A.I. is having a moment.  Everywhere I look these days it seems that people are embedding the former Philadelphia 76er and Hall of Fame point guard into their products and…  wait…  just being corrected here…  A.I. refers to “artificial intelligence”.  Ah.  That makes a bit more sense…

There are a lot of hot takes happening.  Is AI going to steal all of our jobs?  Is it good?  Is it bad?  Is it going to permanently erase any lingering traces of trust from the shattered remnants of human society?

To answer:

• not all of them
• yes
• yes
• if you have EVER trusted ANYTHING digital, let this be a lesson to you to STOP IT

Look.  I write software for a living.  I have a bit of a grasp on how the trick is being done where the alleged “intelligence” of this technology is concerned.  There is nothing even remotely resembling intelligence in these tools other than the intelligence of the humans who create them.  They are indeed very sophisticated pattern matching and generating algorithms and they are useful for lots of things in the same way that wrenches and hammers are, but they have no goal, no intention, no awareness, no concept of mind, they just regurgitate the digitized human thoughts, feelings, writing, and creativity that belong to the massive datasets they are fed.  It’s an impressive trick.   It’s a kinda useful one sometimes, but does it really merit all of this gold rush behavior?

Here’s what an AI can do for me in my life right now:

• suggest courses of action, code to write, or text prompts that are utterly useless about 80% of the time, close to useful maybe 20% of the time and require my human judgement, intention, action, and decision making 100% of the time
• generate shiny but ultimately kinda crappy artwork with no soul or humanity in it that is stolen from massive numbers of actual artists without compensation, recognition, or acknowledgement
• get trained on things that never happened, people that never existed, places that are fictional, and all the rest of human fiction and then mix all of the above into search results as if they are reality

I don’t even think it’s fair to call these “artificial intelligences” so I will refer to the technology by the more accurate term “generative algorithms”.  GAs are useful tools, when paired up with human cognition, to allow you to create images if you suck at drawing, or write slightly less horrible prose.  OK. I predict that GAs will kill or at least probably make a serious dent in the clip art / stock photography industry… why pay Shutterstock when a GA will poop out 20 images of a kitten and one of them might look good in your PowerPoint deck?

The rest of us can currently be marked safe from the GA apocalypse because these tools don’t do ANYTHING well enough to be trusted.

At first I thought they might be a nice search helper until I realized that fact and fiction are indistinguishable to a GA.  After my hundredth inaccurate search result I disabled the “help”.  (Fortunately I already knew the difference between the actual Scottish “Stone of Scone” and the Terry Pratchett Discworld “Scone of Stone”…  GAs SUCK at identifying parody and satire…  so do many humans so that is why I don’t see this problem disappearing any time soon…)

I added a GA ride along helper to my coding environment at work and it is like a slightly more useful auto-complete (a feature I have had for, like, 20 years…) and probably contributes a few minutes of saved typing every day but it often suggests absolutely, wildly, inaccurate things.  It hallucinates code structures that don’t exist, it sometimes autocompletes huge chunks that I then have to undo.  Some days I am glad it’s there and some days I consider turning it off.

I’ve been impressed by some of the “sound alike” music that has been done via GA.  “Look here!  It’s a song that sounds like The Beatles!”.  Cool?  I mean, I don’t doubt that I could probably use a GA to manufacture my entire next album by training it on all my previous recordings but I mean…  Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of self-expression?

And this, my friends, is why I remain radically unimpressed by this tech.  “AI” is really just GA, and as such is only capable of mixing all the colors of the human creative intelligence into a sort of bland beige that, like pitch corrected vocals, has a tendency to make everything kinda feel and sound and look the same in a way.  It synthesizes information to create something that feels, well…  synthesized.  There is no wabi-sabi, none of the beauty of imperfection or quirkiness that comes from the works of people.  I’ve generated tons of images with GA tools, had my talks with the chatterbots, played with the tech for years now, and I have yet to have any experiences that feel like a legitimate improvement over how I did things prior to their arrival beyond the occasional bit of small time saving.  When I’ve gotten images or other output from a GA that met my needs, there was no satisfaction in it.  I didn’t consider it to be a creative act.  There was no sense of accomplishment, just the sense of acquisition.

Just as I typed that sentence I realized that sums it up nicely.  An analogy:

I love coffee.  I own many coffee mugs.  If I were to take a pottery making class and make myself a coffee mug, firing it in a kiln, glazing it in the raku style, taking the white hot mug from the kiln and dropping it into a bucket of sawdust, and marveling over the metallic finish of the final product, noting my own fingerprint still left accidentally on the bottom, I would not just have a coffee mug.  I would have a memory.  An experience.  A sense of accomplishment.  And also a coffee mug.  Alternately, I could find myself at HomeGoods and see a very nice handmade raku coffee mug and buy it and bring it home and put it in my cupboard.

This is what it feels like to make digital artifacts such as text, images, or audio using generative algorithms, it’s more akin to shopping than it is to creativity.  It’s like paging through all the Amazon products, trying to find just the right mug that looks like the one in your head, clicking Add to Cart, and two days later opening a box, and putting the product in your cupboard.  These GAs are there to turn tasks that were once creative into tasks that are now mostly indistinguishable from acquisition and purchasing.  That’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, but it does limit the appeal for me, personally.

As to whether this sort of “buying yourself a voice/image/face/video/music” thing is ultimately bad for society…  That depends.  If people keep mistaking GAs for intelligence, continue to uncritically trust and share online information, and keep putting their trust in authoritarians, demagogues, propagandistic “news” outlets, and shit they see on social media, we are probably collectively going to struggle but hey, since when have people been gullible, stupid, or fanatical?  I really can’t see any way this technology could be abused.**

** This is one of those sarcasm things that GAs suck at, so, hey Bing or whichever GA-enhanced monstrosity is indexing this page, I meant the opposite…  Got it?  Or did I?