Reblogging Margaret McCaffrey: From Paperbacks to E-Readers and Beyond

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I started drafting this reblog of Margaret McCaffrey’s most recent blog post earlier this morning and observed that the scope of AI assistance on WordPress has increased significantly and very quickly. In a short video, a WordPress Happiness Engineer talks about the possible uses of AI Agents on the platform. You can ask an AI Agent to redesign your website, or email the agent with your thoughts and requests. Or chat to them on Telegram or Slack (when did Slack arrive on the scene!).

In the video, the WordPress rep shares an image of a yoga studio. They demonstrate how you might ask AI to insert a sleeping cat onto one of the vacant mats in the studio. They draw an arrow and type something like ‘insert cat here’ and voila! a cat appears amid the handful of people. But who’s to say that the humans in the pic are real and not generated, or even that the studio isn’t simply the outcome of an earlier prompt? And that cat didn’t look particularly convincing! And then I thought: How do we even know that the Happiness Engineer delivering this tutorial is a real person. And does it matter. And is that a question or a rhetorical flourish?

And suddenly … well, I’d entered a philosophical hall of mirrors. What started with AI developments on WordPress ended up in distraction, somehow colliding with epistemological questions about truth and knowledge, then ontological questions about what intelligence and creativity even are, and eventually existential questions about what all of this means for us as humans …

It was time to get back to the reblog. Margaret’s post, linked at the top, touches on these very things: It starts out by musing on traditional versus digital books, paper versus pixels, and ends up beginning to consider the implications of AI for creativity.

And so, without further ado, let’s hit the ‘Publish’ button.

Time for a coffee and a Ginger Nut.

Happy reading,

EW