Writing for machines
I can't go a day without unwillingly engaging with ai in some form. Yesterday, I left a meeting at work because we were being presented with ai generated pictures and being asked to come up with witty work-related captions for each one. Most tellingly, the guy who'd put it together had included the prompts he'd used on each slide. What a waste of time and resources! I had to leave.
I read a thread about the use of ai in novel writing and that it could be a great tool if used correctly. I hear the same argument applied to ai music and art. But what does that mean? How is it to be used correctly?
The prevailing view seems to be that producing low effort ai slop is not using it correctly. Using it correctly seems to be about putting in time and effort - prompting, re-prompting, further editing (can't help but think all this extra time and effort is against the make things quicker and easier ethos of ai-people-droids, and one might just as well make art the old way, but whatever). Writers also suggested that if used, the use of ai should also be declared in the credits.
In the fevered rush to use novel technologies and the assumption that technology itself is somehow a neutral tool (technology often is burdened with the weight of politics, bias, and underpinning usage philosophies), we miss the fact that some highly motivated, darkly political, loveless humans who run private ai companies are being enriched and emboldened at our expense. Many people won't declare their use of ai in creative work because the ability to profit from it is high and declaring it might diminish the product in the eyes of others. In this, there seems to be a complex relationship between the tool, the output, labour, time, ego, and perception. Anti-ai pushback is shaping the narrative around declaring its use in creative projects. I'd like to think there’s some level of guilt in those who use it heavily that explains their unwillingness to declare it, but I have doubts. It seems that the talentless and the shallow-minded are often those most attracted to generative ai (vapid politicians looking for buckets of ai investment money too). After all, taste and the profit motive don’t always go together well.
We best be prepared for the flood, because that's what we face - a flood of art poverty, surveillance, deepfakes, fake propaganda, and deceit. Those who continue to say that there's no going back may be right, but in the same breath they'll also talk about productivity gains, optimisation, and profits. And to me, this talk of possible infinite profits is what seems to drive so much of the pro-ai conversation. A tool it may be, a meta-tool, but show me a brush or a hammer or a bicycle that also has such intimate ties to surveillance capitalism and trillionaires with dark political motivations.
Some days, I think what's happening is that a bunch of socially stunted, sci-fi obsessed, unlovable nerd sociopaths have convinced the world that automating everything is the future. They believe that everything is code, or can be reduced to code, and should be treated as such - optimised, made efficient, automated. The thin end of this wedge seems intimately related to capitalism: automate to generate products and profits - skip the hard work and make things easy. And do it all while paying a subscription fee to ChatGPT, endlessly.
What rarely seems to be discussed is the messiness of life - the approaches to life that aren't about efficiency or optimisation or being productive. Sunsets, the mystery and fragility of life on a lonely blue planet, the imperfect vaults of human memory that show us a glimmer of ecstasy when we smell an old old scent from childhood, that feeling of the numinous when a poem from centuries ago connects with us. We can reduce everything to code. We can flatten life to a database ingested by bots. There’s useful efficiency in that sometimes. But it's not something we need everywhere, and I fear that the beat of this drum leads only to trillionaire pockets and an algorithmic future.
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