I have dabbled with melodrama my whole life. There’s this Instagram post my wife always reminds me of where I’m looking out of the window, pulling down one of the blinds. I gave it some subtitle to the effect of, “Not sure why, but I really enjoy melancholic songs. I guess it’s because of my melancholy side, haha.”
It’s okay. You can laugh.
No, you can’t find the post anymore. And no, please don’t ask my wife about it, because she still has the screenshot.
Humans are weird. We’re brilliant, and stupid, and full of intent, and lacking any direction, and sometimes selfless, but mostly self-absorbed. We love to create, and love to critique the creations of others. It’s a wonderful, awful cycle that both helps us all improve far faster than without it, yet also hinders many a hand from even trying to create at all.
I have always loved the process of creating. The pitching of ideas, the mixing bowl, and the feeling when you realize you have to turn the whole table around, toss all the ideas away, because you’ve just found a diamond in the heaping pile of trash you’ve been churning out.
When I was young, my sister and I made up stories with our stuffed animals. We called them the “Power People” (like the Power Rangers, but don’t tell us that), and they had gems that, when collected, gave them super forms, called the “Power Stones” (like Chaos Emeralds, but don’t…well, you get the point). We played for hours, sure that one day, we’d make a television series about them, and it would go viral, and we could share all these wonderful stories. We even made a theme song.
Now it’s little more than a silly story we told at each other’s weddings. There’s something sad in there, but more than anything, it’s human.
Those stories…those posts, those thoughts, they’re all fragments of the people we are today. Part of the immense compost that fuels the stories I write, the way I act, the way I run campaigns and the sort of stories I’ll make up for my son at bedtime. And that’s beautiful.
Humans, in all their broken, silly, frustrating, violent ways, are special. Invaluable, I would say, because of the importance we were invested with by God.
And so we come to my point: I hate generative AI. Granted, predictive AI has immense uses. And I’m not trying to say that an algorithm that is able to recognize and generate patterns is inherently evil. But generative AI, I believe, is making us stupider minute by minute, message by message. Not because of what it is fundamentally, but because of how we’re using it.
But I’m just a software engineer. I, too, am incentivized to use it in my work. I’ve used it for my personal projects to create poorly-architected writing software (no predictive AI tools included, though), thrown plot and scientific ideas at it just to see what it would say, asked it to balance an 11-moon system for a planet.
During an RPG campaign I was running in the world of Mistborn, I used it to generate pictures of my NPCs and player characters (something I have grown more and more ashamed of over the years). I thought it was going to be the future. I thought it was a wonderful tool for creatives to embrace. That it would “enable” us.
It’s doing the exact opposite.
Generative AI is not the “great equalizer”. It does not provide the tools that imaginative people have long been awaiting, nor does it give us access to the building blocks we’ve needed. You might look at AI, as I did, and think, “maybe it could edit my story for me”, or some such. “I just need one more idea.” or even, “just a paragraph. Just another asset. Just this one new product idea, and I’ll be able to stand on my own.”
It’s a slippery slope, and one that AI (and its creators) are trying desperately to shepherd you over.
You’ve heard this. You’ve probably read articles about the same thing: people raging against AI. Speaking up against the pandemic that’s quietly spreading through our ranks. Slop, splashed against our screens, bloating our phones, eating our minds.
Call it melodrama. I certainly did. But the more I hear friends wanting to churn out some masterpiece using AI, or when my wife and I mistook an AI-generated song for something real, the more an intense hatred grows in my gut.
I’d rather be radically human than apathetically not.
Recently, I’ve realized a good way to summarize the sort of answers you’ll get from AI: the consensus. It’s trained, after all, on hundreds of millions of text responses, videos, pictures, that the web has broadcast. It’s a conglomerate of the internet and all our insanity.
But if you’ve ever tried to create (which, please, I encourage you to), you know that many times, the greatest works are powerfully counter-cultural. The greatest stands humanity has made are not ones we all nod to and say, “Yeah, that’s good.” They’re not ones that we, as a human race, have agreed upon.
They’re ones that fly in the face of everything we’ve believed. They challenge us, call us higher. Break down our beliefs because they understand us, because they’ve walked the dark roads we’ve tread.
Fundamentally, artificial intelligence is trained to do the exact opposite. Now, you could ask it to “challenge the norm,” and it will try to pull from examples that do that. But all the material it has, everything it has to work with, is the equivalent of taking every book in the Library of Babel with a Gaussian blur on top.
It has access to inconceivable amounts of human knowledge. But it can’t replace being human. The minds that spurred that knowledge: the nonsense and insanity, the late nights, the alcohol and drugs, being on the ledge, being on the mountaintops; it can’t comprehend. It’s impossible. AI does not “understand”. It does not sympathize, or value, or stand by anything. It is a machine trained to keep you invested, and to tell you what you want to hear (even if that thing is, as you’ve asked, challenging).
It can’t pull you back from the brink. It’s not human. And being human…well, it’s the one really valuable thing we have going for us.
I’ve ranted a lot here. I don’t have some breakthrough, or some new statistic that will prove why AI is bad for you. But I do know that when we lend the thinking to someone else, we do less of it ourselves. When we let it make art, what we’re left with is the mundane. When we rely on it for justification, for validation, we tune out the alarm bells shouting from those around us. When we dwell in the fiction, in the consensus, we lose all semblance of reality.
When we give AI the task of doing the things that are expressly human, what is there left for us?
Go outside. Write a poem. Paint a picture (even if it’s a bad one, and you can “only draw stick figures”). Reclaim the deeply human arts that were never ours to give up in the first place.
Don’t let AI do the living for you.