And Another Thing… AI Postscript
I thought I was done talking about The AI for a while after last week’s “Why is this Happening” trilogy (Part I, Part II, Part III,) but The AI wasn’t done with me just yet.
First, In one of those great coincidences, Ted Chiang has a new piece on AI in the New Yorker, Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art (and yeah, that’s behind a paywall, but cough).
It’s nice to know Ted C. and I were having the same week last week! It’s the sort of piece where once you start quoting it’s hard to stop, so I’ll quote the bit everyone else has been:
The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.
Intention is something he locks onto here; creative work is about making lots of decisions as you do the work which can’t be replaced by a statistical average of past decisions by other people.
Second, continuing the weekend of coincidences, the kids and I went to an Anime convention this past weekend. We went to a panel on storyboarding in animation, which was fascinating, because storyboarding doesn’t quite mean the same thing in animation that it does in live-action movies.
At one point, the speaker was talking about a character in a show he had worked on named “Ai”, and specified he meant the name, not the two letters as an abbreviation, and almost reflexively spitted out “I hate A. I.!” between literally gritted teeth.
Reader, the room—which was packed—roared in approval. It was the kind of noise you’d expect to lead to a pitchfork-wielding mob heading towards the castle above town.
Outside of the more galaxy-brained corners of the wreckage of what used to be called twitter or pockets of techbros, real people in the real world hate this stuff. I can’t think of another technology from my lifetime that has ever gotten a room full of people to do that. Nothing that isn’t armed can be successful against that sort of disgust; I think we’re going to be okay.