This 2013 documentary popped up in my feeds and I find that there’s something quaint about the optimism expressed on how this technology is going to change things. As someone who got a BA in Journalism in 1991 and then watched professional journalism and the local newspaper disappear because newspaper owners were stuck in the previous century and anyone with a Twitter account thought that what they were doing was journalism, the fate of writing is not being helped by the continuing escalation of technology and its enablers. The one quote that stands out, early in the documentary, is when someone says how great it is that you can get access to any printed material just by doing a search on your computer and then someone else says that (in 2013) they are printing way more books than they did in the past. These statements jumped out to me because, possibly, despite the search engines engineers’ expertise, are we being shown what we are asking for or what the algorithm says will generate more revenue for the search engine company? And with more books being published, what’s the signal to noise ratio? How much crap is being promoted and genuine art being lost in the shuffle? And all of this was being said long before our current AI/LLM slop debacle. 

I love the technology I’ve employed to work on my writing and online sharing. But I know, just like my music-artist brethren before me, I’m under no illusion that what is promoted and sold and pushed by the algorithm has anything to do with the actual quality of the work. Pick your era, it’s just like the early 1960s and record companies and pushing the crap out of their artists, only now, thanks to technology they can push even more without having to make anything “physical” and pay the artists even less. To mix my metaphors, now a writer can use any of the many “AI” apps to “auto-tune” their writing to something appealing to the marketing algorithm. It’s machines writing for machines. Ack! 

Someone will figure it out and quality will survive, despite the algorithm. At least that’s my hope. I’ve mentioned before that a lot of my time over the past few months has been spent working through journals that I began in the 1980s. Thinking about the future and the expense that I currently endure to keep my stuff online, unlike the video, I’m betting that keeping my work “alive” is going to eventually depend on having physical versions of my work. That’s right, while I’m still here I’ll aways generate an online/electronic version, but I’m betting that what will survive when I’m gone is the dead-tree versions that I’m also working to create. Let that sink in for a moment. Have a great weekend, y’all. JBB

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Tags: books, documentaries, the algorithm, video Fridays, writing

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