Lior Zalmanson ’00

Posted on August 25, 2024

“If I could have, I would have just cast this word processing tool aside and sent you all a mixtape.”

My name is Lior Zalmanson from the 2000 Amitim, a senior lecturer (a weird ranking between Assistant and Associate Professor) at the Coller School of Management, Tel Aviv University. My research focuses on human engagement with artificial intelligence in the context of the future of work. Additionally, I am an artist and curator specializing in digital art, serving as the digital
chair of the Israeli chapter of the International Council of Museums. Currently, I split my time between Tel Aviv and New York City, where I am a research fellow at the Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech.

On October 8th, just a day after one of the most devastating days in Jewish history, I hastily sent a letter to this listserv. In retrospect, I realize it was far too soon to fully comprehend the trauma of those events.

When asked to write a follow-up to that initial letter, something within me resisted. The act of writing itself has become a struggle. Over the past 10 months, I’ve barely managed to put pen to paper. The very meaning of expressing thoughts through writing has transformed for me. It’s no longer a means to maintain sanity; it now feels redundant and, at times, even harmful.

In my professional life, I write research papers for a living. As an artist, text is also my primary tool. Yet, in recent months, the written word seems to have fully escaped me. Moreover, adding more text to the world appears to be the last thing we need right now.

Since October, I’ve felt bombarded by it. Running tickers on TV screens display casualty numbers or missile trajectories. Protest slogans from all sides call for freedom, yet often fail to foster genuine dialogue. Posters of the kidnapped, extremely hectic WhatsApp and Telegram channels, and social media stories overflow with so much text that one must pause to absorb it all before it vanishes. In this deluge of words, the power of thoughtful writing seems to have been lost.

I find it ironic that this is also the year we widely adopted Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools to help us compose texts. Personally, they’ve been extremely helpful. These tools have served as the scaffolding I needed to push through this challenging period, helping me identify instances where my mind was a jumble and complementing my resulting writing shortcomings. They also ensured I never faced the daunting prospect of a blank page.

However, on a societal level, these tools are also responsible for both the increasing volume of textual content and its growing uniformity. GenAI technologies are, at their core, sophisticated prediction machines. Sometimes I wonder: will these machines make us more predictable to ease their work, or were we so predictable to begin with that these technologies have proven so effective?

I often get this feeling when I read about the unfolding geopolitical situation. At times, I feel I can skip the media or online discussions because I can just let ChatGPT imagine it, and they will do a fairly good job – it’s all too sad and predictable.

Given this, I don’t believe I should supply you with another opinion about what’s going on. For me, I had no choice but to write on this meta level. I just worry that all the texts of this year didn’t add too much, that most just contributed to the confusion, hatred, polarization, and suffering of those most affected and vulnerable. I would have loved it if people would stop writing posts or signs and would just go outside to have conversations or sit in silence together. I realize this may sound naïve but I don’t mean this as aspiring for a contrived togetherness display — but merely to quiet down all of the noise and the distraction of misinformation, disinformation or just uninformed ideas that are currently broadcasted to the masses, and hopefully begin something more synchronous.

A month after the events of October, I met my artist friend who had just graduated from an MFA program at a leading university as the sole Israeli in her class. Her classmates have now all stopped speaking to her – they really did not wish for any conversation, and she was left to follow their technological-mediated statements on Instagram and TikTok until she couldn’t anymore and closed her accounts.

She mentioned that what saved her sanity was the fact that one of her tools is music and sound. When working with a fellow Iranian curator, they were able to find rapport through the collaborative recording of voices and tunes. We agreed that maybe a much-needed change will be the move from the written word to notes and melodic expression. Since information seems to have betrayed us, perhaps we might need to return to the more universal, the more emotional language, in which misunderstandings are not as common as we all share a similar capacity to feel.

We reminded ourselves how we used to say, “I love you,” “I see you,” or “I care” through the dedication of songs and the compilation of mixtapes.

If I could have, I would have just cast this word processing tool aside and sent you all a mixtape. I hear the notes playing in my mind now, I wish I had the words to articulate them to you.