prompt engineering

Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI
by Ethan Mollick
Published 2 Apr 2024

We should, they argue, teach basic AI literacy, and probably “prompt engineering,” about the art and science of creating good prompts for AIs. Teaching about AI In 2023, many companies advertised six-figure salaries for “AI whisperer” roles, and for good reason—as we have seen, working with AI is far from intuitive. And any time a new job title with high pay appears, so does a huge number of courses, instruction manuals, and YouTube channels offering the knowledge you (yes, YOU) need to get rich today. To be clear, prompt engineering is likely a useful near-term skill. But I don’t think prompt engineering is so complicated. You actually have likely read enough at this point to be a good prompt engineer.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT focus on working with AI: Peter Allen Clark, “AI’s Rise Generates New Job Title: Prompt Engineer,” Axios, February 22, 2023, https://www.axios.com/2023/02/22/chatgpt-prompt-engineers-ai-job. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT working with AI is far from intuitive: C. Quilty-Harper, “$335,000 Pay for ‘AI Whisperer’ Jobs Appears in Red-Hot Market,” Bloomberg.com, March 29, 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-29/ai-chatgpt-related-prompt-engineer-jobs-pay-up-to-335-000?cmpid=BBD032923_MKT&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=230329&utm_campaign=markets#xj4y7vzkg.

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You actually have likely read enough at this point to be a good prompt engineer. Let’s start with the third principle I shared earlier—treat AI like a person and tell it what kind of person it is. LLMs work by predicting the next word, or part of a word, that would come after your prompt, sort of like a sophisticated autocomplete function. Then they continue to add language from there, again predicting which word will come next. So the default output of many of these models can sound very generic, since they tend to follow similar patterns that are common in the written documents the AI was trained on.

AI in Museums: Reflections, Perspectives and Applications
by Sonja Thiel and Johannes C. Bernhardt
Published 31 Dec 2023

The users transfer the thought in their head (‘Think the image’) into a formulated command (‘Say the image’), which in turn contains everything that ultimately forms the visual result in the urinal, respectively the artwork. In this context, so-called prompt engineering is relevant, which refers to the process of carefully crafting prompts or inputs for a machine learning model in order to achieve a desired output or outcome. This involves designing and refining the inputs given to a model in order to maximize its performance or achieve a specific task or goal.3 The prompt contains the idea and functions as a concept, and prompt engineering is thus the actual artistic act that precedes the resulting work of art. In other words: prompt engineering becomes an actual artistic skill in itself and probably the actual artistic act as such.

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By means of the prompt, the artistic piece is created 3 Prompt engineering is particularly important in natural language processing (NLP), where models are often used to generate text based on the input given. By carefully selecting and tuning the prompts given to these models, researchers and practitioners can control the style, tone, and content of the text generated, and ensure that it is coherent, relevant, and accurate. Yannick Hofmann and Cecilia Preiß: Say the Image, Don’t Make It practically on demand. Against this backdrop, prompt engineering may gain relevance as a future professional field.

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Several AI researchers have issued an open call for a moratorium on the development of large language models such as ChatGPT or GPT for at least six months until further research on the technology has been conducted (Open Letter n.d.). In addition to ethical concerns regarding the data used, there are overarching debates surrounding issues such as the potential loss of jobs, particularly for illustrators, who may feel threatened by the technology of prompt engineering and text-to-image generators. The development of new text-to-image generators could, however, also lead to the emergence of new professions and the enrichment of the field of illustration through creative tools. Furthermore, the creation of fake images poses a risk for politically motivated disinformation campaigns, as demonstrated by prominent examples such as a viral photo of the Pope wearing a Gucci coat or a manipulated image of Donald Trump evading arrest by law enforcement.

Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters
by Joanna Walsh
Published 22 Sep 2025

In the short time it has been available (since October 2022), DALL·E has made making pictures all about words. ‘I would like to write like painting,’ wrote Hélène Cixous in 1983.12 But what does it look like to paint like writing? Prompt engineering has become an actual job, not only in making AI images for fun, but in training AI, which is all about categorisation. As in the game where you get a photo and have to guess the caption, prompt engineers ask AIs Rumpelstiltskin questions until they get the best result, then they work out what it is about these questions that works and systematise it as method. A GPT large language model (LLM) can teach itself in a ‘semi-supervised’ way, inferring meaning from examples of language from the context it is given.

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‘Made it with my own hands,’ claim the multiple ‘creators’ of AI Shrimp Jesus, a meme that, bizarrely, populated Facebook in 2024.34 These images, mostly made as fronts for clickthrus to fake products and other scams, are similar to the cheap meatspace Jesus art objects that have been pushed at us for centuries – except they’re much more creative: besides Shrimp Jesus, there’s sand-sculpture Jesus, Jesus made out of drinks cans, ramen noodles, or strawberries. Most are depictions not of 215a ‘live’ Jesus but of Jesus art. They are artworks about artworks, a joke on both the artisan and the readymade. Shrimp Jesus, posted by @ladymedalion, on Reddit r/ShrimpIsBugs, 2024 Are these the products of prompt engineers, or is this what’s become known as the dead internet, where bots create and only bots view and follow, boosting a site through unusually large traffic? Though there’s speculation that some people might be fooled by the assertion that these works are handmade and exist IRL, neither the algorithms that upvote these creations nor most viewers care whether the work was materially crafted, making the framing assertion itself part of the work: not craft but art. 2023.

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A., 148 fascism, resurgence of, 155–6 female aesthetic expression, 166–7 female beauty, critique of the standards of, 142–3 feminine performance, of lack, 136–46, 137 feminisation, 15, 142 feminist representation, 142 Ferrante, Elena, 135–6 fiction, 95–6 truth in, 189–93 fictional people, 132 fictionalisation, 95 financial security, 210 financialisation, 213 finished product, 43 Fisher, Joseph P., 95 Fisher, Mark, 23, 48, 75, 106, 129 Flarf, 45–6 Flota, Brian, 95 folk art, 160 folksonomy, 159 form, and content, 35 Foucault, Michel, 33–4, 131, 132, 202 4chan, 31, 42, 48, 73 #gamergate, 30 fragmentation, forms of, 80 fragments, aesthetic history, 104–5 frame-breaking, 89 frames, 86–7 Frankfurt School, 155 Fraser, Nancy, 168–9, 169–70 free content, proliferation of, 3 Frere-Jones, Sasha, 83 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 57, 63–4, 66 future, the, nostalgia for, 69–73, 70 futurism, 57 #gamergate, 30 gamification, 43–4 Gardner, Drew, 46 Garrett, Marc, 22 Gates, Bill, 216 Gay, Roxanne, 195255 gaze as action, 54 and art, 127 machine, 57 male, 143 technological, 62, 72 Gebru, Timnit, 122–3, 126 gender, and race, 166 Genette, Gérard, 66 gentleman amateur, the, 7–8, 11 geographic metaphors, 219–20 Gevison, Tavi, 144–5 gig workers, 218 Gigapixel, 108 Girl with a Pearl Earring (film), 121 Girl with a Pearl Earring (Vermeer), 105, 105–7, 121–2, 124, 129–30 The Girl with the Pearl Earring (Chevalier), 121–2, 129–30 Glaze, University of Chicago project, 117 Gompertz, Will, 21 Goodman, Nelson, 210 Google, 1, 205 Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team, 122 Google Adwords, 114 Google Books, 116 Google infamy, risk of, 187–9 Goop, 137, 145 governance, 222 GPT large language model, 113 GPT NLP (natural language processing) models, 104 Greenberg, Clement, 24 Grey Academia, 154, 163 Grossman, Lev, 5 group feeling, 103 Guattari, Felix, 54, 84, 86, 98 Gyford, Phil, 57 Habermas, Jürgen, 191, 192–3 hackable environment, 87 hackers, 216–18 hacks, 219 Hall, Stuart, 169 Hallmark Cards, 21 Halter, Ed, 16–18, 21 Hammer, Barbara, 150–2 Hanisch, Carol, 198 happenings, 82, 98 Hardin, Garrett, 213 Harney, Stefano, 218 Harper, Adam, 71 Harvey, David, 151, 213 hashtag activism, 201 hate campaigns, 30, 142 hauntology, 73–6 Hebdige, Dick, 24, 93, 95, 166, 168, 171, 172 Hediger, Vinzenz, 19 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 133, 206–7 Heidegger, Martin, 132–3, 136 Hepola, Sarah, 194, 194–5 Herbert, Martin, 76 Heti, Sheila, 132, 133 hinge algorithms, 1 Hirschman, Albert, 92 historical past, aesthetic colonisation of, 74–5 Holmes, Anna, 183–4 Holocaust, the, 95–6 Homebrew Computer Club, 216 ‘Homesick for a Place I’m Not Even Sure Exists’ (meme), 70 horizontal platforms, 89 Horkheimer, Max, 154–5, 160, 206 Houellebecq, Michel, 131 Hughes, Robert, 107 Huh, Ben, 29, 30, 33–4, 35, 40, 49, 51 humour, AI and, 101 hyperlinks, 147, 150 hyperobjects, 47 hysterical criticism, 182–3 hysterical realism, 182 IBM, 69 idealism, and the market, 222 identification, 10–11 identity, 137, 158 and aesthetic representation, 164, 166–71 and consumer choice, 162 contingent, 167 Fraser’s model, 168–9 marginalised political, 167–8 offline, 162256 online, 161–4, 165, 166–71, 196 political, 161 reification of, 168–9, 169–70 remaking, 16 status model, 168–9 trash essays and, 195–6 identity choice, 171 identity-in-progress, 163 image addiction, 125–6 image descriptors, 119 imaginary products, 69 immediacy, 91 inauthenticity, 73, 128 individualism, 5, 8, 16, 181, 218 Industrial Revolution, 14–15, 154 ineptitude, 18 influence, long-term, 18–19 influencers, 14, 138–42 information capitalism, 35, 211 information overload, 36 Instagram, 6, 23, 89, 90, 106, 208, 220 body-positive movement, 146 creators, 139–40 Excellences and Perfections (Ulman), 137, 138–42, 143–5, 145–6 intent, 177–8 interaction, 4–5 interest, 49 internet aesthetics, 22 internet conditions, 2–3 internet eras, 202 internet-native, aesthetics, 52 intuitive creativity, 184 Israel, targeting of Hamas members, 56 It Follows (film), 62 Jackson, Robert, 58 Jameson, Fredric, 74, 96–7, 113, 125–6, 181 Japanese economic boom, visual ephemera, 72 Jezebel (online magazine), 176, 183 incest essay, 179–80, 188–9 style, 183–4 jokes, 32 jouissance, 12 ‘Judge Dredd’ (comic strip), 93–4 judgement, 29, 183, 205 juxtapolitics, 169, 205 Kant, Immanuel, 21 and aesthetic experience, 36–7 and aesthetic judgement, 24, 29 and aesthetics, 9–10, 205 magnitudinal sublime, 37–8 Kardashian, Kim, 142 Karp, David, 55 Kiki de Montparnasse, 139 Kitay, Kat, 208–9 kitsch, 20–1, 61, 67, 128–9, 160–1 aesthetic alienation, 208 Fisher’s, 75 music, 74 nostalgia for, 75 Knapp, Steven, 34 Know Your Meme, 33–6, 36, 37 knowledge, love of, 36 Kornbluh, Anna, 91 Kottke, Jason, 55 Kristeva, Julia, 89–90, 185 Lacan, Jacques, 12, 13, 38, 147, 148 lack, feminine performance of, 136–46, 137 LAION, 118–19 Land, Nick, 91–2, 94 language, and AI art, 123–4 language use LOLcats, 39–41 racialised, 41–2 large companies, domination of the internet, 219–20 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (film), restoration, 107, 108 Lavender AI, 56 Lefebvre, Henri, 6, 14–16, 208–9, 210 legacy media, 47 aesthetics, 52 borrowings from, 41 leisure, 14–16, 45 commodified, 13 illusion of, 90 leisure/work paradigm, 15 Les Immatériaux (exhibition), 209 Lettrism, 161 libertarianism, 7 lifestyle journalism, 188 likes, 2, 28 Linux, 215–16257 Liszewski, Andrew, 108 LiveJournal, 215–16 liveness, 97 LOLcats, 27, 27–9, 50 aesthetic appreciation of, 38–41, 39 aesthetic reactions, 28 avowed triviality, 49 and content creation, 49 language use, 39–41, 42 novelty, 50 origin, 30 pleasure of, 47 production process, 28 purposive purposelessness, 44 LOLspeak, 40, 42 London, Furtherfield Gallery, 22 London Review of Books (magazine), 65, 182–3 Lonergan, Guthrie, 210–11 Lorenz, Taylor, 184 love, 218–19 low-class art, 20 lowest common denominator, estrangement with, 103 Lumière brothers, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, 107, 108 Lyotard, Jean-François, 47, 125, 209 machine gaze, 57 Macintosh Plus, 72, 78 McLuhan, Marshall, 135, 139 McNeil, Joanne, 54 Magee, Mike, 46 mainstream recognition, 20 male gaze, 143 male narratives, 11 Man Ray, 139 Marcuse, Herbert, 24, 43–4, 154–5, 166–7 Markbreiter, Charlie, 33 market, the, and idealism, 222 Martinussen, Einar Sneve, 54 Marx, Karl, 84, 206–7 mashups, 103, 105, 105–7 masses, the, fear of, 181 Massumi, Brian, 170, 208 Mbembe, Achille, 166–71 mean image, the, 119 mechanical art, 37 media technologies, 83–4 Meme Map, Web 2.0, 85, 86 memes, 53, 220 aesthetic appreciation of, 37–41 Blackface, 41–2, 42 conceptualisation, 28, 29 financial value, 30–2, 33 originators, 33–5 ownership, 32–3 snowclones, 39, 39 meming, 28–9, 29 anonymity, 30–1 memory computer, 64 locations for, 67 return to objects, 77 screen, 63–5, 66 screen memoirs, 65–9 values, 63–4 memory-leak, 64 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 124, 127 Meta, 115 Microsoft, 121 Minga, 157 misogyny, 30, 184 Mitchell, Elma, 147 mixtapes, 79, 83 moderators, 203–4 modern art, generative principle of, 19 modernism, 127–8, 129 modulation, 39 monetisation, 124–5 monetised production, 212–13 Moore, Marcel, 139 moral judgement, 183 morality, 178 Morton, James, 219 Morton, Timothy, 47 Moten, Fred, 218 motivation, 6 Muñoz, José Esteban, 162 Musk, Elon, 82, 200 Nakagawa, Eric, 29, 30, 40, 51 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 82, 99 narcissism, 152, 181 narrativising, of the self, 190 Nasty Nets internet surfing club, 210–11 Nedroid, 18258 net art, aesthetics, 21–2 Netflix, 44 Neukirchen, Chris, 55 Neuro-sama, 122 New Aesthetic, the, 53–9, 62, 70–1, 73, 76 New Inquiry (magazine), 33 new media, 52–4, 75 New Narrative movement, 197 New York Times Magazine (magazine), 137 New York Times (newspaper), 120, 159 New Yorker (magazine), 94 NFTs (non-fungible tokens), 32–3, 212–13 Ngai, Sianne, 23, 36, 37–41, 43–6, 198–9 aesthetic categories, 27–8, 29, 35, 37, 49, 50 on aesthetic judgment, 163 analysis of It Follows, 62 on envy, 145, 146 gimmicks, 219 Ugly Feelings, 97–8, 184 zany workers, 141, 206 Nightshade, University of Chicago project, 116, 117 9/11 Memorial and Museum, 98–9 noble picturesque, the, 60–2 noise, 93 Northwestern University, Illinois, 204 nostalgia, 57, 58, 60–2, 67 for the future, 69–73, 70 for kitsch, 75 nostalgia mode, 74–5, 76 nostalgic aesthetics, 20 Not Safe For Work, 44–5 nothing, production of, 13 Noys, Benjamin, 91–2, 93 objectification, 136–46 offline identity, 162 Olson, Marisa, 142–3, 210–11 online aesthetics, 21–2, 153 online appearance, 136–46 online choice, 137 online creations, as art, 2 online creators, professional, 3 online engagement, 3 online experience, immaterial appearance, 81 online identity, 161–4, 165, 166–71, 196 online platforms, user-friendliness, 3 online vocabulary, 220 Ono, Yoko, 141 OpenAI, 118, 204, 205–6, 209 openness, 218 open-source, 215–16 O’Reilly, Tim, 5, 86 original work, the aura of, 10, 31, 32 originators, 33–5 Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote), 133–4 outdatedness, 52 outsourcing, 90 Ovation Technologies, 69 overexploitation, and digital commons, 213 oversupply, 33 Oyler, Lauren, 182–3, 185 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 137–8, 145 Papin sisters, the, 147, 148, 151–2 para-academic practice, 199 para-epistemophilic feeling, 36 Paraflows Urban Hacking Festival, 30 parodies, 35–6 participation, via action, 159 pastiches, 35 peer-to-peer online services, 211 people, the, 103 Percy, Walter, 39 Perec, Georges, 44 Perelman, Bob, 113 performance, 16 performance art, 82, 136–46 performative communication, 200–1 personal data, collection and sale of, 7 personal essays, 175–6, 181–2 personality, 154 Peterson, Latoya, 185 @pharmapsychotic, 108–12 photographers, 139–40 photographs, 17, 114, 140 photo-identity, 120 photorealism, 112–13 picturesque, the, 61–2, 69, 76 pile-of-poo emoji, 46, 46259 Pinterest, 208, 213 Pixels, Kane, 73–4 platform capitalism, 202–3 platform owners, 89 Plato, 7 play, 44–5, 206 pleasure principle, 12 plot-driven narratives, 172–3 poetry, 9, 46 Poetry Virgins, 147, 148 political identity, 161 political representation, 92–3 politics aestheticisation of, 143 as aesthetics, 201 Poole, Christopher, 30 poomoji, 46, 46 poor images, 60, 62 postinternet art, 142–3, 210–11 postmodernism, 72, 76, 125–6, 129 Pound, Ezra, 19 prediction, ideology of, 119–21 Presser, Shaun, 115–16 Prin, Alice, 139 print media, 5 private life, 195 pro/am division, 17 process, concern with, 56 production means of, 11 production of, 98, 217 separation from reproduction, 161 professional modes, amateur adoption, 16 professional skills, bypassing, 215 professional status, desire for, 3 professionalisation, 14 professionalism, amateurised, 1 profiles, 7 proletarian amateurs, 8, 9–10 prompt engineering, 114 Propp, Vladimir, 160 public voice, 195 public/private division, 16 purposive purposelessness, 44–5 Quaranta, Domenico, 22 race, and gender, 166 racialised language use, 41–2 racism, 41 radical naturalism, 184 radical trust, 6, 159, 205 radical we, the, 3 Rancière, Jacques on art from everyday life, 104–5 aesthetic regime, 208 on audience, 211 classical Greek spectator, 127 on dangerous classes, 26 on performance, 16 on play, 44, 49 and politics, 93, 99, 205 and risk, 19–20 rating, 139 ReadWrite, 161 readymades, 17, 31 realism, 106–7, 184 reality, 20 experience of, 10 and representation, 142 recognition, 20 Reddit, 203–4, 219 Reisner, Alex, 115 Relational Aesthetics, 18–19 remade material, 158 remix art, 43 remix culture, 79, 161 Render Me Tender (Armstrong), 125 repetition, 106, 149, 151 re-politicisation, of art, 11 representation crisis in, 92–4 and reality, 142 of women, 119 reproduction, separation from production, 161 research-based art, 35–6 retrofuturism, 57 revivalism, 76 rewards, 29 Ricoeur, Paul, 34 Riefenstahl, Leni, 177 Rights Alliance, 115 Riley, Denise, 134 risk, 18–20 RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback), 205–6260 romanticisation, 157 Romanticism, 103 Ronell, Avital, 136 Rosler, Martha, 147 Ruskin, John, 61–2, 69 Russell, Legacy, 97 Saito, Yuriko, 128 salaried work-time, outside of, 216–17 Sato, Atsuko, 32 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 37 sci-goth, 57 scrapbooking, 158–60 screen, the, artifice of, 10 screen memoirs, 65, 65–9 screen memory, 63–5, 66 search engine optimisers, 114 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 162, 198 self, the, narrativising of, 190 self-accounting, 134–35 self-creation, 140 self-deception, 133–4 self-identification, 162 selfies, 6, 103, 140 AI art, 108–12, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 double sense of, 144–5 trash essays as, 187–8 self-possession, 195 self-quantification, 36 self-representation, 136–46 self-transformation, 163 sensations, 37 sensus communis, 29 September 11th terrorist attacks, 78, 94–5, 96, 98–9 servers, ecological cost of, 76–7 sexual content, 45 shareholder profits, 203 Shiryaev, Denis, 108 shock of the new, the, 107, 128 shock of the real, the, 107 Shrimp Jesus, 214, 214–15 side-hustles, 3, 9, 14 The Simpsons (TV show), 47 skeuomorphic, 53 slickness, 18, 71–2, 101 slow violence, 95 snapshots, 64–5 snowclones, 39, 39, 51–2 social art, 48–9 social contract, the, 203 social media, 6, 7, 92, 135, 161, 189–90, 221–2 social mobility, 11, 13–14 social reproduction, 206–7 Sollfrank, Cornelia, 207 @soncharm, 101, 102, 103 Sontag, Susan, 66, 177–9, 182–5 space aesthetic, 220 creation of, 222 cyber, 219 geographic metaphors, 219–20 ownership, 89 virtual, the as, 86 Spahr, Juliana, 97–8 spammers, AI and, 214 spatial metaphors, 86–7 Speaklolspeak.com, 51 spectatorship, 36 speed, metaphors of, 91–2 Speed, Mitch, 209–10 Spellings, Sarah, 173 Spike Art Magazine (magazine), 208–9 sport, 43 Spotify, 89 Squid Game (TV show), 44 Srnicek, Nick, 92 Stable Diffusion, 118–19 Stamboliev, Eugenia, 215 Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), 123 Starobinski, Jean, 185 steampunk, 57 Stein, Gertrude, 38 StereoSet, 123 stereotypes, 10–11, 119, 123 Sterling, Bruce, 54, 55, 56–9 Stewart, Kathleen, 162 Steyerl, Hito, 9–10, 60, 62, 117, 119, 209 Stiegler, Bernard, 205, 215, 216–17, 218 Strategy (magazine), 6 Stubbs, David, 94 stuplimity, 37–38, 39–40, 42261 subcultures, 24, 166–7, 171–2, 217–18 sublime, the, 38, 47, 61, 103, 125 subreddits, 203–4 Substack, 6 suffering, engagement with, 141 suggestion and suggestiveness, strategies of, 148 Sullivan, Gary, 45–6 surface picturesque, the, 61–2, 76 surplus-enjoyment, 12–13 surplus-value, 11, 12, 13 Surrealism, 54, 161 surveillance cams, 54 SweetcrispyJesus, 154 tagging, 159 tape recorders, 83 taste, 13, 103, 128 tattoos, 171 tax, 7 taxonomy creation, 2 Tay, 121, 122 Taylor, Brandon, 190 techno-capitalist worldview, 162 technological gaze, 62, 72 technoromanticism, 209 temporo-cultural disruption, 76 Tencent, 204 terms, Jathan Sadowski, 123 TESCREAL, 126 textual meaning, 131–6 TikTok, 6, 89, 220 Time (magazine), Person of the Year, 5 time and temporality, 76, 80, 86 accelerationism, 91–9 as a medium, 91 pre-internet media, 96–7 spending, 89 time spent scrolling, 91 Tofuburger, 30 Tolentino, Jia, 176, 177, 179–80, 189, 193, 197–8 Topaz Labs, 108 Torres, Émile P., 126 Torvalds, Linus, 215–16 tradition, 80, 81 transcription, 79–80, 84, 97–8 transgression, 19–20 transmission, 79–81, 90 trash essays, 175–99 boom, 180 clickbait prurience, 183 conceptualisation, 176–7 and content, 177–81 content-as-style, 185–7 as debut writing, 177 as economic event, 194 exclusion, 183 fear of, 181 forward movement, 185–6 frame story, 194–6 hysterical criticism, 182–3 identity and, 195–6 intent, 178, 180 methodology, 198 misogyny, 184 and narcissism, 181 normalisation of, 185 and personal essays, 181–2 risk of, 187–9 as selfies, 187–8 and style, 177–80, 183–7, 197 stylelessness, 184–5 writing, 197 trust, 159 truth, 189–93, 198 tumblelogs, 55–6 Tumblr, 23, 54, 55–6, 60, 106, 208, 213 Turing, Alan, 63 Turks, 119 Twitter, 6, 89, 103, 134, 203, 220, 221 demise of, 200–2 Ugrešiç, Dubravka, 66, 67 Ulman, Amalia, 137, 138–46 Unebasami, Kari, 29, 30, 40, 51 University of Chicago, 117 University of Warwick, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), 94 unpaid labour, 5 unrealism, 129 user space, 86 user-friendliness, 3 user-generated content (UGC), 5–6, 16 users, need for, 90 Valéry, Paul, 127 value, 161262 Vanity Fair (magazine), 54, 57 vaporware, 69, 70 vaporwave, 69–73 doom-mongers, 74 hauntology, 73–6 revivalism, 76 vectoral aesthetic capitalism, 89–90 vectoralist classes, 213 vectors, 89 Ventura, Claude, 151–2 Venvonis, Gregory, 171–2 Vermeer, Johannes, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 105, 105–7, 121–2, 124, 129–30 Vestiaire Collective, 121 virtual, the, as space, 86 virtual commodities, 137 voices, 92–9 vulgar, the, 103, 185 vulnerability, 170 Wal, Thomas Vander, 159 walking while black meme, 19 Warhol, Andy, 31, 106 Wark, McKenzie, 89, 213, 216, 217, 219, 220 water scarcity, 209 Watkins, D., 187–8, 188–9, 196 we, use of, 3 Web 1.0, 5 Web 2.0, 4–7, 53, 161, 203, 211–13 meme map, 85, 86 Web3, 211, 212–15 what if thought, 126 white narratives, 11 Wiki software, 35–6 Wikidentities, 170 Wikipedia, 1, 153 Williams, Alex, 92 Willison, Simon, 118–19 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 104–5 Wired (magazine), 54 women, representation of, 119 Woods, James, 182 Wordpress, 215–16 Wordsworth, William, 9 work environment, 47 having fun at, 48–9 product of, 206–7 as safe place, 45 workers, as product, 206–7 working-class enthusiast, the, 8, 11 world building, 172–3 writing, 97–8 X, 205 Youngman, Hennessy, 211 your mom stereotype, 58–60, 62–3 YouTube, 71, 97 The Disintegration Loops (video), 81–3 zany, the, and zany workers, 43–4, 141 Žižek, Slavoj, 21 Zo, 121, 121–2 Zuckerberg, Mark, 81

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
by Tom Standage
Published 16 Aug 2021

In England, the Engineer magazine immediately offered a thousand-guinea prize in a contest to determine the best road vehicle produced in the country. The 1895 race also inspired a similar event in America. Staged in Chicago on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1895, it was sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald and offered a $5,000 prize. All these competitions prompted engineers and drivers to try to outdo one another, advancing the state of the automotive art and providing publicity for manufacturers, in a motor-racing tradition that has continued ever since. An editorial in the inaugural edition of the Horseless Age, published in New York in November 1895, captured the sudden sense of excitement around the technology in America: The change in public sentiment from indifference to enthusiasm was to occur in an incredibly short period of time.

The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 15 Apr 2025

New types of jobs appear frequently and do not fit easily into the categories set out in the Standard Occupational Classification used in official statistics; this system includes many detailed categories of manufacturing jobs, although this sector accounts for only about one-­tenth of GDP in the Organisation for Economic Co-­o peration and Development (OECD) economies and an even smaller share of employment; yet it includes very l­ittle on the proliferation of types of jobs in s­ ervices, including digital-­related work. Th ­ ere are multiple categories of ­painter, for example, but none to rec­ord specific digital jobs, such as prompt engineer. Chapters 3 to 5 discuss further t­ hese aspects of the increasing digitalisation and weightlessness of the economy. One inherent challenge in interpreting standard statistics that is made much harder by innovation and digitalisation is turning the nominal m ­ easures of activities—­the number of dollars or pounds spent on investment or revenues earned by businesses, for example—­into “real” “­P o l i t i c a l A r i t h m e t i c k ” 21 terms or volume terms m ­ easures.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

There are literally hundreds of roles where this single skill alone is the core requirement, and yet there is so much more to come from AI. Yes, it’s almost certain that many new job categories will be created. Who would have thought that “influencer” would become a highly sought-after role? Or imagined that in 2023 people would be working as “prompt engineers”—nontechnical programmers of large language models who become adept at coaxing out specific responses? Demand for masseurs, cellists, and baseball pitchers won’t go away. But my best guess is that new jobs won’t come in the numbers or timescale to truly help. The number of people who can get a PhD in machine learning will remain tiny in comparison to the scale of layoffs.

These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means
by Christopher Summerfield
Published 11 Mar 2025

*3 www.lxahub.com/stories/creepiest-examples-of-personalisation-and-how-to-avoid-the-trap. *4 https://openai.com/blog/memory-and-new-controls-for-chatgpt. *5 See https://inflection.ai/. *6 Lewis et al., 2021. *7 Scheurer et al., 2022. *8 https://medium.com/@lucasantinelli3/analysing-the-effects-of-politeness-on-gpt-4-soft-prompt-engineering-70089358f5fa. 33. The Perils of Personalization Relationships between people are built on trust. As we spend time with others, we learn about their hopes, desires, opinions and beliefs. As a bond of friendship or mutual attraction forms, we tacitly agree to speak and act in mutually compatible ways.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT playing against themselves: David Silver et al., “Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm,” arXiv, December 5, 2017, arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT ChatGPT said verbatim: With some minor cuts for length. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT some deliberate randomization: Eric Glover, “Controlled Randomness in LLMs/ChatGPT with Zero Temperature: A Game Changer for Prompt Engineering,” AppliedIngenuity.ai: Practical AI Solutions (blog), May 12, 2023, appliedingenuity.substack.com/p/controlled-randomness-in-llmschatgpt. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT it’s come closer: Per conversation with Stuart Russell. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Participants were asked: Ezra Karger et al., “Forecasting Existential Risks: Evidence from a Long-Run Forecasting Tournament,” Forecasting Research Institute, July 10, 2023, static1.squarespace.com/static/635693acf15a3e2a14a56a4a/t/64f0a7838ccbf43b6b5ee40c/1693493128111/XPT.pdf.

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety
by Eric Schlosser
Published 16 Sep 2013

Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Vintage Books, 2006)—uses the genius, idealism, contradictions, and hypocrisy of one man to shed light on an entire era of American history. Perhaps my favorite book about nuclear weapons is one of the most beautifully written and concise. John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974) not only has great literary merit, it also prompted engineers at Sandia to confront the possibility that terrorists might try to steal a nuclear weapon. Martin J. Sherwin and John McPhee were both professors of mine a long time ago, and the integrity of their work, the scholarship and ambition, set a high standard to which I’ve aspired ever since. A number of other writers and historians influenced my view of how nuclear weapons affected postwar America.