“It's a generalized negativity where you want to both say this could never be as good as me and my friends, but also it's going to be so good that it destroys everything.”
ChinaTalk · Geopolitics & World Affairs · October 2026
Yglesias describes a contradictory reaction to AI and admits he felt it himself. A few model generations ago he thought the writing was terrible and nowhere near replicating his work. Watching the trend since, he says, he no longer thinks his own gig will last.
Transcript
…but it makes sense, right? Like if you talk to anybody who works in a creative field in the United States, the typical view is both that AI generated content is terrible, right? It's slop, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But also that like its impact is really important. No one else will know
it's, I only have the taste to know it's right. But
I mean, because it's, it's, it's a generalized negativity where you want to both say this could never be as good as me and my friends, but also it's going to be so good that it destroys everything versus, you know, and I, I mean, I feel this too. I mean, there was a several iterations of models ago. I was thinking, oh, this is a cool way to get research summaries done, but the writing is terrible. And this is not within a million light years of being able to replicate my work. And it's only by looking at the at the trend that I'm now like, all right, like this is not, this is not going to last my gig here. It's, it just, you know, but that's, to me, a humbling kind of assertion. And of course, you know, we're not accustomed to seeing huge sectoral transformation unfold before our eyes in the United States. And I assume Chinese people have just witnessed a lot more economic transformation in their this is how
we can make this sort of like China's been growing really fast like tangible is you know a lot of oper a lot of jobs have like like the like the like The profession transform, like the chance that you have worked in different professions in China over the past 30 years, if you were working, is…
And Joey Politano, who's a contributor to the argument, he did a great post for his newsletter at Prickettas recently about how over the last four years, America has lost more than 200,000 jobs in creative fields, publishing, TV, film, graphic design, et cetera. It's unclear, of course, like, you…
I mean, it's interesting on the music case, right? That, you know, people try. I mean, I try to, because I'm old and I try to convey to people how when I was in high school, it was like all my money went to buying CDs because I didn't have very much money. But teenagers really care a lot about…
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