In this episode we sit down with writer, theorist, and consultant Venkatesh Rao to talk about authorship, risk, and why AI is pushing us back to a pre-Gutenberg culture. We get into:

• How “AI alignment” became PR-speak
• The concept of individual authorship as a very recent invention
• Treating LLMs as channels for our shared cultural inheritance, not plagiarism machines
• Why creative work isn’t “labor” and the middle-class myth that effort guarantees economic value
• Risk as the price of originality and why most AI slop is low-risk human behavior
• How Venkatesh actually writes with AI and playful “Lego” ideation
• Why disclosing AI-use in your writing will soon disappear

Whoa Vol. 2

This episode is part of a limited series of ten in-depth conversations put together by sublime.app with some of our favorite thinkers and creatives where we explore how artificial intelligence is changing and challenging creative work.

👉 Get your copy of the zine: https://sublime.app/whoa

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