Interview: Matt Cardin
On AI and the counterfeit muse, on assistance versus abdication, on meat proxies and machine guardrails, on education after the essay, on Andrew W.K. and the movie of the self
I had the pleasure of welcoming back Matt Cardin: writer, editor, and vice chancellor for academic affairs to discuss his latest work and expand from our first conversation. In our first conversation, we went deep into creativity, nonduality, religion, and horror (Interview). We talked about his daemon muse, the magic eye picture of awareness, Berman’s monastic option, and the strange kinship between Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the mystics. Since then Matt has published Writing at the Wellspring, closed The Living Dark, and brought all of his writing home under his own name at mattcardin.com.
This conversation is a deeper dive into his new work on artificial intelligence. Matt is writing a book with the working title The Serious Writer’s Guide to Using AI Without Losing Your Soul, and its core principle is simple to state and hard to live: AI may assist the work, but it must never become its source. We talk about why the machine can feel so uncannily like the muse, and why mistaking instant availability for inspiration may be the central spiritual confusion of this moment. As Matt puts it, AI can’t say what you mean, because what you mean only comes into being as you try to say it.
From there we wander. We cover Person of Interest, the CBS series Matt sees as eerily prescient about sentient surveillance and humans handing their affairs over to a machine. We cover the programmer’s term “meat proxy,” predictive programming, and whether LLM guardrails might quietly narrow what we are able to think. Matt also speaks from the front lines of higher education. He wrote his college’s AI policy, and he argues that the crisis exposes an old mistake: we treated the essay, the grade, and the product as the point, when the point was always the person being formed.
We close with Andrew W.K.’s advice to see your life as a movie you’re starring in and writing. Matt reads it through a nondual lens in which the “me” in the movie is part of the movie too. We also wonder whether the vast matrices inside these models, the linear algebra are a small mirror of the larger field of experience we are all living inside of. The interview left us with more questions than answers but as Matt says its “ like we’re living our way into this mystery.”
Connect with Matt Cardin @ mattcardin.com
Interview: Matt Cardin: A Deep Dive into Creativity, Non-Duality, Religion, and Horror