The New Yorker:

Technology is dramatically changing political speech, rewarding quantity and variety over the neat messages of the past.

By Joshua Rothman

Just before the election, I went to see a play. It was staged for a small group, was about ninety minutes long, and was followed by a Q. & A. For all that time, the audience sat quietly, respectful and absorbed, listening intently to what was said.

Afterward, during cocktail hour, I stood with another guest, a scientist who works in artificial intelligence. Almost immediately, we started talking about the rapid progress of A.I. systems that work with words. “Have you tried ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode?” he asked me. (I had.) “The conversations you can have with it are almost as good as the median conversation you can have with a person!” We laughed, self-conscious about both our small talk and the contrast implicit in what we were discussing. We’d spent the evening in one linguistic world—a heightened one, in which every word mattered. We were now describing another world, in which words could be produced endlessly, and hardly mattered at all. Technology seemed to be ushering us from the first world into the second.

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