Not As Smart As It Thinks
Working on the next book, I was reading Lars Spuybroek on “The Aesthetics Of Variation.” Spuybroek said something interesting about Hogarth’s depiction of crowds, citing Walter Benjamin. I wondered exactly what Benjamin said, so I Googled it. The AI assistant told me that the discussion would be found in “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.” This was certainly plausible, as Hogarth’s memory is very much bound up with mechanical reproduction.
But Google was wrong. It’s not there; it is in The Arcades Project.