AI Article Readings

In this post Marcus Olang pushes back against the lazy idea that formal, polished prose is automatically a sign of AI, arguing that many so-called ChatGPT “tells” are also the marks of a very human education shaped by exams, colonial history, and the pressure to master English as a language of opportunity. It’s a sharp, personal defence of writers whose humanity is too easily misread by algorithmic suspicion.
https://open.substack.com/pub/marcusolang/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-like-chatgpt?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post Scott Alexander uses AI fiction, school-essay “wow words,” children’s songs, poetry, architecture, and orange juice to build a theory of taste: bad taste as the overuse of cheap tricks that reliably delight unsophisticated audiences, and good taste as the difficult art of making space for subtler pleasures. It’s funny, wide-ranging, and unusually generous about why “lowbrow” joys can still be genuinely joyful.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post Scott Alexander uses flags, movie plot holes, and tech-company names as “model organisms” for thinking about taste: small, familiar examples where broader arguments about rules, context, elegance, novelty, and cliché become easier to see. It’s a sharp, funny exploration of why some aesthetic rules feel obvious, when they may just be inherited habits, and why “easy wins” can sometimes feel suspiciously tasteless.
* 00:00 - Introduction
* 00:09 - Reddit Vexillology
* 07:49 - 2: Movie Plot Holes
* 10:12 - Tech Company Names
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/three-model-organisms-for-taste?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post John Psmith reviews Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games, using the history of interactive fiction to explore why games made of words once felt magical, why they faded, and why AI might make them newly strange, powerful, and relevant.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thepsmiths/p/review-50-years-of-text-games-by?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


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In this post Scott Alexander returns to the topic of artistic taste, responding to thoughtful replies from Ozy, Frank Lantz, and Sympathetic Opposition on a piece he wrote last year. He opens by unpacking eight distinct things people tend to bundle together under the heading of "good art" — from raw sensory delight to historical novelty to political point-making — and then sets out to argue, contra his interlocutors, that letting these blur into one another is doing real damage. Along the way he draws on analogies from restaurant criticism, medical research, modern literary fiction, and his own relationship with poetry to defend a particular view of what aesthetic judgment is actually for.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/contra-everyone-on-taste?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit askwhocastsai.substack.com/subscribe