What makes the AI chatbots and agents feel light and clean, here and now in 2026? Is it an innate architectural resistance to advertising, to attention hacks, to adversarial crud? No — it’s that they are simply new! The language models in 2026 are Google in 1999, Twitter in 2009. Their vast conjoined industry of influence hasn’t yet arisen … though it is stirring.In other words, the companies that control these programs can’t let them be free forever. Then the great enshittification begins. Here’s Robin again, on the “magic circle” no AI can cross: that of actually functioning in the real world. The main reason we feel that AI will turn the world upside-down is that, for twenty-five years or so, we’ve spent most of our time on the computer. [I like the title: “the rhinoceros, the anchovy, the Joshua tree.”] AI doesn’t actually affect the physical world that much. Hence, my laissez faire attitude towards it. Also, Robin points out that the digital revolution hasn’t resulted in huge advances in productivity, not compared to the industrial revolution. As I said to Tara the other day, we could still go back to the pre-internet age and not have lost much. Anyway, lots to chew on in Robin’s post. Alan Jacobs:
the arrival of AI slop machines like Suno will dramatically accelerate something that’s already well underway, the widening chasm between live music and recorded music. When musicians recorded live in studio, the gap between that and live performance was very small; now it’s vast and getting vaster. And as Adam says, people will always want to experience live music — and perhaps will value it all the more because of the contrast to an increasingly slop-dominated world of recordings.Cory Doctorow extols a recent SCOTUS ruling about AI-copyright: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/
This is wonderful news for creative workers. It means that our bosses must pay humans to do work if they want to be granted copyright on the things they want to sell. The more that humans are involved in the creation of a work, the stronger the copyright on that work becomes – which means that the less a human contributes to a creative work, the harder it will be to prevent others from simply taking it and selling it or giving it away.Cal Newport: like email, AI is just increasing busywork Michael Tsai is keeping a round-up of various developers’ opinions on AI here Alan Jacobs on using Claude to analyze his own journals: https://blog.ayjay.org/against-ai/ What’s my problem with this, exactly? I have two. First, the questions he asks Claude are the kinds of questions that, fifteen years ago, he would have googled. We know what happened to Google. I don’t see any reason why the same thing won’t happen to Claude. Second, I don’t see any use in using a machine to synthesize my journals. I didn’t write them so that a machine could summarize them for me. I wrote them to get the thoughts out of my head so I could look at them. Going back over my own writing, as boring as it is sometimes, is an important part of the process. Dr. Jacobs is much farther along in his writing career than I am, so he may not be interested in doing that for himself. Foster Huntington on the real sources of creativity: https://arestlesstransplant.substack.com/p/the-case-for-provincialism-and-creativity
have no crystal ball, and I certainly can’t predict what AI will do to our lives or how we will stay relevant, but I imagine the value of the human intellect in the next few decades will be in creativity away from the hive mind. Large Language Models, are like the super cities of the last 30 years. They are mesmerizing, powerful and enthralling, their size and scope truly a wonder to be hold. If the theory outlined above holds true, they won’t really bring anything new to the table. They hoover information, tweak it slightly and spit it out in marginally more consumable forms. They will prove to be the JJ Abrams or Drakes of their respective fields, creating countless hits and selling billions at the box office, but contributing very little culturally in proportion to their commercial success. The real new ideas will continue to come away from the hive mind, in the provinces. I might eat my words on this one, but I doubt it.