Can we have a moratorium on Chat GPT stunt journalism, please? With all respect to Gideon Fink Shapiro—and to my good friend and fellow critic Mark Lamster, who recently asked AI to review Morphosis’s Perot Museum in a piece for the Dallas Morning News—I think I speak for many readers when I say, Basta. I’ve now slogged through essays whose authors pose a series of prompts to ChatGPT about financial advice, office politics, the best restaurants in Los Angeles, alternate endings for Game of Thrones, ChatGPT’s own interest in world domination, and now, in two publications, of all the obscure topics in the world, architecture criticism. These pieces all have the same subtext, of course: anxiety. About the future of journalism, about the value of human intellect, and about where all of us are going to find a paycheck when the bots work for free. There is some paint-by-numbers expediency about them, of course, but also a faint whiff of desperation, which is the saddest of all critical registers to write in. In NYRA’s piece [see “Is Architecture Criticism Pointless? Not Ac…
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—Christopher Hawthorne, New Haven, CT
Letter to the Editors
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