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.

And Another Thing: Pianos

I thought I had said everything I had to say about that Crush ad, but… I keep thinking about the Piano.

One of the items crushed by the hydraulic press into the new iPad was an upright piano. A pretty nice looking one! There was some speculation at first about how much of that ad was “real” vs CG, but the apology didn’t include Apple reassuring everyone that it wasn’t a real piano, I have to assume they really did sacrifice a perfectly good upright piano for a commercial. Which is sad, and stupid expensive, but not the point.

I grew up in a house with, and I swear I am not making this up, two pianos. One was an upright not unlike the one in the ad—that piano has since found a new home, and lives at my uncle’s house now. The other piano is a gorgeous baby grand. It’s been the centerpiece of my parent’s living room for forty-plus years now. It was the piano in my mom’s house when she was a little girl, and I think it belonged to her grandparents before that. If I’m doing my math right, it’s pushing 80 or so years old. It hasn’t been tuned since the mid-90s, but it still sounds great. The pedals are getting a little soft, there’s some “battle damage” here and there, but it’s still incredible. It’s getting old, but barring any looney tunes–style accidents, it’ll still be helping toddlers learn chopsticks in another 80 years.

My point is: This piano is beloved. My cousins would come over just so they could play it. We’ve got pictures of basically every family member for four generations sitting at, on, or around it. Everyone has played it. It’s currently covered in framed pictures of the family, in some cases with pictures of little kids next to pictures of their parents at the same age. When estate planning comes up, as it does from time to time, this piano gets as much discussion as just about everything else combined. I am, by several orders of magnatude, the least musically adept member of my entire extended family, and even I love this thing. It’s not a family heirloom so much as a family member.

And, are some ad execs in Cupertino really suggesting I replace all that with… an iPad?

I made the point about how fast Apple obsoletes things last time, so you know what? Let’s spot them that, and while we’re at it, let’s spot them how long we know that battery will keep working. Hell, let’s even spot them the “playing notes that sound like a piano” part of being a piano, just to be generous.

Are they seriously suggesting that I can set my 2-year old down on top of the iPad to take the camera from my dad to take a picture while my mom shows my 4-year old how to play chords? That we’re all going to stand in front of the iPad to get a group shot at thanksgiving? That the framed photos of the wedding are going to sit on top of the iPad? That the iPad is going to be something there will be tense negotiations about who inherits?

No, of course not.

What made that ad so infuriating was that they weren’t suggesting any such thing, because it never occurred to them. They just thought they were making a cute ad, but instead they (accidentally?) perfectly captured the zeitgeist.

One of the many reasons why people are fed up with “big tech” is that as “software eats the world” and tries to replace everything, it doesn’t actually replace everything. It just replaces the top line thing, the thing in the middle, the thing thats easy. And then abandons everything else that surrounds it. And it’s that other stuff, the people crowded around the piano, the photos, that really actually matters. You know, culture. Which is how you end up with this “stripping the copper out of the walls” quality the world has right now; it’s a world being rebuilt by people whose lives are so empty they think the only thing a piano does is play notes.