Nicholas Carr's Blog

Today’s Sunday Rerun is a post I originally published in May 2018. It looks at the way popular metaphors shape how we see our relationship with tech companies and their products—and our sense of personal responsibility and agency in using technologies. I’m hoping to write more on this subject in the months ahead, so I’m republishing this as a starting point.

Mines and Factories

Am I a data mine, or am I a data factory? Is data extracted from me, or is...

If you’ve done much googling recently, you’ve probably noticed the odd and dubious set of sources that Google’s large language model draws from in generating the “AI Overviews” that now appear at the top of the company’s search results (after the ads, of course). Rather than dig deep into authoritative writings on a subject, Google’s bot usually pieces together its overview from recently published, cursory summaries posted on a hodgepodge of highly trafficked websites — the same dumbed-down, sea...

Seventeen years ago, when MySpace was bigger than Facebook and going online still felt liberating, The Atlantic published my essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in its summer Ideas issue. With AI now being sold to the public as an intelligence amplifier, just as the net was then, I offer the essay as today’s Sunday Rerun. It’s always good to be reminded that the ultimate effects of a broadly adopted new technology never match the early ...

One day in 1953, a young and at the time little-known experimental artist named Robert Rauschenberg arrived at the studio of the great abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning bearing a bottle of Jack Daniels and a strange request. He wanted the famous artist to give him one of his drawings so he could erase it. De Kooning was taken aback. “I remember that the idea of destruction kept coming into the conversation,” Rauschenberg later r...

Today’s Sunday Rerun is a post that originally appeared on my old blog, Rough Type, at the end of 2021. Written about a year after OpenAI’s release of GPT-3 and a year before its unveiling of ChatGPT, it’s one of my first attempts to make sense of generative AI. (I would also work some of this material into the AI chapter of my book Superbloom .) The connection between AI and the Spiritualism movement of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries is something I hope to write more about soon.

I was going to end my last post, “Against Compression,” with a coda about a fictional artist, but I decided the piece already placed enough demands on the reader’s patience. So here it is, a free-floating coda. Affix it to whatever you’d like.

The career of the contemporary French artist Jed Martin is a twisty one, full of incursions and recursions. (Michel Houellebecq chronicles them all in his 2010 novel The Map and the Territory.) As a boy, Jed would sit i...

My Brief Career in Abstraction

I was a generative pre-trained transformer before GPTs were cool. After dropping out of grad school in the mid-eighties, I landed a job with a new digital-media division of H. W. Wilson, the venerable publisher whose Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature had long been a mainstay of library reference desks. Looking to capitalize on the surging popularity of personal computers and online databases, the company had decided to create a digital supplement to the Guide ...

One recent Tuesday, at two thirty-seven in the afternoon, I received an email from UPS letting me know that a package had been delivered to my home. Attached, as evidence, was a blurry, off-kilter photograph of a small, slightly dented but otherwise nondescript cardboard box that had been placed on my driveway, next to the garage door. A minute later, at thirty-eight minutes past two, I received a second email announcing the p...

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the sculptor Pygmalion, a celibate by choice, sculpts a beautiful woman in ivory and falls in love with her. “He kisses it and feels his kisses are returned.” Nearly two thousand years later, in 1913, George Bernard Shaw uses Ovid’s story as the basis for his play Pygmalion, in which the phonetics professor Henry Higgins teaches the cockney guttersnipe Eliza Doolittle to speak the King’s English and in the process becomes...

Among the general public, generative AI’s most enthusiastic early adopters have been students. Surveys conducted a year ago revealed that nearly 90 percent of college students and more than 50 percent of high-schoolers were regularly using chatbots for schoolwork. Those numbers are certainly higher now. AI may be the most rapidly adopted educational tool since the pencil.

Because text-generating bots like ChatGPT offer an easy way...