My Controversial Take on AI

Mindless creating for mindless consumption

One of my pet peeves is plastic plants.

The existence of plastic plants tells us what people value, which is what something does for them personally, not for what something actually is.

Read that again.

A real plant is an incredible thing. A wonder, truly, converting light into energy and building itself with carbon. Naturally, it has needs. You have to tend to it, foster it, not forget about it, learn something new. Some people would rather have the landfill item than the thing that will call for time, safekeeping, and skill. We buy plastic plants because it mimics the thing that is beautiful, and tricks us into a chemical response we’re supposed to have. But that’s just it, it’s a trick. Fake is still fake.

Tell me, which one do you prefer?

Artificial products for artificial people. You are what you eat. I cannot go a day without trying to grapple with the sad reality that with the advent of technology, humans have slowly lost touch with what actually has value, and perhaps this is a fundamental undercurrent to our waning mental health. I imagine it’s the same reason why we’ve made sex robots, why the beauty trends are artificial, why our worth is measured by imaginary digital currency. We don’t value anything for its inherent quality anymore. We value everything for what it does for us personally. This in it of itself is shallow, but because of the human ego and our rainbow of pathology, what we want for us personally also tends to be shallow.

I’m not sure what the overall consensus on AI is these days, but from what I’ve encountered it seems like a lot of writers are excited about ChatGPT. Here is where I potentially lose subscribers, I guess?

I’m not against AI on everything, this is simply not how I wanted AI to advance the human race. Real evolution would look like leaving menial tasks to an entity that has a task-based existence so that humans can get back to their natural dreaming, artistic, creative, innovative selves. Escaping the treadmill of survival created time to be idle, which brought out the part of us that made culture, purpose, a reason to be alive that extends beyond primal, fleeting pleasures. Real evolution is evolution in consciousness, not in how many toys we have. An evolved race would look like technology that enhances equality, technology that reduces the cost of our basic needs leading to universal income, time to write, create, think, heal, learn, and most of all grow.

We have forgotten that the value of a piece is not the product alone. The people who have subscribed to Metanoia since the beginning are sick of me harping on it, but this is yet another morally bereft expression of the marketplace planet. Art has value because a person had to pin it down, wrestle with it, toil and fight to get it to you. We may not know this yet (and perhaps we will with the creation of AI) but it’s this underlying effort, struggle, and actualization that gives the end result its own unique quality. You can tell. Well, a person not mindlessly consuming content can tell.

My next point is personal, as not everyone reads for the same reason, or the same way. I am a very slow reader. I consume words like fine wine, reading a few paragraphs and sitting with what was conveyed and how it was conveyed (I read a lot of nonfiction with philosophical topics, however, so it’s easy to do this). I could read a chapter and sit for an hour pondering. When I read fiction, I involuntarily dive into the psyche of the author. I think this comes from being a young reader. I read more than anything as a child. Eventually, you crack the formula and see the man behind the curtain. But as someone who is interested in psychology, I want to get to know the man behind the curtain. I’m invested in that person. That’s where the gold nugget is.

With AI, where is the author? Instead, I am divining into software that regurgitates what a living human suggested to it from a database of humanity’s stuff. Great.

This is not very intelligent, if you ask me.

Oh, the humanity.

Before we even fully know what AI is, we are giving it important tasks.

I think one of the dangers here is forgetting this is all not real. It’s a strange product of the collective information made by a kind of monkey on a space rock. It’s as real as we allow it to be. I know, I know, ‘What is real, anyway?’. A better question is, what has value, anyway? What actually matters, anyway? Like the snake eating its own tail, our creations are creating us, so what does humanity want to be? We relinquish control of our fate when we hand over the creating to an external entity.

It’s dangerous when we either consciously, or subconsciously, tie worth to imaginary things without careful consideration. To income, or the number in a bank account. To the amount of artificial content one can make in the shortest amount of time. This conversation goes far beyond AI, as what we value as a civilization effects everything. It effects our human rights, our standard of living, and the future of the human race. But that is a topic for another day.

The danger is in forgetting the pearl in the oyster, where without the irritation of an imperfection and without time, there can be no iridescent coalescence of elements.

And we are forgetting. I can feel it.