Good morning. Here are this week’s highlights:
In Washington, the Education Department moved to cancel student loans for nearly every college arts program and to judge schools by their graduates’ earnings (The New York Times) — a logic that values an arts education purely by what its graduates later earn. Meanwhile, a loose symposium of writers spent the week worrying the opposite question: what is the human part of creative work actually worth, given that it’s the one part a machine can’t reproduce?
Neuroscience suggests “semantic knowledge” — the internal map of how concepts connect — is the precondition for genuine invention, and it’s what no AI model possesses (Neuroscience News). But how can you tell whether something has been written by AI? The Atlantic proposes that it’s the absence of human friction: prose that’s too clean, too even, “simultaneously breezy and grandiose” (The Atlantic). And as computers increasingly talk to computers, another writer asks whether we’re quietly surrendering our autonomy — typing into the box and waiting (The Atlantic).
So we’re working out how to define and defend the irreducibly human contribution to art and creativity at the precise moment our government is reclassifying it as a bad financial bet. One side measures art by its earnings; the other suspects the value was never in the output at all.
All this week’s stories below, organized by topic.
Doug
