This week, I sit down with Josh Rothman, a longtime writer and editor at The New Yorker. We unpack his provocative essay, AI Is Coming for Culture.
Josh argues that AI isn’t just reshaping our jobs, politics, and wellbeing. It’s reshaping culture itself. But this isn’t only about AI-generated songs or stories. It’s about how we experience art, film, music, and books together. Think of Taylor Swift’s Swifties or Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters. Could fandoms like this form around AI-made music? And if they could… is that necessarily a bad thing? And if the stories we consume, and the memes we laugh at are produced by computers rather than people, how does that change the meaning of culture?
Together, we explore how culture, creativity, and originality are being redefined in the age of AI.
About Joshua Rothman:
Joshua Rothman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers ideas, tech, science, and culture and contributes the weekly column Open Questions. He is the author of the weekly column Open Questions, which explores, from various angles, what it means to be human. Previously, he was the magazine's ideas editor. He has also been an ideas columnist at the Boston.
Check out Joshua’s recent piece in The New Yorker: A.I. Is Coming for Culture