It's a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects--orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Tools such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion can be instructed, with textual prompts, to produce ersatz oil paintings of dogs in hats in the style of Titian, or simulated photos of plasticine models of astronauts riding horses. Carson's book takes a familiar form, the little lecture, and subverts it, manipulates it, until as the reader you start to feel like you're inside her wonderful brain, scrolling through her mental browser history, joining her in hyperlinked fancies and half-abandoned rabbit holes. These systems roll scenes, territories, cultures--things people thought of as "theirs," "their living," and "their craft"--into a 4-gigabyte, open source tarball that you can download onto a Mac in order to make a baseball-playing penguin in the style of Hayao Miyazaki. AI companies are talking a lot about ethics, which always makes me suspicious, and certain words are banned from the image generator's interface, which is sad because I wanted to ask the bot to paint a "busty" cottage in the style of Thomas Kinkade. It's a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects--orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña.

In 1992, the poet Anne Carson published a little book called Short Talks. It's a series of micro-essays, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, on seemingly disconnected subjects--orchids, rain, the mythic Andean vicuña. Her "Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff" is what it sounds like. Her "Short Talk on Trout" is mostly about the types of trout that appear in haiku. In what passes for the book's introduction, Carson writes, with dry Canadian relatability, "I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime."