Nepenthe

From The Guardian .   Illustration: Sean O'Brien/The Guardian   I n February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work. Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant ( The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening.) AI had translated the sentence’s meaning but was seemingly unaware that the repetitions rendered the line absurd. It was far inferior to his own translation that would be publish...

From The New York Times     Chris (Simpsons artist)                 As someone in the word business, I’m often asked to weigh in on the question of literature and artificial intelligence. People are usually surprised when I admit that I love A.I. I use A.I. for everything, 24/7. I can’t get enough, me and my whole family. My uncle uses A.I. to buy onions. It used to be you wanted onions, you went to the store and maybe it was full of people, or it was empty — you literally never knew. Now A.I. can calculate when the grocery store is low-traffic, and my uncle just strolls in, la-di-da, and buys onions, no waiting. Imagine a world where you don’t have to wait to buy onions. It’s here. I have this digital agent. Does everything for me, from managing work flow to offloading repetitive tasks to reminding me when to hug my kids. I call it the Gooch. The Gooch is up all night, scrabbling around its binary habit trail, what’s-upping m...