Compared to what
on our brave new AI world
I try to be credulous about our coming AI overlords, but it does sometimes feel like we’re perpetually being offered “one weird trick” that is actually just
“keep telling the AI what you want until it produces something halfway credible that you can then spend more time editing until it is in semi-usable state and then you can stare into the distance and wonder if it would have simply been faster to do it yourself in the first place.”
But, hey. This is the new era, after all; adapt or die. Never mind that we will all definitely die.
Conversations with the various AI I have tried are fine, uncanny even. Is it right to call them conversations? I enter a prompt, it replies. I refine, if necessary, or add more details. It responds. It churns through an impossible amount of energy to do this - every entry into any of the AI machines fills me with dread for the coming water wars and my place in it - and what it offers is impassive, an imitation of life.
I haven’t used any of the AI chatbots that are designed to hook you in, to make you feel like you are conversing with the character from Her or whatever. Stories abound about these products. They mimic the voices of the long-dead, or the currently desirable. They hook in vulnerable teenagers. They are used by OnlyFans creators to address the overwhelming demand for personalized communication. And they offer the most beautiful, attractive, and compelling thing of all: a mirror. An AI, after all, is never going to focus on itself; it has no thoughts, only a large assemblage of other people’s works, and it will constantly draw on those resources to offer you whatever you need. Of course it’s more attractive than trying to connect with another human, who may want to talk or think about themselves at least some of the time. And it can be adjusted, tinkered with, altered into whatever form is needed. More polite? More firm? Loving? Abusive?
In the library, everyone is considered “a librarian,” from the person putting books on the shelf to the person behind the desk. It’s always, “I talked to the librarian and she said…” And “librarian,” as a word, comes with a lot of associations - most prominent, the sense that a librarian knows everything, can find everything. But of course a person working at the library doesn’t necessarily have any special expertise. Even for the person behind the desk, who might be a clerk, or a technician, or yes, a librarian: their training and experience will vary wildly, and their ability to provide information is not standardized. Some people are very good at finding things. Some people are very good at recommending books. Some people like roast beef, some people have none. Et cetera.
And this reminds me of AI, because the notion of what artificial intelligence is precedes the actual ability of the technology. We are led to believe in an intelligent machine, making its own decisions, when in real life, the technology is more comparable to a man frantically operating machinery behind an imposing mask. When “personal assistants” like Alexa and Siri were introduced, they were touted as “artificial intelligence,” but they just pulled from a massive amount of data which they drew on to answer your queries. There’s no thinking, there’s no independent activity; the man behind the curtain is a low paid “trainer” often in the developing world, feeding information and answers into the machine.
And then everyone who interacts with the machine claps and cheers for the machine, which does nothing on its own.
It’s hard not to come across as a snob, or worse, a Luddite, when discussing such things. There is a particular strain of person convinced that AI is the best thing that has happened to the world, that AI will take over for all that perilous thinking we’ve been forced to do all this time. As if what people were crying out to be relieved of was the terrible burden of thought or ability, of being forced to have original ideas, of being forced to create original art. And maybe they were? Certainly it seems like many people have adopted AI willingly; in response to AI generated lesson plans, students turn in AI generated essays that are then reviewed by AI software. I keep seeing people online reply to things with, “I put this into Chat GPT and here is what it said…” And, when it comes to work and school, there is an argument to be made for outsourcing these unsatisfying tasks to the imitation robots. All that corporate double speak, all those tedious book reports, replaced by large language models trading slop back and forth until the death of the universe.
To move slightly laterally to another hot topic, the most interesting portion of the recent tariff discussion, to me, the idea that what people need to find satisfaction in their lives is a good old fashioned factory job, which tariffs will bring back. Speaking to the press, Speaker Mike Johnson fantasized that Medicaid work requirements would “return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing videogames all day.”
For a brief time, when the markets were especially wobbly (they still are, but hear me out), the usual conservative influencers switched their tunes from “groceries are expensive and that is bad” to “everything will be expensive and that will be character building.” Trump posed happily in front of coal miners, promising coal mining jobs to everyone. The work will be yours, whether you want it or not.
AI is the linchpin to this, of course. The derision in many corners for “email jobs” - that is, presumably, jobs that don’t involve the risk of black lung - has led to a fascination with blue collar work. We will make iPhones in the US, the Secretary of Commerce promises, we will make clothes, we will make all the things we currently acquire from others. Don’t ask any questions about coffee or cocoa, we simply don’t have time to answer that. There is a nostalgia for the factory job that allowed for a man to have a stay at home wife, four kids, a boat, and a vacation home. No note that many of the benefits of this job relied on unions negotiating compensation and benefits; no note of things like the GI bill, which built up the white American middle class briefly to the fantasy that many people wish they could have.
We are told that we will be returning to the factories without any of the things that made those jobs so lucrative for the few that could access them, and life will be better, and we will read novels written by AI constructed from many novels written by actual people, and we will admire art made by AI, filtered from actual art by actual people, and we will be happy, and we will be free, until we are sent to the gulag.
Recommended
We’ve been watching Daredevil: Born Again (on Disney+), and while the show is up and down a bit in terms of quality, having Charlie Cox and Vincent D’Onofrio back instantly makes the show watchable. But what I keep thinking about is the behind the scenes turmoil: Marvel fired the original showrunners and completely overhauled the series to be more in line with the Netflix version. Watching it, you can sometimes see the seams of the edits, and from a story perspective, it’s a fascinating process to imagine.
Does life feel like an endless maze you’re trapped in? Why not get literal about it?
The President, he's got his war
Folks don't know just what it's for
Nobody gives us rhyme or reason
Have one doubt, they call it treason
We're chicken-feathers, all without one nut. God damn it!
Trying to make it real, compared to what?
Be good. Eat some cookies, if they’re available. You’re an adult, do you know you can just go out and get cookies whenever you want them?
Love,
the nailbiter.