Reading
Articles, essays, and ideas I keep coming back to. AI, taste, art, and what stays human.
The Atlantic
The Importance of Taste in the AI Era
In a world of limitless AI-generated choices, taste becomes the essential human skill — a subtle sensibility, more secret weapon than personality trait.
Forbes
LVMH Sees The AI Challenge For Luxury Is Not Technology But The Human Element
LVMH's position that AI's real challenge in luxury is preserving the irreplaceable — craftsmanship, creativity, emotional connection.
Behavioral Scientist
How to Cultivate Taste in the Age of Algorithms
By the author of Filterworld. Taste is a cultivatable skill that becomes critical as algorithms flatten culture into sameness.
WIRED
AI Will Make Human Art More Valuable
The advent of AI renders human art more precious by contrast. What's made by hand becomes rare, and rarity is value.
Fast Company
How Human Curation Came Back to Clean Up AI's Messes
Major tech companies rediscovering the human touch after over-investing in algorithmic recommendations.
The Guardian
In the Age of the Algorithm, the Human Gatekeeper Is Back
As information explodes, human curation and editorial judgment become more, not less, valuable.
Google Cloud Blog
Inside LVMH's Data Estate, Where Luxury AI Agents Are Taking Root
The tension revealed: how the world's largest luxury conglomerate deploys AI while fiercely protecting human craft and creative judgment.
The New Yorker
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
Ted Chiang's argument that a language model is a lossy compression of the web — fluent, plausible, and quietly wrong. The clearest thing written on what generation is and isn't.
The Red Hand Files
Nick Cave on ChatGPT Writing a Song 'In His Style'
A songwriter's fierce reply: art is something that costs the maker something. Data can imitate the style, but it cannot suffer, and the suffering was the point.
Walter Benjamin (1935)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The essay that named it first: reproduction strips art of its 'aura.' The origin point for every argument about why the original, the singular, the present still holds value.
Emergence Magazine
The Serviceberry
Robin Wall Kimmerer on gift economies and reciprocity, drawn from a single berry. On abundance, gratitude, and value that isn't extracted. Quiet and radical.
The New Yorker
The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety
Kyle Chayka on the low hum of unease that comes from letting algorithms choose for us — and the effort it takes to want what is actually yours.
The New Yorker
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
James Somers watches AI absorb the craft he spent a life mastering, and asks what's left. Tender and honest about loss — and about what endures.
This list grows as I find things worth sharing. Check back.