Right now I’m coaching for Inkhaven, a month-long marathon writing event where our brave residents are writing a blog post every single day for the entire month of November.

And I’m pleased that some of them have seen success – relevant figures seeing the posts, shares on Hacker News and Twitter and LessWrong. The amount of writing is nuts, so people are trying out different styles and topics – some posts are effort-rich, some are quick takes or stories or lists.

Some people have come up to me – one of their pieces has gotten some decent reception, but the feeling is mixed, because it’s not the piece they hoped would go big. Their thick research-driven considered takes or discussions of values or whatever, the ones they’d been meaning to write for years, apparently go mostly unread, whereas their random-thought “oh shit I need to get a post out by midnight or else the Inkhaven coaches will burn me at the stake”¹ posts get to the front page of Hacker News, where probably Elon Musk and God read them.

It happens to me too – some of my own pieces that took me the most effort, or that I’m proudest of, have zero notable comments or responses. I’m not upset about it. I’ve been around the block. It happens.

But for those people, those new bloggers who are kind of upset about the internet’s bad taste, might benefit from reading artist Dimespin’s essay written to other visual artists: “Why people like your doodles better than your finished works.”

e.g.:

This piece is good and even if you’re not a visual artist, you can probably make your own analogies by reading it. That said, to spell out a few for the writerly crowd:

The quick post is short, the effortpost is long

Here is the most important thing I can tell you for writing things that people might choose to read on purpose: Make it short. Everyone has 10,000,000 other things they could be reading. Make it efficient. Make it count.

If you are Scott Alexander, you can get huge readership on your long articles. If you aren’t, try either writing short things or becoming Scott Alexander. Pro tip: One of these things is easier than the other.

The quick post is about something interesting, the topic of the effortpost bores most people

The random historical event you read half a sentence about on Wikipedia and it caught your eye? Maybe that means that it could catch a lot of people’s eyes, and your quick post has brought it to them. If you’ve spend ten years formulating a theory about your field of work, that might only be interesting to people who care about that field. Or it’s about one of those “what is good anyhow” or “my theory of consciousness” type questions that people either already know about or already know they don’t give a shit about. Everyone has their own theory of consciousness, Harold!

The quick post has a fun controversial take, the effortpost is boringly evenhanded or laden with nuance

The quick post is low-context, the effortpost is high-context

The quick posts that aren’t even about a thing you’re an expert in – well, okay, you don’t know a lot, but you’ve written it as a non-expert and it’s at a non-expert’s level of understanding. Most readers aren’t experts in whatever random thing. You are automatically going on this journey of discovery with them.

Meanwhile, it’s really hard to explain something you have a detailed technical understanding of, in a way that’s approachable to others. You haven’t spoken to someone who ISN’T a software engineer in eight months. You’re tripping over feldspars left and right. Even if you try to explain it to a novice, you might not do it very well. “To appreciate why this modern factory design choice is interesting, we have to understand the history of automobile manufacturing logistics. In 1886 – ” Okay, maybe you’re right, but I’m also already closing the tab.

The quick post is has a casual style, the effortpost is inscrutably formal

Excessive linguistic density frequently triggers a distinct reticence in opportunistic audiences to apply interpretive labor to the text in question.

AKA: oh my god, just talk like a normal person, nobody wants to read all that.

You might put formal language into a piece because you are an expert and you’re thinking about it in jargon and conceptual terms. In this case, try saying it like you’d explain it to your buddy who doesn’t know jack shit about it.

You might also use formal language in an attempt to Make It Look Professional – unless you’re aiming for a really particular audience that eats up formality, just stop doing that! Readability is kind.

If you’re a writer and you’ve run into this situation and you’re upset about the internet’s bad taste and lack of discernment, my main advice is that on some level, you gotta get over it. You will never have any control over what random people find interesting, or what the algorithms decide to promote, or anything at all about other people. You’re lucky to be getting an audience at all, and if you are, you’re doing at least something right.

If you’re smart, you can convert these flickers of fame into more readership for your other better stuff – but the attention of the internet is best modeled as a random swarm of locusts that will occasionally land on your ripe fields based on its inscrutable whims. You can go crazy analyzing it or you can just keep farming.

Maybe you should just do the opposite of all these things so your writing becomes popular? Well, I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.

If you care about maximizing readership, I dunno, sure. Clickbait is popular for a reason – it works. If you don’t lie to the readers or advocate for anything evil, then I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong by optimizing for readership.

Note that some topics have inherently wider appeal than others – a short light post discussing something concrete and weird about the world is definitely going to get more readers than a piece that compares different philosophical schools. But if you care about philosophy, maybe the second piece is more important to you to write. The numbers aren’t a proxy for value of the piece or quality of its ideas.

Even if you’re exclusively interested in maximizing reception, audience might matter. I think very few people cared about my 2017 summary of a 2015 Blue Ribbon Study Panel on Biosecurity report, which is fair – I wrote it because I had already read this 83-page-long report, and figured someone else might just like to see my notes. And empirically they did, because a major biosecurity funder came up to me at an event and said they read it and really appreciated that I wrote it – they wanted to know what was in the original report and didn’t want to read 83 pages. This was a fantastic audience for it to reach. Or, like, if you want to contribute to the academic discourse, probably you want to engage with the academic literature, and that’s just inherently gonna dissuade many casual readers.

But listen, I bet you’re not just writing to maximize audience. Friend of the blog Ozy Brennan once said that being a writer requires “the absolute conviction that total strangers should listen to you because your words are interesting and valuable” (as well as “the decision to choose a career where you never leave the house or talk to anyone”.)

You’re here to say something interesting and valuable, right? I don’t think you ought to smooth out everything you touch for the masses. You want to say something that only you could say or that will hit the reader who needs it at the right time. You want to impress that one guy at the Blogging Club, or you practice “blogging as warnings scrawled on the cave wall”, or you’re writing for nice future AGIs creating rescue simulations of you based on your digital text corpus. Listen. Don’t lose your mind about it. Just try to say something beautiful and true. Or, failing that, say something fascinating and baffling.

But, I mean, obviously it’d be nice if the masses turn out to want to hear it too. I get it. There’s nuance.

This post is mirrored to Eukaryote Writes Blog, Substack, and Lesswrong.

Support Eukaryote Writes Blog on Patreon.

1. Nobody has dropped out yet! Isn’t that amazing? ︎

Questions put by Benjamin Franklin to his Junto, a club for mutual improvement that he founded in Philadelphia in 1727:

• How shall we judge of the goodness of a writing? Or what qualities should a writing have to be good and perfect in its kind? (His own answer: “It should be smooth, clear, and short.”)
• Can a man arrive at perfection in this life, as some believe; or is it impossible, as others believe?
• Wherein consists the happiness of a rational creature?
• What is wisdom? (“The knowledge of what will be best for us on all occasions, and the best ways of attaining it.”)
• Is any man wise at all times and in all things? (“No, but some are more frequently wise than others.”)
• Whether those meats and drinks are not the best that contain nothing in their natural taste, nor have anything added by art, so pleasing as to induce us to eat or drink when we are not thirsty or hungry, or after thirst and hunger are satisfied; water, for instance, for drink, and bread or the like for meat?
• Is there any difference between knowledge and prudence? If there is any, which of the two is most eligible?
• Is it justifiable to put private men to death, for the sake of public safety or tranquillity, who have committed no crime? As, in the case of the plague, to stop infection; or as in the case of the Welshmen here executed?
• If the sovereign power attempts to deprive a subject of his right (or, which is the same thing, of what he thinks his right), is it justifiable in him to resist, if he is able?
• Which is best: to make a friend of a wise and good man that is poor or of a rich man that is neither wise nor good?
• Does it not, in a general way, require great study and intense application for a poor man to become rich and powerful, if he would do it without the forfeiture of honesty?
• Does it not require as much pains, study, and application to become truly wise and strictly virtuous as to become rich?
• Whence comes the dew that stands on the outside of a tankard that has cold water in it in the summer time?

From Carl Van Doren’s biography. “New members had to stand up with their hands on their breasts and say they loved mankind in general and truth for truth’s sake. … In time the Junto had so many applications for membership it was at a loss to know how to limit itself to the twelve originally planned.”

We live in an age of wonders. Unfathomably complex machines will, with a few words or sentences, create the most remarkable imagery for us to enjoy. “Le Voyage”, an AI generated video of a painted world, went viral on Twitter last week.

The author of this arresting machine hallucination goes by the handle bandyquantguy, and he made it using a variety of AI tools, including Google’s Veo 3, which creates short video scenes from text prompts. He’s made a lot of them — this is #28 in the “Paint World” series.

When I saw Le Voyage on twitter earlier this week, I was too quick to dismiss it, and the entire medium of AI-generated video, as “not art”. The debate over what is and isn’t “art” is ultimately too tedious to be interesting to me, and always resolves to a maximalist definition (“if it made you think or feel something it’s art”) or a subjective one (“someone thinks this is art so it is”). So, fine. AI video is an artform. I don’t think this is much of a concession given that many people would gladly hang AI-generated prints on the walls of their home. Not should it be controversial given the creeping definition of the term “art” in the modern era, which long ago expanded to encompass purely-conceptual pieces like the infamous banana taped to the wall.

And it’s not recent. Painting a fictional signature on a urinal was gallery-worthy over 100 years ago, as Marcel Duchamp demonstrated with “Fountain.”

So this debate didn’t originate with AI tools. Anyone familiar with the development of photography has heard the failed argument against its consideration as an artform: that the use of a tool that precisely records an image reduces the practice to mere craft, the artist to technician. But photography requires technical mastery not dissimilar to other built artforms, as well as a keen eye for one’s subject, hard work in creating or scouting tableaus to photograph, and above all, an eye for beauty — or, in other words, taste.

All of these elements are present in AI-generated imagery as well, especially taste. The term “slop” is apropos for the vast majority of images created by these tools, simply because the people creating them are so enamored of its novelty that they fail to exercise any discretion in what they share with others. It’s like the old joke: What’s the difference between a good photographer and a bad one? The bad one shows you every photo they take. The AI art we don’t dismiss as “slop” is that tiny minority that was curated by somebody with taste.

So, it’s not the case that AI art isn’t “art”. It’s that AI art has no artist.

Suppose you find an old oil lamp in woods. You rub it and out pops a genie, who grants you three wishes. You ask it to create you a world-class oil painting of an old man cradling a newborn or something similarly schmaltzy, and the genie bobbles its head and produces an opus to rival all the renaissance masters. Who is the artist, you, or the genie?

We built that genie. “We” in this case refers to a couple distinct groups of people: first, the scientists, engineers, researchers, programmers, and technicians that developed the machine learning algorithms and then embodied them in silicon; second, and just as importantly, the countless human artists, writers, and other creatives that uploaded their creative work to the internet to be ingested by these hungry shoggoths. When you type a prompt into an AI tool, the creator of the product is, by metaphorical weight, 99.999999% not you. To the extent such work has authorship, it’s almost infinitely diffuse, spread so thin as to be meaningless. You didn’t make that, the genie did.

Asserting that your genius with prompting rises to the level of creative artistry is so delusional and wrong-headed that one struggles even to call it narcissism. It’s more like a category error. Everybody has met a guy who insists that he had the idea for a famous app like Instagram or Snapchat way before it was released. Even granting this is true (it never is), the idea is not the important part. Ideas are cheap. Execution is hard, and execution is everything. And in the case of AI art, the execution is 99.999999% the work of other people.

Last week a finance guy went viral for making the risible claim that a household income of $140,000 is the minimum to not live in poverty. There was lots of incisive criticism of this claim, but what I found most astounding was the author’s response to an accusation that AI wrote his article. Yes it did, he responded, and I’m proud of it.

This mindset is utterly alien to me as a writer, akin to a celebrity with a ghost-written memoir insisting that she did in fact write it herself since she was interviewed by the ghost-writer. It seems to view creative production as simply a means to an end, the act of creation itself dreary busywork we should be glad to offshore to less valuable entities like an LLM ghost-writer. I suppose I don’t have any real objection to treating art or writing as mere commodity with no provenance if your aim is something other than creative expression, such as creating things to be sold or trying to influence policy. But it seems to me that the typical AI art booster wants to have their cake and eat it too, to outsource the creative work onto the robot and still claim the output as a true expression of their own beautifully unique individuality. Speaking again as a writer, an LLM does not “help you write” by producing text in response to your prompt. It replaces your creative voice with its own.

If there’s anything to fear and despise about the rise of AI art, it’s not that creative types will be put out of work, although many surely will. But that’s the life of an artist since time immemorial — for most of human history only the truly exceptional artist could make a living on their work, usually with the support of a wealthy patron. Rather, the real threat this technology poses is devaluing the very act of creative expression itself by flooding the market with good-enough simulacra of creativity. Duchamp and the banana-tape guy first became famous in their local art scenes for creative genius, then laundered that fame into their bizarre conceptual art pieces using the fame as collateral. There is no shortcut to this process. An unknown concept artist painting his name on a urinal is simply a lunatic rightly ignored by everyone. The most skilled prompt “artist” is at best a technician, and their work will be swallowed by an endless ocean of similar products with nary a ripple, producing not even the traditional fifteen minutes of fame.

AI slop is harmless enough on its own, but the danger is that drowning us in slop will inevitably devalue real art in a simple equation of supply and demand.

The true test of any artform is this: can the person making the art possibly hope to get pussy as a result of their efforts? Or, to be less crass, can they use their artwork to gain social status and acclaim? If no, then they are not an artist. Prompt authors will not get pussy, therefore they aren’t artists, QED. But worse than that, the hyper-saturation of infospace with spectacular AI-created artwork, even if ultimately shallow and empty, actively suppresses the urge for human artistry. Save me the bromides about true creatives being in it for the love of the game — status-seeking is an irreducible human motivation, and when you remove that incentive it cannot but warp the outcomes in predictable ways.

Art cannot and will not ever die. If there’s a silver lining in this situation, it’s that the firehose of slop will naturally sour the public toward conceptual art, which they mostly already don’t like. Democratizing the production of Duchamps, taping a banana to every wall, will only serve to further undermine and accelerate the collapse of “idea as art.” Expect the post-AI era of art to emphasize the real and the physical, to feature unforgeable signals of labor, skill, and effort above mere conceptual novelty or beauty of form. That would be a nice outcome, and I hope it comes to pass.

As for bandyquantguy, the tweet featuring his AI-generated painted world went massively viral on Twitter for a few days, generating millions of views. But almost none of this infamy splashed onto the author’s original YouTube videos, which the tweeter helpfully duplicated and uploaded instead of embedding (although to his credit, he did provide links in a follow-up tweet). Paint World #28 currently sits at a whopping 4,100 views on YouTube, not even a muffled sneeze of attention by the standards of online virality. Considered together, these numbers may herald the arrival of a new artform, but they categorically do not signal the arrival of a new artist.

Or — if they do, his name is Veo.

Nature’s open-access sideline Nature Scientific Reports is the “we’ve got Nature at home” of scientific publishing. It appears to run any garbage for a mere $2,690 processing charge. A snip, I’m sure you’ll agree. [Nature]

Sometimes, the garbage gets caught out. Here’s this week’s big hit on social media: “Bridging the gap: explainable ai for autism diagnosis and parental support with TabPFNMix and SHAP” by Shimei Jiang. It was published on 19 November, but it breached containment just a couple of days ago. [Nature, archive]

The author says he analysed a pile of autistic patients and ran the data through a small machine learning model to help with diagnosis.

The paper reads like it was written with a chatbot. It’s very big on rambling text, bits of it literally don’t make sense — this was absolutely not edited by anyone — and it contradicts itself. Such as when the author says he’ll make the private patient data sets available to other researchers by arrangement — which is normal — but then he says all the work was based on a “publicly available benchmark dataset for ASD diagnosis.”

The crowning glory, though, is the absolute banger of an illustration: [Nature, archive]

• At the top is the headline “Autism Spectrum Disorder”. There’s a brain in pink, blue and white with “AUTISM” above it, and some little particles below, one of which has a line pointing to it saying “AUTISM”. He’s found the autism particle!
• Below that is a picture of a woman with a child in her lap. The child is pointing at the words “MISSING VALUE & runctitional features”. The woman’s legs go through the bench she’s sitting on. Pointing to the bench are the letters “FS1-NC,” which aren’t anywhere in the paper. To her right is a box with “Historical Medical frymblal & Environental features”.
• There’s a picture of a bicycle with the heading “AUTISM” and “score 0.93.”
• At the bottom are a couple of boxes saying “Factor Fexcectorn” and some unexplained diagrams.

I hope that’s all absolutely clear.

The author’s institution is the Anhui Vocational College of Press and Publishing. It’s a graphic design school in China. Seems an odd venue for autism research.

The paper assures us that “All experimental protocols were approved by the Institutional Review Board” — I wonder how often the ethics board for the graphic design college meets.

Jack Ryan on the No Breakthroughs blog did a deep dive on this amazing paper. He contacted Rafal Marszalek, the editor in chief of Nature Scientific Reports, who said: [blog post]

This paper is in the process of being retracted and the author has been informed.

… Whilst the details of peer review are confidential, we can confirm that the article underwent two rounds of review from two independent peer reviewers, supporting an accept decision.

You wot, mate. If Nature’s reviewers let that image through, then Nature’s editorial process is incompetent and Nature Scientific Reports is just a pay for play paper mill. But we knew that.

The paper now has an editor’s note:

Readers are alerted that the contents of this paper are subject to criticisms that are being considered by editors. A further editorial response will follow the resolution of these issues.

It’s unusual for a paper to be retracted in just a few days. But then, this will be the first time a human actually looked at this paper in the entire publishing process.  Nature did get their $2,690, which is the important bit.

• Video — Podcast

Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! This week, we received the first copies of Issue 2 of our magazine! As of this Monday, we will move from pre-ordering to just regular ordering, so if you wish to get the magazine at its discounted pre-order price of £18, with an extra discount for paid subscribers (see the original email for details), then this is the last weekend to order.

Pre-order Issue 2

In 2018, I saw two visions of the future. Down one path, there was Ohh Cha, the Japanese matcha pop-up that took place inside Muji Tottenham Court Road over the course of two weeks, serving koicha as thick as molten chocolate and usucha of various provenances – the type of matcha that compelled Japan to create kaiseki dining, tea ceremonies and the architecture of the tea house just to put a bowl of it in its right place. Down the other path, was the tin of chilli kale matcha I spotted on a supermarket shelf that promised to ‘destroy hangovers’. Of course, London chose the second path.

Over the last few years, matcha has taken over London, just as it’s taken over everywhere else in the world. As someone who used to work in the tea industry, and spent the best part of a decade trying to get people to drink good matcha, this has been a strange experience. Matcha is everywhere and people – particularly young people – love it, even if it’s low-grade matcha (and, increasingly, not from Japan, but from China). Meanwhile, the scarcity of matcha has pushed the prices for premium matcha up; from what I’ve heard, in the last year the wholesale cost has almost tripled. Whatever the grade, London has an insatiable need for matcha (note: all of these are real!): Biscoff matcha, Terry’s Chocolate Orange matcha, toffee nut Cream matcha, matcha tiramisu, matcha ramen, matcha hummus, matcha biriyani, matcha milk pedicures and, most ominously, daytime matcha raves.

So, in today’s acid reflux, I’m handing over the column to Niloufar Haidari to explain this pivotal moment in matcha culture on a global scale, and why it just might mean the death of civilisation as we know it. Jonathan Nunn

It’s 7pm on Saturday and you’re at a matcha rave in Dubai, by Niloufar Haidari

@timeoutdubai

Time Out Dubai on Instagram: "And you thought matcha was boring…

It’s 7pm on Saturday and you’re at a matcha rave in Dubai. The afro-house is bumping, ladies are swaying around like Sims, taxes are being evaded. There is much pain in the world, but not on this rooftop. Here there are digital nomads, myopic influencers selling dreams, and Europeans who moved to the UAE to escape the creeping tide of Islam in the West. There are also, for some reason, iced matcha lattes. Two Asians, seemingly the only non-white people in attendance, hand-whisk the green powder and serve it up to the partygoers with pink foam. A posh-looking man in a blue shirt and cream trousers offers a matcha ice cream cone to the camera with a smile and the Dubai skyline behind him. There is a complete dearth of swag, personality and vibe.

Drinking matcha is obviously not a new practice. Its history in Japan goes back nearly a thousand years, while whisked tea dates back even further in China. Starbucks has been selling (bad) matcha as ‘green tea lattes’ since 2006, the earthy, bitter taste of cheap matcha masked by everything from vanilla syrups to blueberry purées and sweetened coconut milk. But matcha has recently become a status symbol for wealth signalling and wellness culture, propelled in part by ‘aesthetic’ lifestyle TikToks, in which influencers in blush-coloured athleisure pose with matching strawberry matchas at ‘morning wellness raves’.

However, such events are not confined to the cursed dropshipper-populated corners of Bali and Dubai. This summer there were matcha raves in Vienna, Madrid, Frankfurt, Perth, Tijuana and Cork. Louis Bekk, a French DJ who seems to have made a career out of playing bad house remixes at pop-up brand activations, allegedly ‘turned the matcha scene on its head’ when he hosted an alcohol-free day-time rave at Marylebone’s How Matcha.

Of course, the reason I know so much about Gen Z green drink culture is not because I think it is a frivolous industry emblematic of impending societal collapse (although it is) but because I myself love this shit. When a matcha spot opened in Brent Cross’s new food court, I was ready to fall to my knees with gratitude at the prospect of finally being able to access a delicious silly little drink anywhere near my home in Neasden – the last place in zone 3 where you still can’t get a half-decent flat white. Its best-selling drink is the peach collagen yuzu; I personally alternate between the vanilla and brown sugar oat milk options, sometimes adding a shot of ashwagandha or bee pollen if I really feel like recreating my experience of the time I lived in LA. I will happily travel anywhere that gives me the option of topping my drink with sweetened cream cold foam, and have on more than one occasion found myself the oldest person in the queue at Jenki, waiting 20 minutes to spend £6.50 on a rose collagen matcha latte just to Feel Something – or maybe to avoid feeling anything at all.

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