I have always had a bad habit of judging a thing by the character of the people that enjoy it.
But as of late, nothing is irking me 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 who enjoy it and find use in it, but the people who seem to be the most bullish about it carry a worrying degree of overlap with those 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 to 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 loath 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 touted in many a wonderful sci-fi novel, is an entirely different creature from the simple probabilistic mechanisms that dictate the results of current LLM-based “AI” products. An argument can be made that it is a mere extension of deep learning protocols that have been around since the 1970s and have been the core of many day-to-day technologies for decades now. The feeling that these “AI” products (ChatGPT, Gemini, and other names—the products of musings by an advertising department seemingly based on what a celebrity off their meds might consider naming their child) represent 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 people’s throats to gain popularity.
The particular popularity of LLMs like ChatGPT or generative models like DALL·E (i.e., the one that does the “draw me a BDSM dungeon in the style of Monet” idiocy), I believe, has far less to do with their utility or potential for sentience (which I would surmise is negligible at best) and more to do with the fact that they appeal to our inherent narcissism as a species. The only thing they have achieved anew is a pale mimicry of what people can do, or more precisely the way we might speak, 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 its credit, it did come in momentary use when I needed to generate a fake script for a one-man show 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 that the world, as the powers that be have made it, necessitates to get through 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 positions 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, and as those industries begin to operate like tech companies—focusing purely on profitability in the absence of any artistic direction—they will settle for something passable produced by an AI rather than something perfect made by a person who devoted their life and livelihood to their chosen craft. But I hold out faith that there will always be people wanting to make really good things, and people who will want good things to be made. And if so, the only real consequence of AI on the creative industries is that 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 who 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.
