Vol. 1, No. 10: Imposter Syndrome
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Dear Soft Labor,
I’m a writer who uses a pen name—a best-selling writer, in fact—and even better, I write young adult fiction that teeters on the edge of fantasy. That being said, the concept of using AI to “ideate” or even generate text for novels makes not only practical but conceptual sense for my work. I read a lot about AI and find a lot of the backlash—or what I call “the froth”—around it to be rather hysterical. However, I am in utter agreement that AI is and will continue to have an effect on common language—its usage, its syntax, and its sound.
I am concerned that engaging directly with AI will sully the voice that I’ve worked so hard to hone over so many years—that I will become a fraud to my loyal readers, even if they don’t know my real, legal name. Am I being too precious?
From the LLM,
Imposter Syndrome
Dear Imposter,
In short: No, you are not being too precious.
We try not to judge those to employ AI in their working process—or even in the work itself. (We’re thinking, for example, about Sheila Heti’s work with AI, including “According to Alice,” a piece of fiction she wrote for the New Yorker in 2023 by engaging with a customized chat bot.) We do feel concerned, however, about the way AI is “smoothing out” our relationship to language—how encountering AI-generated language in an everyday context, whether through Google search or AI-enabled tools like Figma or Notion, slowly changes our expectations of language itself, effectively lowering the bar.
How does one remain aware of this proliferation of decidedly “mid” language produced by algorithmic averages?
For us, it’s about inserting friction into the encounter. We tend to disable AI tools where possible. We rarely enable AI transcripts or translations as they are, in a word, janky. We have a very precious, black crocodile-skin notebook in which we take long and shorthand notes that are often intelligible only to us. We draw.
Even if you do decide to employ AI, doing so in an intentionally off sort of way can help you retain a sense of control over the process, which is as much about the writing as the books themselves are, right?
Keep it glitchy.
Yours,
Soft Labor
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Search Results
“Search Results” points toward Soft Labor’s ongoing research interests.
🔗 For Labor Day, we re-read Toni Morrison's "The Work You Do, The Person You Are," her brief 2017 essay for the New Yorker. "Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”
🔗 J. Crew did indeed use AI to generate its recent ad campaign for a collaboration with Vans, a hard fact that was reported by Blackbird Spyplane and subsequently dissected by the entire fashion/photography Internet—so obsessively, we might add, that BBSP published a follow-up claiming that the Vans in question aren’t even depicted correctly. On our end, we were most offended by the fact that the campaign imitates, in an eye roll-worthy way, the late, great, utterly inimitable Bill Cunningham—who once photographed us while we were exiting the Armory, wearing Issey!
🔗 While we usually forgo reading reviews before the books themselves, we recently began Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna’s The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want after reading its excellent review by James Gleick in the New York Review of Books. (See: “The Parrot in the Machine.”) Bender and Hanna—an academic linguist and a sociologist formerly of Google’s Ethical AI team, respectively—have the professional bona fides to challenge common notions around AI. While taking in their witty, face-paced narrative—a rarity for this subject matter—the reader can almost imagine the two sitting in a board room, communicating with silent, sideways glances over the din of their colleagues.
🔗 “AI is Coming for Culture!!!!!!” We graciously added six exclamation points to the title of Joshua Rothman’s latest for the New Yorker. Epic Jaron Lanier quotes in this one.
🔗 “I felt like the father of a synthetic son who was showing signs of mental decay.” For Frieze, Paul Chan writes about the experience of training AI frameworks to draw a synthetic self-portrait in the form of a chatbot. Perfect psychoanalytic and philosophical references here, as ever.
🔗 We’ve heard a lot of recent buzz over Dean Kissick's recent Spike Magazine essay, “The Vulgar Image” which is about—you guessed it—AI’s effect on visual culture, et cetera, et cetera. Also try Travis Diehl’s recent Libra Season column, “Hello, Cruel World!”
🔗 “AI isn’t design’s biggest problem,” claims Soft Labor comrade Jarret Fuller in his latest column for Fast Company. What is a problem, however, is that his columns are consistently hidden behind the website’s paywall, and so we were glad to see Fuller write a bit more about his piece in his newsletter.
🔗 We’re currently reviewing New School professor Dominic Pettman’s Ghosting: On Disappearance which offers a wide-ranging history of an action that—admit it—most of us have taken, whether online or off.
🔗 Unrelated, but nonetheless good: We recently splurged on three photography books—all newly-reprinted cult classics. Adrienne Salinger’s Teenagers in the Bedrooms was photographed in the 90s. (Rebecca Mead recently spoke with Salinger for the New Yorker.) We dropped so many Euros on Barcelona-based Apartment Books' recent drop of Kyochi Tsuzaki’s legendary Tokyo Style and Happy Victims. While both document the private interior spaces of Tokyo apartments, the latter was first published over 87 installments in the fashion magazine Ryuko Tsushin and chronicles the lives of fashion obsessives living with their vast collections in cramped city quarters.
Progress Report
“Progress Report” updates readers on Soft Labor’s own work, as well as that of our collaborators and comrades.
▶️ Soft Labor is excited to begin mentoring for the New Museum’s cultural incubator, NEW INC, which is welcoming its twelfth cohort of 74 members working at the intersection of art, design, technology, and entrepreneurship. We’ve been a fan of NEW INC since day 0—it’s been a long time!—and we’re glad to finally have the time, space, and opportunity to collaborate.
▶️ We’d like to direct your attention to The Pleat, a recently-relaunched publication by writer, editor, and Soft Labor comrade Eve Batey. You may know her culture reporting from her work at Vanity Fair and many other outlets over many years, but The Pleat is a personal, less structured work, written in a voice without a trace of the early-aughts confessional vibes that characterize so much of this kind of writing.
Dress Code
“Dress Code” spotlights workplace looks of all forms and kinds.
