrase Nguyen's The Score, which I'm currently reading). What if, at the individual level, the best answers are the least legible to others? What if the meaning of being human is the capacity to generate answers to that very question that make sense, at least initially, only to the person who is doing the answering? The absolute refusal to be value captured?
This could be a kind of definition of art: something is a work of art just to the extent that it is maximally legible to the artist and minimally legible to anyone else — to the extent, that is, that it refuses translation.
This hardly forecloses the possibility of its subsequently being translated, of course. Everything can be translated. Everything can resonate. And some art will resonate broadly. But it will not have been created for that purpose. The words, the colors, the rhythms, the textures — these will have been chosen for reasons that elude reason, that are ultimately inscrutable, that are of the heart, not the head. The resonance, the translation, will follow after.
Of course, this is all super naive. There is no self, no pure origin from which original ideas could spring. “We are a dialogue.” We are thrown projections. We are fragments, remnants, pieces of kintsugi (wabi-sabi pottery).
But still. We are each unprecedented, unforecastable, unique filters through which what has been flows into what's to come.