The Office for the Arts is open to submissions for the new National Cultural Policy. On their website, they say that Al Will be used to "manage submissions", including: "creating summaries" of submissions and "the identification of common themes and issues". In other words, they will use Al to do the hard work of reading the expert testimony and reports written by artists and arts-workers. This is a disgrace. Summaries, by default, flatten subject matters. Every effort to make clear certain complexities will be lost in the compact-factory line that is Language Learning Models (so-called "Al"). Even the assemblage of themes is a critical and creative act mapping the through lines: it should not be left to a data-collecting apparatus that a) is owned by private companies and b) is known to consistently make errors as well as outright lie.

If there's one area in which the act of critical reading should be championed, as our primary tool for thought-making, for the dissemination of meaning, it is the national Office of the Arts. What message does this send? Why should I write anything to you, if my words are going to be treated with such contempt - and, indeed, actively replaced by the lazy summation of a corporate crapshoot? Why not just generate our own LLM-crap so that we are all sending nonsense back and forth, facilitating an entirely one-sided conversation for a Hall of Funhouse Data Mirrors to distort and for an unaccountable private company to profit from our cultural, creative, intellectual copyright?