If what I see in my mind excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph.
― Ansel Adams

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A great creative writer is someone who uses language in new ways to communicate new kinds of experiences—who replaces stereotype with reality, as Proust put it. LLMs are incapable of doing this, because they have no access to an experience or a reality that lies outside of language.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic

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There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer.
― Ansel Adams

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The herculean task of a photographer is to capture a momentary frame as beautiful in reality, as it would be in a dream.
~ Ansel Adams

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There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.
~ Ansel Adams

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I would never apologize for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful.
~ Ansel Adams

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There’s a pleasure in being told what we already know, in a way we’re already used to. That’s why so much human writing and storytelling does exactly that. We go to a Hollywood movie or pick up a romantasy novel or attend a Sunday sermon knowing what to expect, and our expectations are almost always met.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic

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Jane Austen and Charles Dickens were both masters of comedy, but the contrast between her ironic understatement and his histrionic exaggeration reflects profoundly different personalities and life experiences, in which class and gender played an important part.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic

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LLMs generate writing probabilistically: After training on billions of texts, they build complex equations to predict which words are most likely to be found together. That process can be traced in the way an LLM tells stories.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic

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AI writing never challenges the way we think or see. It can’t do so, even if you explicitly ask it to. And this limitation reveals something important about the source of human creativity. All writing, all speech, has to follow conventions; to know how to use a language is to know how other people already use it. But it’s also possible to find new ways of using it, to say things in a way no one has ever heard before. This possibility exists because we can appeal to something more fundamental than language—our experiences of reality, which are so varied and surprising that language can never exhaust them.
~ Adam Kirsch via The Atlantic

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