Quotes
π¬ “I feel like I’m spending half my work time managing my mental and emotional ability to navigate a situation where I can’t confidently apply what I learn to what I’ll do next.” Kim Werker on Canada-to-US book tariffs feels applicable to a lot of us right now.
Thank you @cygnoir@social.lol for pointing the way to this beautiful thread about the power of connections we make online. ππ¬ “She strode the earth clad in the invisible armor of their virtual companionship.” β Lev Grossman, The Magician King
ππ¬ " ChatGPT has access to every poem ever written, at least in theory, but it can’t feel anything when it generates a poem from a prompt. Is this still poetry?" John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “It’s a near certainty that generative AI can have some positive effects on human writing, but for that to be true, we must hold fast to what makes writing meaningful to humans.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “What do we make of a technology that is simultaneously undeniably powerful, has access to all the information in the world, and can produce outputs at a speed unmatchable by humans, but at the same time is also untethered from reality?” John Warner, More Than Words
ππ¬ “The things ChatGPT is ‘smarter’ at… are relatively limited as compared to our human capacities for experience, reflection, analysis, and creativity…” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “It’s not that ChatGPT makes stuff up. It has no capacity for discerning something true from something not true. Truth is irrelevant to its operations.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “Large language models do not ‘write.’ They generate syntax.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “…ChatGPT cannot write. Generating syntax is not the same thing as writing. Writing is an embodied act of thinking and feeling. Writing is communicating with intention.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “…segregating people by those who are allowed and empowered to engage with a genuine process of writing from those who outsource it to AI is hardly democratic. It mistakes product for process.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
ππ¬ “‘That was it,’ Maggie said with a laugh. ‘I was bright. Brie was sweet.’” Nora Roberts, Born in Fire
π¬π “Rather than seeing ChatGPT as a threat that will destroy things of value, we should be viewing it as an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI
π¬πΊ “The thing, Hastings? Do you think Poirot concerns himself with mere thingness?” Season 1, Episode 2, “Murder in the Mews,” Agatha Christie’s Poirot
π¬π “Do you want to look back on a life of items crossed off lists drawn up in response to the demands of others? Or do you want to hang on to, and repeat, and remember, the thrill of discovering things on your own?” Rob Walker, The Art of Noticing
ππ¬ “I want a life capacious enough to contain what I choose to be true about myself and that which I did not but have nevertheless learned to work with, to use, to wield.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “…kindness is a form of magic we can choose to know how to do. What matters is attending to suffering, no matter why it’s there.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “In illness, the now feels like punishment.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “Maybe the blast radius of disability destroys everything and also makes new worlds. Maybe these are worlds of paradox: both the radical limitation of what you used to be able to do and an explosion of the horizon around what you thought would ever be possible.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “…this is the conundrum all sick and disabled people live with. To be pathologized is to be allowed to survive.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “How can you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
ππ¬ “How many of us have already met our doom and then had to get out of bed and go on?” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom