Why We Should Stop Hating AI, at Least for a Moment

By Andy — 2026-09-15 — Literary News

I walked past the headline and flinched. James Baldwin and AI, in the same sentence. My first thought was the reflex one has when you see your favourite author's name next to a tech company's. But then I actually read what was happening.

There's an exhibition running in New York called "For Those Who Come After," part of a larger festival called KIN. It sits in a room with a typewriter, three stacks of cards labeled Wisdom, Courage, Love. You sit down. You ask it a question. The machine—powered by what looks like a bespoke AI model—pulls three relevant cards from the stacks and then types out something that sounds like a poetic reflection, something drawn from Baldwin's own archive of books, essays, letters.

The whole thing is designed by Kinfolk Tech, a nonprofit. These people make immersive art projects about memory and community and the stories that get erased. Augmented reality monuments of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and queer people. Fellowships on community memory. Archival work. That sort of thing.

So here's where my problem gets messy.

My instinct was still to recoil. Actually, that's not quite right—my instinct was to recoil first and ask questions never. But the closer I looked at what Kinfolk is actually doing, the clearer it became: the whole point is to get you closer to Baldwin's words, not further from them. Elsewhere in the room there's a radio, a TV, a record player. All playing Baldwin. The typewriter is just one more station. The founder, Idris Brewster, called it a "poetic intervention" designed to slow people down and make them think about the partnership between humans and machines.

That's not dystopian. That's not even close.

So why did I have to fight so hard to see that? Why is my first reflex to assume the worst?

It's because the tech industry has poisoned the well so thoroughly that quieter, more human uses of machine learning can barely breathe. We've had CEOs standing up at conferences talking about how they're building doomsday machines, about how they believe they're engineering our collective doom, and somehow expecting sympathy. It's the sort of theatre Silicon Valley does brilliantly: invent a disaster, refuse to solve it, throw the mess to the rest of us and act bewildered that we're upset.

These men sound like method actors who've convinced themselves that sitting at a desk with a laptop is labour, is struggle, is dangerous work. The insecurity wrapped up in that is almost impressive. You're on the computer. You're not saving anyone from anything.

But because they've been so loud, so maximalist, so committed to their own myth-making, the rest of us now see the word "AI" and can only think of everything we know about how it's been built, how it's been deployed, who's cheering it on. The grifters who brag about killing jobs, the planet, entire ways of life. That's the culture we're inside.

Which means a typewriter that quotes James Baldwin, that's trying to do something artistic and real and thoughtful, now has to fight through all that noise just to exist.

It's sad, more or less. It's the kind of thing Baldwin himself would have had something precise and furious to say about—how money and power and ego corrupt even the neutral tools, how the worst people in the world can poison everything they touch, including things they had nothing to do with.

The typewriter isn't the problem.

Source: "A contemplative, sacred writing space inspired by James Baldwin's discipline and intimacy with the typewriter." — Kinfolk Tech