​​I’m in The Zone™ editing the next issue of our annual zine and interview series, which drops next week.

The theme of this year’s issue is AI × Creativity and we’ve convinced some of our dream guests (Oliver Burkeman, David Perell, Robin Sloan, Venkatesh Rao, Jasmine Sun, Anu, and more) to share perspectives they’ve never put on record before.

For the limited edition print zine, our friend Jake Weber has been cutting letters from old magazines and books by hand. They are human, imperfect, and laborious.

They also double as a symbol for the way large language models are built: by assembling fragments of all humanity’s writing and culture into something new. A patchwork of the past rearranged into unexpected futures.

Digitally handmade, that’s the vibe.

This is a dynamic that kept coming up in the conversations--how humans will always find new ways to signal our humanity. (!! I’m never giving up the em dashes.)

From Robin Sloan (novelist, New York Times bestseller):

We've seen this happen so many times. AI programs master the perfect New Yorker short story format, and then we all decide the format is busted, and we're onto the next thing.

From Mills Baker (Head of Design at Substack):

Humans will always relocate themselves just outside of the pattern to avoid getting got. And so I'm very pessimistic about LLMs generally. I mean, I love them. They're really useful. I like to use them to correct photos. But, you know, broadly speaking, they're never going to do the other part.

If you want to get early access to all ten interviews + exclusive access to the limited-edition print zine, become a Sublime Premium member and we will send you a pre-order link next week.

Everyone else will get the conversations week by week over the next ten weeks.

Let’s get groovy, baby.

(P.S. If you missed last year’s issue, get it here.)