Mercedes Torrendell, writing on AI, language, people

mercedes torrendell writing on ai, language, people

what we say

“AI is stealing our jobs.”

what we mean

The jobs are being redrawn, and we deserve a say in the drawing.

I interview the people building and living inside AI, and I write about the gap between what the technology is said to do and what it actually does to us. My beat is language: how the words we use about work and machines quietly decide who gets a say. The aim is always the same: trade the loud sentence for the truer one.

published

An ongoing interview series for The Creative Independent about how creative people actually relate to technology. The direction: away from hot takes, toward the people living the shift, artists, researchers, historians, developers, and increasingly the voices inside big institutions where AI is quietly changing the work. The question underneath every conversation is the same: what does this technology do to the way you make things, and who gets a say in that?

César Fieiras researcher, on the complex influence of ai in creative industries tci Roopa Vasudevan media artist, on creative resistance in the digital world tci
Lois Rosson, historian at NASA Rosson works in the NASA History Office writing the history of exoplanet research, and her book project traces how artists and illustrators invented what outer space looks like. We talk about who decides what discovery looks like, now that AI models like NASA's ExoMiner help find the planets humans then have to picture. upcoming
all interviews → more conversations at the creative independent tci

essays

Lost in translation essay in progress, on ai, language, and precision substack · soon
We Are Not Being Given the Words to Want Differently a glossary essay substack
the narrative-gap essay essay in development

source texts

what I'm reading and translating from, a running cache.

Europe 2031 A speculative history of how Europe fell behind on AI, and the missing positive vision underneath it. Reference point for the narrative-gap essay. reference

in progress

Valerie Fuchs interview forthcoming

three questions from the conversation

  1. “If AI collapses hours of struggle into one prompt, and people ask the model their ‘dumb’ questions instead of each other, what happens to the people who need to see someone else struggle to feel okay about their own?”
  2. “You asked ChatGPT what a girl could be versus what a boy could be. What made you want to poke at that, and what came out of it?”
  3. “Developers’ sense of their own value is being shaken by AI, but nobody’s really talking about it. Why does it stay unspoken?”

goes live soon on The Creative Independent