Martha Woodmansee
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 Martha Woodmansee. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Martha Woodmansee'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 I almost skipped was about a vegetable.
Edward Young, 1759: the original work "rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows, it is not made." I was deep in the research for this book, reading about eighteenth-century German copyright disputes — not exactly my natural habitat — when that line stopped me. Not because it was beautiful, though it is. Because I recognized it. I had been saying it my whole career, just in different words.
Every pitch deck I ever built rested on that vegetable metaphor. The founder as origin. The vision as something that grows from within. The product as organic expression of a singular mind. I have stood in rooms and said, essentially: this came from me, and that is