When something seems to bother me an inordinate amount, I like to see it as an opportunity for self-reflection.  I ask myself just why it is that the thing bothers me so much?  What nerve is it touching and why is that a nerve for me?

I remember my first brush with social media websites all the way back in the olden times of MySpace.  By the time MySpace launched, I had already been online in one way or another for a decade.  I had built a bunch of personal websites and I was proto-blogging at sites like LiveJournal.  Somebody told me about this new site and I checked it out and it felt…  off.  Like taking a sniff from a bottle of milk that is just beginning to sour.  I did not feel compelled and, in truth, I didn’t want to use the site because of that initial gut reaction.  It took milliseconds for my brain to construct a picture of a future in which people didn’t make their own quirky expressions of creativity on their own websites but rather they just dumped themselves into a pre-existing mold, a templated website that collected all the ephemeral human content into a nice pen where it could be commodified and corralled and monetized.  I am not retroactively crediting myself with more foresight than I actually possessed. I had been a technology professional for a decade, and an enthusiast before that.  I had read all sorts of books about future directions of networks and technology.  I had been on closed community silos like AOL and CompuServe before I ever even heard the word “internet”.  I knew what I was looking at the moment I saw it and I didn’t like it.  It seemed like a harbinger of the end of the wild wild web.

Which, of course, it was.

I did put a few songs up on MySpace, at the urgings of others, but I felt really irritated by the ask.  I didn’t want to be in a silo, my songs were already available on my own site, and it seemed like an imposition to have to participate in this new stupid thing or else risk being completely outside of the social sphere.

Then, of course, it all got even worse.  People started prodding me to join some new site called Facebook.  Which I did.  And I hated.  And I unsubscribed from immediately.  And then people prodded me again and I did, again.  And then I got a “poke” and I immediately unsubscribed again which of course didn’t last.  Everything about the core idea behind “social media” sites and apps felt like an attempt to corral us all together in order to advertise at us and turn us from free thinking, free range, homo sapiens into a manageable network of predictable marketing demographics.

Which, of course, it is.

It was clear from day one that this new paradigm of social silos was going to create a flood of change that would almost entirely erase the antediluvian world of self-hosted websites, GeoCities pages, quirky web forums, webrings, and nutball creativity that had flourished on the web prior to their arrival.  No more would Mahir kiss you, no more would there be another Zombo.com to fulfill your every dream, it was time to monetize, monetize, monetize the web and it’s webdom.

I hated this shift.

I hated it because it was anti-creative.

I hated it because it was addictive.

I hated it because it was bad for relationships and society at large.

I hated it because it enforced a grid of conformity on human expression.

I hated it because it was closed and proprietary.

I hated it because it was antithetical to the entire concept of the internet in which information wants to be free and standards of interoperability need to be OPEN.

Nothing that has happened in the ensuing decades has changed my mind in the slightest.  The tingling of my spidey senses the first time I saw MySpace have been absolutely confirmed in every horrifying detail.

The web is a wasteland of low traffic, mostly ignored, little watering holes like this blog here that sit outside in the lonely dark while the majority of humanity spends their waking moments funneling their photos, videos, comments, relationships, experiences, hopes, dreams, ambitions, and souls into a tiny handful of dopamine dispensing closed-silo apps that are designed to aggregate humanity into big piles for ease of commercial exploitation.

But that’s old news.  The new news is the new thing that is tingling my spidey senses again.  “AI”.

My spidey sense about AI has been ringing louder and louder for a couple of years now.  It’s not for the reasons every techno-utopian seems to want to talk about.  They talk about the fear of a global super-intelligence arising or us “losing control” of the tech, big science fiction fears, and they then tell us all about how this tech will actually solve all of our problems, solve climate change, let us live forever, blah blah blah.  The people developing this technology, pushing this technology, are talking about it in the same glowing terms that they have previously talked about crypto, smartphones, virtual reality, and all sorts of other tech.  In every single case, the technology has arrived, disrupted, been incorporated into our lives to one degree or another, and proceeded to deliver on about 10% of the amazing world-changing life improvement that was promised.  Remember when Siri or Alexa or “Hey Google” were going to change your lives in so many ways and everybody got a smart speaker and now the only thing the technology gets used for is to reply to a text message hands free while driving?  Would that change if they were smarter?  Would you have an in-car conversation with an LLM instead of listening to the radio?  Would that make your life better in any way?

The fact is that an LLM can have a human like conversation and it has a lot of information to back it up but it’s not an enjoyable conversation.  It is boring.  A generative image pooper can make 25 images of a pretty lady in the time it takes to type “make me 25 images of a pretty lady” but they are all boring.  A song generator can create three country songs that sound just like Shania Twain in response to a single prompt for a “make me a country western song about my cat” but they are all boring too.  It’s all boring because there is no “there” there.  If you like the song, can you go see the artist play live, learn about their lives, relate to their story?  Nope, there is no artist.  AI creations are hollow, they mean nothing.  They are not art, they are content.

Why on earth would I as a sentient being want to have a conversation with an echo box beyond (maybe) asking it for directions?  Why would I want to contemplate a machine-generated video or image?  There is no meaning there, no creative choices were made, no intentionality is expressed.  It can’t be beautiful even to the level that a child’s crayon drawing can be beautiful.  It can’t even be ugly in an interesting way.  It’s just pixels.

This is a shallow critique and I realize it is not really what’s bothering me, when I probe my own thoughts a bit deeper.  The core thing that’s bothering me is that generators are already teaching people to short-circuit the creative process and in so doing, removing about 99% of the value of creating to the person themselves, never mind the end product.

Here is what I mean by this.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I sit down to write about it with the hope that by doing so I might be able to put into words what I am feeling.  I journal, I think, I take a break after 20 minutes and go sit and drink a cup of coffee and stare out the window, pet my dog, meditate, eat an apple.  An hour later my thoughts have crystalized a bit.  My first thoughts have been flushed and my second thoughts have come to the fore.  I have discovered a way to say what I’m feeling and I have written something in the process, a creative piece, but I don’t share it with anybody, no matter how beautifully written it may be.  The point of the exercise was the personal process.  It wasn’t about output, it was about personal exploration.  The technology required to go through this process?  A notepad.  A writing utensil.  A cup of coffee.  An apple.  A canine.  People have done this for millennia.  This is creativity even if nobody ever reads it.  This is a practice, a process.

That night I go to sleep and my mind processes the days inputs during REM sleep, I have vivid dreams in which pieces of my past and present intermingle in unexpected ways.  When the alarm clock goes off, I’m engaged in a conversation that I don’t want to leave.  Something important is about to be said.  But the dream dissipates after the second hit of the snooze button and I wake up to feed the dog and make a pot of coffee.  Images from the dream linger in my mind, snatches of words, I head straight to the notepad again and write it down before it burns off like morning fog.  As I write the words start to transform from prose into poetry.  Pretty soon I’m writing metaphorically, I’m making allusions, I’m finding something new to say that I didn’t even know I wanted to say.  My subconscious processes have combined with my creative practice and now new perspectives are being found, I’m thinking laterally, I’m less sad, and something is emerging.  It has a sound, it has a color, it has a shape, it has a smell.

Then, snap, I hear a symphony in my mind.  There is a song, the words are there, I’m plugged back into my subconscious, the process, the practice, the persistence, they have led me to a creative moment that feels like it comes from somewhere out in the sky, like I’m channeling something, I’m just writing it down.  The lyrics and melody and structure of the song are all there, I’m just transcribing them.  I write the last line of the last verse and I sit back feeling giddy and a little high although I never managed to get to the coffee cup.  It feels like magic.  It feels supernatural.  I can understand why people believe in god.

After this magical moment, I have a choice.  I can stop there.  I can keep the art to myself, hum the song when I want, it’s mine, it’s personal, it’s uniquely a product of my experiences, my practice, my process, my brain, my feelings, my heart.  I could keep it, nothing wrong with that.  But, I also have the option to share it.  I could take the time to create a representation, to polish the rough edges, to refine the words, maybe expand the song structure, spend hours, days, weeks, crafting a representation of the song so I can share it with others in case, in so doing, those other people will resonate with it.  That takes a lot of work.  Technical work.  Craft work.  Artisan work.  But it’s also social work.  Maybe the song is beyond my ability to play.  Maybe I hear a violin part and I don’t play the violin so I have to involve a friend who plays violin.  I need a drummer and a piano player, I have friends who do that.  We spend time in the studio together, we collaborate on the song.  They resonate with it and bring some of their own perspectives, their own thoughts and feelings, their own musical riffs and ideas.  As the song is born, multiple voices are brought in, it connects minds and hearts in the very act of crafting the work.

I am months beyond that initial restless feeling at this point.  I am now sitting in a recording studio with a bass guitar trying to get through a couple of takes without any flubs and listening to the song via playback and, between takes, I am suddenly hit by just how COOL this is.  How something I was feeling that I didn’t even have a name for was now this THING that didn’t exist before and this THING is not just the resulting 5 minutes of audio, it’s everything involved in getting to this point.  The journaling, the dreaming, the moment of inspiration, the choice to share, the crafting, the collaborating, and then, at the end there are two things.  There is a creative journey and there is a song.  When I listen to the song, I relive the journey.  During the journey, I have grown as a person.

Art isn’t merely the song.  Art is also the process that leads to the song.  Art is the practice of introspection, the use of creative tools of expression as tools to explore experiences, and the continual commitment to personal exploration and growth.  The song is the tip of a very large iceberg that the listener never sees but it is the process of living with an artistic practice, writing, painting, music, whichever language the artist uses, that enriches the life of the artist.

Let’s now compare this experience, one I have had countless times over the course of my creative life, and compare that to “AI” based “creativity”.

Let’s just say I am feeling something.  I am sleeping badly.  I’m angry when I have no obvious reason to be.  I’m sad and I don’t know why.  I try to use an LLM-based therapy bot app which gives me some emulated empathy and regurgitated and remixed self-help information and suggestions but I feel pretty much the same and I’m no closer to understanding why or transforming those emotions into anything.  I decide to write about it on my computer and the AI assistant starts suggesting what it thinks I might want to say, rewriting my raw thoughts into something “better” but it no longer sounds like me and the whole exercise is getting me no closer to any sense of self-discovery.  I’m being course-corrected and guided towards the statistical norm, pushed to the hump of the bell curve by an inscrutable algorithm that is trained on the collectively homogenized writing of every text every human has published online.  I give up and spend an hour doomscrolling.

I sleep badly, I can’t remember if I had any dreams or not.  I feel like shit the next morning.  I heard about this cool new AI music generator while doomscrolling before bed.  I install the app and I type in “make an angry song about being confused about my life” and it generates three options.  The lyrics are angry.  The songs sound like a cover band that are playing familiar songs from faulty memories, accidentally morphing them into new songs that seem oddly familiar although they are not exactly bangers.  Still, it’s amusing, for a minute.  I am impressed by how “realistic” the result is.  I click regenerate a few times to hear the variants until I like one a little better than the others and I pat myself on the back for “creating a song”.  I click a button that shares it with other users of the platform.  I go pour myself a bowl of cereal, I’m still angry, two days from now I will forget this ever happened and I will still feel like shit.

I have successfully avoided the journey, I have made a “professional” sounding song without growing, without crafting, without any personal benefit.  It’s like showing up at the trailhead of a 2000 mile hiking trail, taking a selfie with the sign, and then taking a helicopter to the end of the trail and taking a selfie with the other sign as a method to experience the trail.  Is it faster?  Sure.  Does it serve you in the same way?  Absolutely not.

This is the concern that really gets to me.  I worry about people taking this shortcut because it’s so ubiquitous, so pervasive, that it never occurs to them that they are shorting themselves, stunting their own growth.  Creative practice deepens your understanding of yourself. Creative collaboration creates powerful interpersonal connections. Being “bad” at writing, painting, playing the guitar, singing, sculpting, or poetry is not a sin that needs to be “corrected” by a computer, it’s merely a stage in learning.  Some of the best art in terms of humanity, relatability, and resonance is raw, unpolished, unprofessional, voices cracking, colors blurry, message unclear.  When a pitch corrector “fixes” my singing, it’s no longer really my voice.  When an LLM “fixes” my prose, they are no longer really my words.  When an image or audio generator creates, from whole cloth, the thing I ask for from a prompt, none of that is actually me.  No wonder it feels beige, benign, hollow, dull, polished but pointless.  If this is the way of the future, people taking shortcuts to create digital artifacts that are shiny but vapid, the artistic equivalent of cotton candy, and real creative process is considered to be too hard, too slow, too cumbersome, and too inefficient, well, that’s just a fucking tragedy.  For the creators themselves.  I fail to see how it is possible to reap the benefits of creative work if you don’t actually do any creative WORK.

My advice to anybody who thinks they want to be creative is to be very mindful about how/if you make use of these tools because you might find that they become a barrier to actual creativity, a substance-free substitute for being an artist, finding your own voice, and inhabiting a creative process.

I’m honestly struggling to see an upside to generative LLM-based technologies.  The further we get from living in real space with each other, working in real space with each other, and interacting in real time with each other, the lonelier we get, the sadder we get, the more disconnected and fragile we feel.  Now tech companies are going to augment this reality with these digital simulacrums of intelligence that try to trick us into feeling less alone and give us the ability to “create” without reaping any of the benefits of creating.  The obvious beneficiaries are the companies running the server farms that run the code that powers these “AI” products and the companies that sell information about us to each other so they can sell products to us.  Our human experience, our quality of life, our depth of personal understanding?  These are necessary grist for the mills of the algorithms but they are also being starved by the very technologies that rely on them.

We are already seeing the beginning of a sort of “AI” Ouroboros, with new models being trained on the output from previous models, trending towards a polished mediocrity, a sort of bland vanilla soft-serve of images, audio, video, and text that has no ability to inspire, to infuriate, or to improve us.  Actual humans must continue to sit with actual feelings and do actual creative practice.  They must share this with each other in real life, in real space, in the real world, in real time.  Actual creativity must continue, and it will, because humans are awesome.

My prediction: the trash flood that happened in the wake of the rise of social media was NOTHING like the trash flood that is coming for us now with this tech.  Pointless “art”, fake news and misinformation, the end of the internet being enjoyable in any way, shape, or form, integrated LLM bullshit in every tech product that cannot be disabled, and a never ending temptation to short circuit the creative process to get that sweet dopamine hit without doing all that pesky personal growth.

The 10% that is good that will come from this tech?  Smarter GPS route guidance.  Occasional useful suggestions when doing advanced technical tasks with lots of details (like writing software, for example).  Deeper understandings of how biochemistry works.  Better real time language translation between people who speak different languages.  There are, clearly, some very useful and helpful applications of this technology, but that’s not what is happening.  That’s not what is going to make big money for big tech companies.  They want pervasive “AI” everywhere because they have a lot of spare server cycles and stockholders to please. They want it to serve them and their commercial interests.

In his book “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” Marshall McLuhan argued that “the media is the message”.  In other words, that it is perhaps more important to focus on the medium by which something is expressed than on the message itself.  If the message is “Hello, Bob” and it is verbally uttered face to face that is different than if it were communicated via skywriting, or a letter in the mail, or an email, or broadcast on television, or by tattooing it on a body part.  The message is the same, the media is different, and the choice of media provides the all important context that makes the words mean whatever they mean to Bob.  The media is, in fact, the message.  If most of the messages in the future will be delivered via LLM/GA, those messages will feel hollow, untrustworthy, soulless, empty, bland, boring, and lazy.

My spidey sense says that this is going to be a net negative for our species and our general enjoyment of life.