Aesthetics

Gabriel García Márquez read Jorge Luis Borges the way a student reads a master: closely, gratefully, for years. Borges, by most accounts, did not return the favor. He found García Márquez’s prose baggy where his own was compressed, sentimental where his own was cold. The debt ran one direction only. That asymmetry is not a footnote in Latin American letters. It is a small, uncomfortable model of how culture actually works, and it is the model we need if we are going to talk honestly about AI slop. …

At a private event not long ago, I lined up what felt like the perfect shot. The light was doing something rare, the composition had assembled itself, and the moment was about to peak. Then, in the same instant, a dozen smartphones rose in front of me. Not out of malice—out of reflex. A wall of glowing rectangles, each capturing the same scene from nearly the same angle, each producing an image that would be indistinguishable from its neighbors. The photograph I was about to take became redundant before it existed. …