It’s been a while since a particular piece of technology has felt as fraught, efficient, and consequential as today’s text-to-image AI art-generation tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney.

It reminded me of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, in which the college-professor protagonist travels into the countryside with his colleague Murray to see “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” Nothing makes the barn particularly remarkable except its notoriety—a fictional pre-Internet meme. Observing the crowd of photographers around the b

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This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is ... See more