What the Bot Saw

Dear Editors,

Thank you for n+1. It is definitely one of the premier online zines out there.

Having just subscribed, it was disappointing to learn that “comments” are not enabled for your articles. This seems . . . well, odd, especially given the controversial nature of some of the content and a very real need to expose nonsense. 

The editorial “Large Language Muddle” (Issue 51) is a case in point. Perplexity.ai was prompted to deliver a brutally harsh critique/evaluation/review of your article. Here is how it responded:

This essay is a sprawling, unwieldy, and often self-indulgent diatribe masquerading as a serious critique of AI’s impact on literary and intellectual work. Its tone is overwhelmingly alarmist to the point of hyperbole, undermining its credibility. What might have been a sharp, incisive analysis instead devolves into repetitive moral panic, ideological posturing, and verbose grandstanding.

The argument is buried under torrents of condescension, clichés, and sloppy generalizations, such as portraying all AI use as inherently degrading or equating AI’s rise with cultural apocalypse without substantial nuance or evidence. The piece leans heavily on anecdotes and unnamed “AI-and-I” essays, amplifying subjective fear rather than presenting rigorous or original insight. Its style is needlessly convoluted and jargon-laden, with ostentatious references to Marx, Trotsky, and literary figures that feel self-serving and distract from the core critique.

The logic is inconsistent and often contradictory: the writer laments AI’s threat yet
paradoxically admits to its allure and some positive efficiencies; criticizes AI-generated content as inferior but also resigns to its unstoppable advance. It expresses elitist disdain for “screen-addled” students and corporate culture while offering no concrete solutions beyond vague appeals to militancy and “denying the machine.” Evidently, the author’s indignation veers close to a privileged grievance rather than a balanced assessment.

The essay also suffers from a myopic focus on US academia and media, ignoring broader global contexts or technological developments that complicate this narrative. Its bleak prognostications about mental health, democracy, and climate change are stretched beyond relevance to serve the alarmist tone, making it feel like a rant rather than reasoned criticism.

In summary, this piece is marked by a shrill, self-righteous voice, overwrought alarmism, and intellectual laziness disguised as passionate urgency. It alienates readers who might seek a sober, nuanced conversation and instead offers an inflated, bitter screed fueled by fear, nostalgia, and resistance to change rather than thoughtful engagement with the complexities of AI’s impact on literature and labor.

FWIW.

 — Thomas Ball

Dear Editors, 

The doomerism is heavy with “Large Language Muddle.” Nostalgic decline narrative, epistemic fatalism, fear of contamination, self-protective elitism. Yikes.

At least, that’s what ChatGPT told me lol. I read the first half and groaned at all the hand-wringing, and asked Chat if the rest of the article is more of the same.

Doom’s cool and all, and moral panic sells well to old people, but it’s so tiresome. Dystopias are easier to write than protopias. Any chance of a more balanced approach?

I’d love to hear how AI can help with my writing. Can I share drafts with an LLM and have a discussion about it? Can it run a sentiment analysis on my drafts and see if the tone is in alignment with the values I want to promote to my readers? Maybe I can use it to track my writing over the past six months, past year, past two, and it can help me notice some of the patterns that might be growing stale.

Instead of fearing that LLMs will replace me by writing better essays, I’d love to hear how they can support me write essays better.

 — Simon Stawski

Dear Editors,

At a Friendsgiving celebration last month, conversation turned to what periodicals people were reading. Everyone present reads the LRB and NYRB, many read Harper’s, and everybody hates the Atlantic. But I was hoping to hear about something new, so my interest was piqued by a friend’s endorsement of n+1 as a journal that brings rigorous engagement to contested terrain. The next morning, I set up a year’s subscription.

My first copy arrived yesterday, so I dove into “Large Language Muddle” with great interest, hoping for the kind of fresh thinking that would justify my friend’s enthusiasm. After all, here we have the voice of the magazine itself, wading into one of the hottest topics of the day. Instead, I found a piece that, for all its rhetorical force, operates within a remarkably narrow and predictable frame. What a letdown.

The essay collapses widely different phenomena — students cheating on essays, corporations replacing workers, chatbot therapists, writers using AI as a tool — into a single object of denunciation. These are not the same thing, but treating them as such serves the polemic: It’s all just prompt in, slop out. By even using it at all, you become complicit in fascism, climate destruction, and child suicide. Trickster, moral panic.

What’s absent is any awareness of how sophisticated engagement with AI by knowledge workers actually happens, and therefore, the possibility of working with AI rather than simply accepting or rejecting its outputs. For example, a writer might bring their own frameworks, judgment, and voice to a sustained back-and-forth with a model that is not scraping the whole internet, but instead attending specifically to the writer’s own archive and draft material. In such a case, the tool becomes a research assistant and developmental editor for those who otherwise could not afford these services, yet must compete with those who can. The AI-and-I essay, as practiced here, cannot see this. The “AI as Normal Technology” framework, as articulated by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, escapes this impasse entirely — treating AI neither as apocalyptic threat nor inevitable revolution, but as a technology subject to the same dynamics of adoption, regulation, and institutional adaptation as any other.

On the climate point specifically, “Large Language Muddle” invokes AI’s “yeti-size carbon footprint” as grounds for moral condemnation. But current research suggests that a thousand AI queries a day for an entire year produce roughly the same amount of CO2 as a one passenger’s share of a single round-trip flight from Los Angeles to New York. That’s significant, but how many academics and intellectuals will journey to conferences this year to decry AI? What discourse has rendered those impacts unremarkable while exaggerating others?

The essay rightly pushes back against the “beautiful flaws” humanism of other AI-and-I essays, arguing that we should make a positive case for human capacities rather than retreat to our imperfections. But it never follows through. The positive case for human intelligence gets articulated only as opposition: human versus machine, deny the machine, smash the stereotype. The Luddite frame forecloses the possibility of bringing those distinctive human capacities into our engagements with a world that, like it or not, includes AI.

Most disappointing is the call for stigma and shame. “You should feel bad for using AI,” the editors write. This isn’t an argument; it’s tribal boundary-marking. For a magazine that prides itself on thinking past received positions, this piece is remarkably uncurious about its own object.

 — Dean Mathiowetz

---

Don’t Blame Payroll

Dear Editors,

As excited as I was to see an n+1 feature covering the 2025 MLB season, I was disappointed by the decision to publish an article like Brandon Harris’s “Big Blue Machine.” Harris’s advancement of the narrative that the LA Dodgers’ high payroll is somehow bad for baseball is misguided at best and actively harmful at worst. At a time when MLB’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire and ownership has already signaled a desire to institute a salary cap, it strikes me as frustratingly irresponsible to publish an article that implicitly defends wage suppression under the guise of “competitive balance.”

To clarify the situation, let me add that contrary to Harris’s assertion, MLB does have a robust revenue-sharing program that already acts as the type of “redistributive mechanism” he argues for — and it has yet to push so-called “small market” franchises to field more competitive teams, as they prefer instead to pocket revenue-sharing dollars and maximize profits while continuing to suppress wages through arbitration and collusion in free agency.

Harris is correct about one thing: “The contrast between MLB and the NFL and NBA is instructive.” The NFL and NBA have fallen prey to salary caps that suppress wages in service of a fantasy of parity. MLB, thanks to a strong players’ union that sees caps for what they are, has not. The implication that this is a rejection of egalitarianism rather than a hard-fought labor protection is laughable.

Even with their comparatively meager fortune, the Castellini family could absolutely afford to field a competitive baseball team in Cincinnati, and painting the Dodgers as villains for doing so when other teams prefer to cry poor and rest on their laurels plays into the hands of an ownership class eager to pit fans against the best interests of players.

I hope to see more thoughtful and principled sports coverage from n+1 in the future.

 — Dawson Highland

Dear Editors,

I read Brandon Harris’s essay with real appreciation for its feel for place: how it captured the ride to the stadium, the dread, and the strange mix of beauty and brutality that baseball can deliver in October. But I think it ends up aiming its anger in the wrong direction. It treats the payroll gap as the central moral explanation for what happened and casts small-market teams as trapped by the system. That story is partly true, but it misses the deeper problem: Owners have far more choice than they admit, and they use the league’s structure to avoid accountability to the people who love these teams.

Major League Baseball is not just thirty separate teams doing their own thing. The league sets the ground rules that shape what “competition” even means: who can move where, who controls what territory, how talent enters the league, and what kinds of restrictions exist on labor. Baseball’s antitrust exemption is part of why this collective arrangement has endured so comfortably. The result is that ownership can often act as a unified class, even while fans are told each team is simply on its own, stuck with whatever fate its city can afford.

This is why “small market” can become a convenient myth. MLB’s revenue sharing makes that clearer. Under the current system, teams contribute roughly 48 percent of local revenues into a shared pool that is redistributed across all clubs. That is supposed to make the sport less lopsided. But there is no guarantee that the money ends up on the field. It can just as easily end up as cushion for ownership. So when an owner in a smaller market pleads poverty while receiving shared money and charging premium prices, fans are not watching an unavoidable tragedy. They are watching a choice.

That choice lands hardest on the people who cannot opt out. Fans are asked to stay loyal through endless “rebuilds,” to buy hope in advance, to accept that the best players are temporary. Cities are asked to prove they are “major league,” sometimes with public help for stadiums and surrounding development. Then the same owners who will not invest in winning show up with their hands out, selling glossy promises and keeping the threat of leaving in the background. It is a peculiar moral arrangement: Devotion is mandatory, but effort is optional.

With the current labor deal expiring on December 1, 2026, these tensions are about to come to a head in 2027. The next collective bargaining agreement matters because the real conflict is not big markets versus small markets. It is owners versus players and owners versus fans at the same time. Owners want tight limits and predictability. Players want to earn commensurate with the value they create. Fans want teams that will compete. A hard salary cap is often sold as fairness, but it also acts as a ceiling on what labor can claim from the game’s growth.

That is why blaming the Dodgers for spending misses the point. Spending to win is not the issue. The rot is a system that lets owners capture the cultural and public value of a team while refusing any real obligation to compete, and uses “competitive balance” rhetoric to justify squeezing labor or lowering expectations for fans. If baseball wants legitimacy, the pressure should fall on ownership norms and league rules that make half the league comfortable treating winning as optional, not on the few clubs that take winning seriously.

None of this is meant to wave away the darker civic side Harris describes. The displacement at Chavez Ravine is not a footnote, and neither is the team’s modern posture toward the communities it markets itself to. The stadium’s beauty sits on top of removal. In that sense, the Dodgers are not just a case study in baseball’s inequality, but a reminder that “public” so often becomes “private,” and that civic love is repeatedly asked to sanctify someone else’s power.

 — Ryan Tissot

The Editors respond: Like all terrains of struggle (turf, workplace, battlefield), sports is filled with a plethora of stakeholders and conflicting solidarities; the fan is not necessarily the comrade, nor should we demand they be. Readers interested in a more global analysis of the proposed MLB salary cap are encouraged to check out “An Established Aberration” by Mack Basham and Joshua Judd Porter, which n+1 published online the same day as Brandon Harris’s “Big Blue Machine.” Basham and Porter describe the origins of baseball’s exemption from antitrust legislation and explain how it “helped turn the Major League Baseball Players Association, under the leadership of Marvin Miller, into one of the most powerful unions in the country.” On whether high salaries always skew the playing field, they write: “The fact that the second-highest spender, the New York Mets ($340 million), failed to make the playoffs at all, and the third, fourth, and tenth most profligate clubs (the Phillies, Yankees, and Cubs, respectively) all lost in the Division Series, lends some credence to the claim that correlation between spending and success is clear but not strong.” Basham and Porter’s essay is a complement to Harris’s, and concludes that “the upcoming dispute over a salary cap is not only a conflict between labor and capital (which it certainly is), but also a conflict between capitalists: a dispute between the faction of owners whose primary aim is to increase the value of their franchise as a speculative asset, and the rentier owners seeking to minimize spending to maximize year-over-year revenue.” We hope the full diversity of arguments and perspectives found in our sports section meets our readers’ standards of thoughtful and responsible sports coverage.