Lorraine Daston
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Lorraine Daston. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Lorraine Daston's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.
Foreword
By Edo Segal
The sentence that made me put my laptop down was about a flower.
Not a real flower. A drawing of one. An eighteenth-century botanical illustration, commissioned by a scientist who told the artist: Don't draw the plant on the table. Draw the species. Smooth out the insect damage. Straighten the crooked stem. Remove everything that makes this particular specimen particular, and give me the ideal.
The artist did. The image was beautiful. And for two hundred years, the scientific community treated that beauty as proof that the image was true.
I read that and felt the blood leave my face. Because I had been doing the same thing with Claude for months.
Not with flowers. With ideas. I would describe a half-formed thought,
