michael-dean-k/

Will AI ever be able to capture the intangibles of quality?

Davey sent me a voice note, loosely around if it would be possible for AI to handle all of the branches of quality. I’m skeptical that it would work, and even if so, I think there’s value in having humans read essays and make these decisions. Still, he triggered three questions in me:

1. Might unconscious machines actually be able to better determine cultural transcendence than humans? I’ve made a team of judges that is well-rounded, but it’s limited to the people I know and trust. The categories are good, but is it really representative of the whole Internet? How would I know? In the future, you could have scrapers read every Substack post in real-time and create a living map of cultural vectors, and then simulate all new essay against past/present/future vectors. (Or, better yet, the bots could read Substack, understand the psychographics of readers, and then elect human judges to still keep humans in the loop.)

2. Might some element of essay evaluation, if it wants to be “perfect and total” require a machine with simulated consciousness? This got me to think about the taste category. I think that you could potentially map the canon, and then have it make conclusions that only a lifelong reader could come to. But there is an element of ‘somatic reaction’ that would probably not translate. Even if a machine had some sense of qualia (which I think it can), it would likely be significantly different from a human’s. 

3. Even if machines could do the entirety of evaluation, and create anthologies of human-written essays (and machine-written essays, but in a separate collection), might there still be value in including humans in the process? Could be valuable both in terms of determining the winner, and the emerging culture from involving humans in that process. I like to think that if we ever have a “best machine essays of 2028” that humans will play a critical role in the eval of that.