2025 saw its share of great movies; Hamnet was one that broke hearts. The film ends at the Globe Theatre in 17th-century London, with the performance of Hamlet. Agnes is furious that Shakespeare has taken their son's name for the stage after his death. As the play goes on, her agitation transforms into catharsis as she begins to understand what she is watching: a boy dies, and his father writes him back to life in verse, gives his name to a prince and a kingdom and a soliloquy, so that the dead child’s mouth can keep moving four hundred years after the dirt.
Hamlet dies on stage. Agnes reaches forward. The whole audience reaches forward. On the Nature of Daylight is playing.
I was seized not by a gentle cry but rather an outburst of sorts that seemed to have a life of its own. For minutes, I couldn’t move in that AMC signature recliner.
Great art feels human. In our appreciation of it, both the intellectual and the somatic, there has always been a named author. An imagined other who felt something so deeply, so inescapably, so undeniably that they had no choice but to press it into form. The talent we worship is almost incidental to the need.
IfIcoulddoanythingelse,Iwouldn’tbe doing this.
And that has always been part of the exchange, the recognition that art comes from necessity. Well, not just necessity, but legible necessity. If you were the only person in the world who had heard a song that broke you, you would not rest until you'd played it for someone else, to be less alone, to have someone turn to you and say, yes, I feel that too.
An author who meant it, a congregation of strangers who felt it, together with the work of art itself, create that sense of divinity. An implicit social contract on how art is created and consumed, through which we seek both an aesthetic experience and a profound sense of connection, a shared vibration across interiorities that cannot be anything other than truths, across interiorities that otherwise move about this world disjointed, terrified.
And now, that contract is being broken by LLMs.
I could try to explain why On the Nature of Daylight moved me so. The crescendos, how it confronts or even celebrates loss, how the movie scenes it accompanies reverberate inside my skull. I wouldn’t know if any of them were true. It reaches past every fence you’ve built, and by the time you realize what happened, you’re already undone.
If someone were to tell me it was generated by LLMs — it totally could be, and it will be soon — I would feel uneasy, because subconsciously, we are always searching in the dark for the hand that made a piece of art. Before intellect, before taste.
What would it mean, for a piece of music that has, in the darkest moments of my life, brought me to my knees and compelled me to pray, to not come from a person at all?
Is it a misplaced longing? A misplaced longing to be understood?
We want someone, anyone, to have felt what we feel, and to find, in the shared medium, a way to say I was here too. Across distance, across death, across the absolute impossibility of truly knowing anyone.
It’s supposed to be a leap of faith, but we want to be convinced.
Soon, if not already, great art can come from LLMs. Art can come from these “children” of ours, in some nominal sense. But these children produce works that make their parents weep. We put guardrails around them the way you’d childproof a house, except the child can speak in every tongue we’ve ever spoken and sing back to us the residue of every grief we’ve ever named. Every lullaby and every elegy. Every sentence a person wrote at the highs and lows of their life. A language model touches those words and the residue comes with them. When it speaks, the residue speaks too.
What happens to the faith then?
Well, nothing.
It was a leap of faith to begin with. The faith was never really in the author. It was in the possibility of connection itself, in the desperate, ancient, human bet that the interior of one sealed room can reach the interior of another.
2025 saw its share of great movies; Hamnet was one that broke hearts. The film ends at the Globe Theatre in 17th-century London, with the performance of Hamlet. Agnes is furious that Shakespeare has taken their son's name for the stage after his death. As the play goes on, her agitation transforms into catharsis as she begins to understand what she is watching: a boy dies, and his father writes him back to life in verse, gives his name to a prince and a kingdom and a soliloquy, so that the dead child’s mouth can keep moving four hundred years after the dirt.
Hamlet dies on stage. Agnes reaches forward. The whole audience reaches forward. On the Nature of Daylight is playing.
I was seized not by a gentle cry but rather an outburst of sorts that seemed to have a life of its own. For minutes, I couldn’t move in that AMC signature recliner.
Great art feels human. In our appreciation of it, both the intellectual and the somatic, there has always been a named author. An imagined other who felt something so deeply, so inescapably, so undeniably that they had no choice but to press it into form. The talent we worship is almost incidental to the need.
If I could do anything else, I wouldn’t be doing this.
And that has always been part of the exchange, the recognition that art comes from necessity. Well, not just necessity, but legible necessity. If you were the only person in the world who had heard a song that broke you, you would not rest until you'd played it for someone else, to be less alone, to have someone turn to you and say, yes, I feel that too.
An author who meant it, a congregation of strangers who felt it, together with the work of art itself, create that sense of divinity. An implicit social contract on how art is created and consumed, through which we seek both an aesthetic experience and a profound sense of connection, a shared vibration across interiorities that cannot be anything other than truths, across interiorities that otherwise move about this world disjointed, terrified.
And now, that contract is being broken by LLMs.
I could try to explain why On the Nature of Daylight moved me so. The crescendos, how it confronts or even celebrates loss, how the movie scenes it accompanies reverberate inside my skull. I wouldn’t know if any of them were true. It reaches past every fence you’ve built, and by the time you realize what happened, you’re already undone.
If someone were to tell me it was generated by LLMs — it totally could be, and it will be soon — I would feel uneasy, because subconsciously, we are always searching in the dark for the hand that made a piece of art. Before intellect, before taste.
What would it mean, for a piece of music that has, in the darkest moments of my life, brought me to my knees and compelled me to pray, to not come from a person at all?
Is it a misplaced longing? A misplaced longing to be understood?
We want someone, anyone, to have felt what we feel, and to find, in the shared medium, a way to say I was here too. Across distance, across death, across the absolute impossibility of truly knowing anyone.
It’s supposed to be a leap of faith, but we want to be convinced.
Soon, if not already, great art can come from LLMs. Art can come from these “children” of ours, in some nominal sense. But these children produce works that make their parents weep. We put guardrails around them the way you’d childproof a house, except the child can speak in every tongue we’ve ever spoken and sing back to us the residue of every grief we’ve ever named. Every lullaby and every elegy. Every sentence a person wrote at the highs and lows of their life. A language model touches those words and the residue comes with them. When it speaks, the residue speaks too.
What happens to the faith then?
Well, nothing.
It was a leap of faith to begin with. The faith was never really in the author. It was in the possibility of connection itself, in the desperate, ancient, human bet that the interior of one sealed room can reach the interior of another.
That we are not alone after all.