Idiots just like you and I: AI and the people that make it

I have always had a bad habit of judging a thing by the character of the people that enjoy it. It is the impulse that has at many an occasion stopped me from entering a rock climbing gym, All Bar One, or any establishment with a Cyber Truck parked outside of it. It is to my great dismay that I am even aware of the existence of such abominations.

But as of late, none are irking quite as much as the scourge of AI nonsense that seems to have gripped our collective consciousness. Of course, there are many good and decent people that enjoy it and find use in it, but the people that seem to be the most bullish about it carry a worrying degree of overlap with the people that were convinced that Cryptocurrencies would replace the entire existing monetary system. These are, in my estimation, amongst the worst of us, and anything they stand in such ardent support of should be approached with suspicion at the very least. Ideally with a strong degree of openness for derision.

To use the moniker Artificial Intelligence for the recent proliferation of the little language-based internet toys in increasingly common use is a misnomer to put it kindly. I absolutely abhor a fact and am loathe to include any at all in anything I do, but given my (albeit reluctant) near-decade-long experience as a software engineer, please forgive my impending use of a few. AI as it has been toted in many a wonderful sci-fi novel is an entirely different creature to the simple probabilistic mechanisms that dictate the results of current LLM-based “AI” products. An argument can be made that it a mere extension of Deep Learning protocols that have been around since the 70s, and have been the core of many a day-to-day technology for decades now. The feeling that these “AI” products (ChatGPT, Gemini, and other names the product of musings by an advertising department seemingly based on what a celebrity off their meds might consider naming their child) is a new cutting-edge technology is little more than a flurry of marketing on the edge of propaganda. Last I was aware, life-changing, paradigm-shifting innovations have generally not needed to be so incessantly forced down peoples throats to gain popularity.

The particular popularity of LLMs like ChatGPT or Generative models like Dal-E (i.e. the one that does the “draw me BDSM dungeon in the style of Monet” idiocy), I believe has far less to do with their utility nor potential for sentience (which I would surmise is negligible as best) and more that they appeal to our inherent narcism as a species. The only thing they have achieved anew is a pale mimicry of what people can do. And the only things they are better than people at are the things that none of us ever wanted to do in the first place.

The few places where AI is truly useful to any meaningful extent can be counted amongst the most menial and degrading tasks humanity has ever been subject to. The writing of cover letters, recommendation letters, meaningless emails, and other forms of verbal garbage that never needed to exist in the first place. To it’s credit, it did come in momentary use when needing to generate a fake script for a one-man-show I needed to trick Sri Lanka’s censor board into granting me a license to perform, but that is a tale for another occasion.

Generative AI, and the various LLMs available to us currently provide a genuine utility in producing ceremonial garbage words that no one really wants to read but the world as the powers that be have made it necessitate to get through a life. I am grateful to never have to write a visa letter again, and if the entirety of what I saw of this technology was a little startup named something infuriating like lettr.ai, I would not be nearly so troubled.

On the fears of it replacing those in the creative industries; they only carry validity because of the stupidity of many of those in the position to make decisions in said industries. Record label heads and studio executives of yore, while money-minded at their core were at the very least, people of taste. But as they are slowly replaced by tech people, said industries begin to operate like tech companies and focus purely on profitability in absence of any artistic direction, they will settle for something passable produced by an AI rather than something perfect made by a person that devoted their life and livelihood to the craft that made it. But I hold out faith that there will always be people wanting to make really good shit, and people that will want good shit to be made. And if so, the only real consequence of AI on the creative industries is it will require those of us in them to become more unique, more dissenting, more singular in our work. In a word, better. The only ones of us at risk are those that are underdeveloped in their craft to begin with. And if we are being honest, most of them weren’t getting much work to begin with.

Despite my luddidical tendencies, I would love few things more than a set of technologies that remove the need for the useless and the mundane and give me more time to do the things that give me meaning. But this incarnation of AI is surely not it. In my experience in life and in the workplace this is little more than a souped-up google search with less accurate results and many times more consequences. I feel as though it is fair to feel that when many begin to turn to Reddit as a source of reliable information, we have allowed things to go far too far indeed.

In defence of tourists over travellers

I am currently in the midst of planning a trip to Sri Lanka. The place that most that know me would call my home, where I was born, and (with now surprising contentment) spent the majority of my childhood and adolescnece. But I cannot help being overcome by the feeling that I will be returning as a Tourist. The reasons for which I am currently parsing through with professional aid but in the meantime feel it is pertinent to note-

Tourists seem to be catching a particularly bad rap as of late. Particularly in comparison to their outwardly more enlightened, self-appointedly superior counterparts, the Travellers; a collective I would place near the top of my list of undesirable characters, wedged tightly between real estate agents and men who deemed it suitable to purchase their first skateboard over the age of thirty.

Being aware that these distinctions are largely of my own creation, allow me to elaborate:

To me, Tourists tend towards a simultaneously loud yet discrete lot, benignly attempting to escape the drudgery of their day-to-day for the time allotted by their captors (read: employers) to a place whom history has been particularly unkind to, in the hopes of temporarily being treated to some dignity, some comfort, and if their funds allow, some third-world luxury. To enjoy the simple pleasures of a meal by the sea, a cocktail overlooking a blood-stained sunset, and fellating their lover behind a bush growing at the foot of a coconut tree. Then continuing on their journey, often in a herd, shepherded by an exasperated local tour guide, to often be returned by bus directly to the foot of the airport for their journey home. To which they will return completely unchanged, but hopefully at least a bit recharged.

Travellers however, carry the outward appearance of a more bedraggled, bohemian, even humble nature. And believe themselves to be as such, where-in lies my issue with their existence.

On the family holidays of my childhood, I recall the indifference of tourists to us, and in hindsight appreciate it immensely. They came, they lounged, they paid, they left. As opposed to the troubling habit of Travellers to stick around, after having “fallen in love” with a country after a short few weeks there. With places as with people, if anyone claims to fall in love with anything within a few weeks of coming into contact with it, that says a lot more about them than the object of their fickle affections. Upon sticking around, many tend to open businesses of their own, often (in the case of Sri Lanka at least) taking advantage of lax immigration and business regulations to siphon money that would otherwise go into the local community into their own coffers.

I would rather Sri Lanka be a country that would not have to depend on tourism at all for its survival, but that is not close to the case now, and likely will not be in my lifetime. There is a particular precarity to know that the state of your country almost unilaterally depends on how welcoming you are to the rest of the world. It does something to a people. Most commonly when meeting someone off the back of a recent sojourn to Sri Lanka, one of the first two things mentioned is “How nice the people are”...

-- Before I continue I would like to state, that I am entirely aware that these statements are made entirely in good faith and as an attempt to connect with me based on the knowledge that I am from the same place they visited. However, if one reserves their right to make lazy conversation, I reserve my right to remain an angry immigrant, but I digress --

... how kind, how accommodating, how hospitable. This is not by choice, but rather a coping mechanism. You wouldn’t compliment an assistant for being polite to their boss. When your financial stability depends on how special you make visitors feel, being nice to random foreigners is just a part of the gig. Add to that the post-colonial hangover given form by an island-wide preference for the less melanated among us, and you get what much of the world knows Sri Lankans as. Smiley, docile, subservient little people. Shit is patronising as hell. I find disparaging the people of a nation to be a sign of respect, and long for the day when Sri Lanka is spoken of in a context much like Germany’s, where “Sri Lankan Engineering” is revered as a mark of inherent quality and rigor, and “Sri Lankan People” are known as odd, precocious, and prone to genocidal tendencies if not kept a close enough eye on.

But at the very least, tourism in its conventional sense does provide a boon for the locals, particularly of rural areas, to make a living. Hotels in their building alone provide jobs for everyone from middle-class Colombo architects to manual labourers in the provinces, and consistent employment for many more after they start running. A hostel on the other hand, while being far more economical for its foreign consumers, does close to fuck all for anyone back home. In a Traveller’s search of an “authentic experience”, they often encroach on the haunts of those with exponentially less financial resources than them for the sake of trying on the costume of a different, poorer, but purer, life. And it’s fun because it is deliberate and temporary. Instability is not really instability if you’ve got a strong social security system and your parents’ house(s) in the country to go back to if your frivolity might go awry.

Tourists are, albeit begrudgingly, accepting of being ripped off. And I love that about them. I have grown weary of seeing tips from first-world 20-somethings on how to haggle down the price of goods in a street market an amount that is minuscule to themselves but makes a tangible difference to the life of the person they are haggling with. Yes, if you are foreign, and particularly if you are white, vendors in most developing countries will try to fuck you over. And it is your responsibility to let it happen. It is the very least you could do in exchange for the circumstances that made it so you could live for more than a month in their country for less than a days work in yours.

But what bothers me most tends to be the supposition of any significant enrichment of the soul occurring on any of these trips, be it by a Traveller or Tourist. The difference being that the latter often carry no notions nor illusions to this effect. It is my opinion that the process of being introduced to yourself happens through dealing with the realities of life, the pains of growing. Realities and pains which are unlikely to occur when you are leagues away from anyone that might hold you accountable for being the worst version of yourself, in a place no one knows your name but treats you as if you were their best friend. Having visited many places and lived in a good few, it seems to me that it is living in a place, and having to reconfigure yourself around its contours not relishing in it doing the same for you, that has any chance of growing the scope of what you know the world to be. It’s the reason I will likely always feel a tourist in Sri Lanka. I grew up there, but have never lived there as an adult. Never made memories, fond and regrettable, found the spot to meet and complain after work, where to get fucked up come the weekend and where to hide when I need hiding, that it will likely never completely be a part of my internal history. I currently have no plans of moving back as an adult, and no plans of changing those plans either.

In my time in the western world, which has encompassed the majority of my adult life, I’ve often heard a version of the phrase “I went travelling” to so-and-so far off place, but did not do the “usual tourist-y stuff”. “Tourist-y” often uttered with the same implied vitriol I might ascribe to “cringe-y” or “mass murder-y”. A strong emphasis placed on *getting to know the locals* as a way of growing more worldly and “finding oneself”. Most importantly, with no thought given as to if any of these locals have the slightest interest in knowing *you*. Forbid that the inhabitants of a developing country might have a purpose to exist outside being a conduit for the self-actualisation of a western middle class youth fresh off the back of an overpriced humanities degree.