Sarah Brouillette
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sarahbrouillette.bsky.social
Sarah Brouillette
@sarahbrouillette.bsky.social

literature prof, book historian, cultural sociologist, anti-work communist gadfly

https://carleton.ca/english/people/brouillette-sarah/

Art 35%
Philosophy 17%

Reposted by Sarah Brouillette

LLMLM?

Reposted by Sarah Brouillette

We are quickly moving from “the inevitable future of existence” to “multilevel marketing wine club hustle”

Reposted by Sarah Brouillette

the internet is straight up not interesting anymore as either a fictional subject or a modality by which fiction is produced sorry
To be very clear, that lady in the NYT article is not making any money with her hundreds of AI slop books.

She makes money by *convincing people* she makes money that way and getting them to pay her to teach them how to do it.

It's an evolved MLM, and the NYT is helping market it.

❤️‍🔥

this is very funny and true
Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins
YouTube video by Folding Ideas
youtu.be

and I mean, as @mattseybold.bsky.social put it, "every session of Claude Code is like running a dishwasher" -- if academics aren't fighting the widespread adoption of these things then what are we even doing, and that includes IMO acknowledging the underlying compulsions

easy prey for these pyramid schemes).

I think recognizing some of what makes people fall into these traps--and they are traps, because Ms. Hart will tell them this is an easy way to make money and that's just not true--is totally compatible with wanting to guillotine the people developing the AI to begin with (and making us

Totally--could not agree more. It sucks for many reasons, not least because it makes it even harder for people who care about writing in the genre to make any money doing it.

Reposted by Sarah Brouillette

the thing i'm waiting for with the ai romance novel lady is for another scammer to figure out that purely ai-generated material w no human authorship is generally not considered to be protected by copyright in the US rn, and saving themselves the 45 mins per book by reselling hers

this has been going on in non-fiction and low content books for a long time -- it was only a matter of time; Ms. Hart is selling access to her technique and developing proprietary tech, just taking advantage of how many people out there are desperate for some kind of income

Reposted by Sarah Brouillette

‘The International Energy Agency reckons that if the current global expansion of data centres continues, the CO2 emissions for which they are responsible, currently around 200 million tonnes per year, will be about 60 per cent higher by 2030.’

Donald MacKenzie on AI.

www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Donald MacKenzie · AI’s Scale
AI’s scale doesn’t matter just to specialists. The rest of us are being taken on a ride along the logarithmic curve...
www.lrb.co.uk
There's something very important in this from @alondra.bsky.social about how a government of bosses understands its relationship to AI: as a means to avoid preexisting, even nominal, deference to popular deliberation or expert consultation. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

screaming, crying, ordering ten copies 💖❤️‍🔥

Reposted by Sarah Brouillette

My book is now available for pre-order!
Beneath The Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work - Zone Books
Zone Books
www.zonebooks.org

Duke UP in fall 2026 (exact date not set)

Reposted by Sarah Brouillette

Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era. Is the title.

There are tons of AI generated books on Amazon and Audible of course. They are mainly non-fiction though, or low content books. I have a chapter about this in my forthcoming book :) :) 🙃

Hard to keep up with the pace of development, but to my knowledge existing research on real creative writers using AI suggests they use for help with certain bits rather than to write a novel from nothing. I find their working practices more interesting than the aesthetic judgement.

this is a good piece about writers turning to AI not to generate whole stories but for speed up, because they are stressed out by online content expectations (h/t @dan-sinnamon.bsky.social who I believe recommended): www.theverge.com/c/23194235/a...

I'm struck by the way the diagnostic terminology-- superficial competence, asymmetrical effort,
mass producibility--is new language for deskilling and automation

What existing work does is point out (1) the implications of deskilling and automation for creative labor and (2) how useful it has been to fascist aesthetics, especially anchored in current US statecraft

I'm definitely not in favour of ignoring it. I think there is already a lot of important analysis of AI slop that takes it seriously as something we have to study. And none of this is bothered about it being "low" culture, as this brief piece suggests. +

those with no money or work can enjoy the consoling pleasure of instantly generating videos of people doing zany shit ... or use AI yourself to produce Substack material faster to satisfy subscribers ... what's not to like

for those following AI & labour news, I was just reading about the Washington Post and: "The layoffs come as Will Lewis, the Post’s publisher and CEO, continues to push a new strategy centered on subscriptions, events, and heavier use of AI."