The Real Apathy Behind Artificial Intelligence
In which I complain about summer going on too long and wonder about the sad apathy at the heart of AI adoption in the creative fields.
Hi!
We’ve hit the portion of the summer that’s best described as “overripe.” People are annoyed and aggressive, drivers are even more unhinged than usual, and it feels like every trash bin is overflowing into the streets. I don’t know how other cities do it, but in Seattle, at least, we need a good chilly rain to come through and remind people of their manners.
It probably doesn’t help that the president is sending troops into cities, ICE is taking firefighters off the line at wildfires, and nepo babies are trying to make it impossible for anyone to get their Covid shot. It wasn’t exactly a long, hot summer—at the time that I write this, no real violence has erupted in Washington DC, thankfully—but it was certainly a long, itchy summer.
The thing that I’m hoping for this fall, both for myself and for the elected leaders I support, is clarity. Clarity of mind, clarity of purpose, clarity of action. This year has been an out-and-out mess, and bad people are working hard to make sure it gets even messier. I hope the cooler air brings a little more thoughtfulness and intentions to our actions. We can’t just respond half-assedly and irritatedly to everything all the time—that’s how the bad guys keep us on the back foot.
So let’s agree to make this autumn Suck It Up Season, a time to regain our focus and stop wallowing in the mess of it all.
I’ve Been Writing
Because my boss, Zach Silk, went on vacation at the beginning of the month, I guest-wrote an issue of The Pitch, the weekly economics newsletter from Civic Ventures. My essay is all about corruption in government and why it’s bad for everyone.
I wrote about Lovestruck in Seattle, a new pop-up romance bookstore on Lake City Way that is officially the first brick-and-mortar romance bookstore in Seattle. Lovestruck has been met with rapturous crowds of romance fans, and now they’ve launched a Kickstarter to fund a permanent location in Wedgwood, which is opening this fall.
I also wrote about the best paperback releases for August.
I’ve Been Reading
We’re starting my month’s reading recap with three huge bummers, so be warned:
If you’re feeling outraged about the teenager who was coaxed into committing suicide by ChatGPT or the man who was coaxed into a murder-suicide by ChatGPT, you should read Karen Hao’s Empire of AI to understand how thoroughly vile OpenAI is, from top to bottom. Nothing good can grow from roots this rancid.
Paula Bomer’s The Stalker is a novel about a terrible young man who treats women badly and steals from his friends. He’s not as slick as Patrick Bateman and he’s considerably dumber than any of the malicious turds in Fight Club. To get into this one, you have to be in the mood for a dark book from the perspective of someone with absolutely no redeeming values.
Swing Low is labeled a memoir, but it’s more of a novel by Miriam Toews that is written from the perspective of Toews’s own father in the months leading up to his suicide. It’s a talented daughter’s attempt to comprehend why her emotionally troubled father made the choices that he did, and the book really hurts to read. You feel like you’re bearing witness to something very intimate and painful.
Sophie Elmhurt’s A Marriage at Sea is the true story of a young married couple that gets lost at sea together. I’m not generally one for true survival tales, but the relationship of the couple in the book is a fascinating one, and the way the external hardships mirror the challenges they face internally as a young married couple is interesting.
A Field Companion for Wandering is a small collection of quotes, passages, poems, and other snippets loosely arranged around the idea of wandering and getting lost. It’s compiled and written by Connor Bouchard-Roberts, a Northwest poet, and it’s one of those books that you can dip into and out of at random times—more a meditation tool than a book you read cover to cover.
I’d been wondering for a while where the cartoonist Peter Kuper had gone off to. I love his graffiti-inspired style, and I’d been missing his work, which was regularly published in places like Mad Magazine. I never would have guessed in a million years that Kuper had spent years writing and drawing Insectopolis, a kid-friendly guide to the wide and wonderful world of insects set in a post-apocalyptic New York City. It’s a fun and informative book that I wish I had around when I was a kid.
Did you know that before photography existed, a common argument that captivated the popular imagination was how horses run? Some people argued that at least one pair of horse hooves were always on the ground when they ran, while others argued that all four hooves left the ground mid-stride, and other people argued that horses actually leapt forward, like frogs. Because photography hadn’t been invented, there was no way to be sure! That’s one of the things I learned reading Muybridge, Guy Delisle’s excellent comic-book biography of Eadweard Muybridge, the man who invented the technology that finally captured photographic evidence of how horses run—and incidentally invented motion pictures as the same time. Muybridge’s life is a long and exciting one full of rich patrons, professional gossip, and murder, and I was shocked several times by the twists and turns in his story. And last weekend I was delighted during one of my walks to discover the Muybridge, which is a bridge in Renton devoted to Muybridge’s photographic achievement:
You Can’t Spell “Apathy” Without “AI” (More or Less)
It’s nearly impossible to browse around online without encountering some sort of egregious AI monstrosity. But for some reason, this AI graphic meant to advertise a bagel restaurant on a food delivery app just broke me:
For some reason, this instance really hammered home the thing that annoys me most about this dawning AI age.
If anyone who worked at this restaurant stopped for even one second to think about how the AI was presenting their business to the world, they never would have published these graphics. But instead, they typed “bagel sandwich” into an AI engine, saw the first result, and said “what the hell, close enough” and then uploaded it to a delivery service.
All these ugly graphics with weird glitches, all these texts with fabricated quotes, all these bizarre videos of long-fingered people cheering Will Smith on—they don’t happen unless someone (or, more likely, several people) fails to give a shit about their job. If they checked their work or asked someone else to take a look, there’s no way they would publish the AI work. But they didn’t care, and neither did anyone else.
I know people who have lost jobs to AI. It’s not because AI did their jobs better than they did, or even half as well as they did. It’s because their bosses don’t care how poorly the job is done as long as it gets done quickly and cheaply. We’re learning how little good work matters to a large swath of the population—especially in fields that involve writing and art.
I guess the question I can’t answer is this: How much of this work never mattered? How many advertising executives and editors of websites never cared at all about the work they were putting out into the world? Is this largely a new development, a result of everyone being too damn busy and too damn distracted all the time? Or did the writing and photography and graphic design and illustrations we were putting out into the world never matter at all to a huge portion of the population?
These things have always mattered to me. I go nuts when a popular song has a bad rhyme or an awkward lyric. I hate an ugly ad or a confusing piece of advertising copy. I generally read every single blurb in, say, a Bumbershoot or SIFF preview package in a local publication, and I can pick out the blurbs that were phoned in by someone who felt like the job was beneath them.
These little details matter to me because they feel like the glue that holds everything together. But now so much of the audio-visual wallpaper in my everyday life is being spackled over with AI slop, and it makes me feel a little bit like everything is falling apart.
So if you’re rejecting the easy apathy of AI, and you’re still doing your job and focusing on the details, I just want you to know that I see you and I appreciate you. Thanks for doing what you do. It’s important.
That’s all for this month.
Take care,
Paul