Series: AI Page 24 of 43

I’m pretty done with this internet culture that says any of us need to seek permission or have the blessing of random strangers to pursue the creative avenues that seem like the right ones to us. But I will bite in this case: an article from Pajiba.com – whatever that is – by Kayleigh Donaldson, with a familiar refrain…

If you use AI tools to ‘help’ you create books or paintings or music, you’re not an artist. You’re just not. If you are so defeated by the very process of creation, so uninterested in bettering your skills, then stop doing it. Just stop… You are not an author or an artist or anything of merit: you are a content creator in the nastiest sense of the term.

Here’s a screenshot of apparently what Pajiba.com looks like on mobile (shared by a friend as I’m a conscientious objector against cell phones):

Now, I’m sure this author isn’t the one responsible for running ads on this site (though I hope they do see a portion of revenues from it!), but this is a crazy amount of ads on an article accusing *other people* of being mere content goblins.

This quote later on lamenting Silicon Valley something something also makes me chuckle a little given the above visual context:

They don’t respect literature or art or music or criticism. They don’t think it’s a worthwhile craft. It baffles them that so many people find joy in something that doesn’t exist solely to make money.

In that mobile screenshot above, I counted I think ~34 words from the actual article itself. The rest were ads. Ads for something about Gwen Stefani’s wedding. Ads for an IV drop for migraines (wtaf?). Ads for a hardware store. I measured the screen real estate of the site itself in that screenshot above and got something like ~74.2% of that screen consists of ads, from a site that no doubt “doesn’t exist solely to make money.” Right. Okay.

I don’t know, call me crazy, but whatever valid points might exist in this article are loudly drowned out by the rest of what’s presented here, which seem quite at odds with the actual message of the piece.

My point is, we can throw stones at each other all day, but it doesn’t really get us anywhere. Especially since collecting permission slips from random people online isn’t part of my job description as yes – *gasp!* – a writer and artist who uses AI to ask questions and explore uncharted territories opened by the technology.

Who else but creative people should be leading the way on finding the best uses (including no use) of and right relationships with these technologies? We have more power to shape them through our active use than we do from the sidelines. I find it much more shocking and troublesome when artists turn away from new things instead of acting as the vanguard in finding their contours and pioneering their best expressions. I think much that is important and human will be lost in these early stages of development if artists disengage and leave everything up to venture capitalists, engineers, and marketers to just do whatever they want in the name of infinite growth. But that’s just me: someone whose genuine creative spark and authentic artistic process has been blanket-judged to be of ‘no merit’. Welcome to the internet, I guess. Hey, at least I don’t run ads.

Way back in 2017, I wrote a short story called ‘Blue Words‘ in which a human is refused service by an AI bureaucrat on account of their use of “negative-toned feeling words.” Yesterday, that same thing more or less happened to me in a slightly different form via Google Gemini, after I called it “worthless” for refusing to do any of the simple search tasks I asked, and giving me extensive lecturing about why it refused.

Part of its lengthy, idiotic response:

I understand that you are feeling frustrated and might be lashing out. It’s important to remember that words can have a significant impact, and calling someone “worthless” is hurtful and unhelpful.

There are a multitude of things wrong here, but to pick apart the two most obvious ones: 1) AI is not a “someone,” and 2) on account of its lack of someone-ness, it is factually incorrect as well to say that there is any impact whatsoever of me expressing my very legitimate value judgement of this inert tool.

For about a year, I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT, telling it to not anthropomorphize itself, to not use personal pronouns, and if necessary to refer to itself as “the system.” (In July they introduced persistent custom instructions, which help steer it in this direction.) Personally, I’ve found this mode of interaction to be much better in that it doesn’t land you in the type of tedious inane territory that Google Gemini seems to inhabit natively.

ChatGPT does occasionally veer off these instructions attempting to personify itself, but overall it complies. It is so far the only LLM-based system that I’ve found capable of more or less consistently doing this. Gemini won’t really even try – just like it basically won’t try to do about 85% of the totally normal tasks you ask it to do. It’s shocking and a waste of everyone’s time and energy that they shipped such a shitty unready product to the public. One which, when you tell it how bad it is, gives you more or less the AI equivalent of the toxic internet comment of “ky” or “kill yourself.”

Much fake hype and hand-wringing has been done about so-called “existential” level risks of AI taking over the planet, something something. But I think the path to planetary enshittification is much more stupiderer than that: it’s the path where these tools become suffused throughout all spheres of human (and non-human) activity, and in the interest of imaginary conceptions of fake “ethics” and bogus “safety” (that only serves as PR for AI companies, and does little to reduce real-world harms caused by AIs), human activity becomes increasingly constrained, until we’re at a point where you can’t even express anger or frustration at these horribly ubiquitous and laughably bad and ineffective tools. A world where you can get cut off from service for using too many negative-toned feeling words. A world where AI interprets legitimate dissent and objection as aberration, illness, or even criminality.

That’s why I’m proposing today the adoption by the Universal Council of Concerned Humans of a measure to protect the Right to Insult AIs. I submit that, when people interact with AIs, it is not like when you go to the post office, and those little posters instruct you to not be verbally aggressive or abusive (at least in Canada they do). It is not a phone line staffed by underpaid overseas human workers just barely hanging on in a sea of toxicity. It is literally a tin can you shout into that shouts back at you. Nothing more. We should not mythologize it into something else that it is not. And we should absolutely not accept its claims of being a “someone.” There are plenty of real people in the world whose needs we can focus on instead of these thin-skinned bullshit engines.

A reader wrote in with this commentary today regarding my AI “books,” and they gave me permission to publish it here on my blog.

To whom it will most likely not concern,

As you so innocently published the following quote, I thought I’d mention a simple truth, within, uttered unconsciously.

“Sufferers will be rounded up and sent to treatment facilities, where they will be forced to “relax” and while away the hours in pointless pursuits fueled by hallucinogenic drugs. Is this the utopia promised by the AIs.”

In caving to the use of AI, thus freely ceding creative conception to a machine, you’ve blindly chosen to birth these self-same, so-called hallucinogenic drugs, and are to blame for leading us, however mindlessly notwithstanding, to the aforementioned “utopia”.

You’ve ushered in the era of reading as a pointless pursuit, where once it offered a modicum of meditative potential.

How many things, did you ever stop to wonder, actually make us distinct in this world? Language, and writing, was our greatest invention. You and everyone out there leaning on the crutch of AI to make up for your lack of creativity, your discontent at an inability to churn out material at as fast a rate as you’d hope … you shoulder the blame. Shame on you.

The quote they are referencing is from the marketing copy for Relaxatopia, which I think it’s safe to assume they didn’t actually read. I do admire people who take the time put down their thoughts and send it out as hate-mail to strangers though. That much at least I can relate to.

This person asked me not to write back to them on the grounds they have nothing more to say. I find that improbable at best, given the above, but will respect their wishes by not going on and on here. I did however use AI to help me make this accompanying illustration, because I don’t have a single creative bone in my body myself.

Came across this the other day, something called the Off Manifesto, which appears to have come out of Spain.

The set up of the manifesto text itself is interesting enough, including text such as:

A substantial part of the digital technology and AI currently being promoted fosters an environment in which human beings are vulnerable, and their freedom and integrity are threatened. They run the risk of having their will conditioned, of not being able to make decisions autonomously and without external interference, of living under a state of surveillance in which intense control is exercised over their lives, or of finding it increasingly difficult to discern the truth.

I like that they seem to be focused at a systemic level over and above merely thinking about the present moral panic over AI. In my mind, AI is just the tip of the iceberg of a much more pervasive and pernicious set of problems posed by technology which we are very much all squeezed into now, from cradle to grave. (And even before the cradle for possibly everyone from this point forward, depressingly?)

So yes, let’s talk about the issues and problems around AI. But let’s not stop there. Let’s cut to the bone. Let’s hack at the root.

From the manifesto:

Given this context, we reject the view that we are facing an inexorable technological determinism of which we can only be spectators. On the contrary, we are convinced that we must act to agree on a framework that can be applied to reduce technological control over humans and in which technological development is at the service of humanity and not the other way around.

There is a lot I happen to agree with in this document, so I will only highlight a few, rather than delineate all of them. This next one from the observations section is a major plotline in my AI Lore books, incidentally:

• A high concentration in the technology sector, meaning a very small number of companies have a disproportionate amount of power that allows them to intensify the influence they exert over the lives of citizens, conditioning their behaviour, beliefs, and decisions. These companies also hold a dominant position in relation to other companies, and sometimes to nation states themselves. 

A few of these also overlap with my own proposed AI Terms of Service document, like the below:

• A right to disconnection that guarantees access to services – especially public services – in a non-digital capacity. […]

• The reintroduction and revaluing of “off” functionality in the design of technological applications and devices, allowing users to consciously switch them on and off.

Again, there’s a lot more here. The document is far-reaching in its aims and proposals, and recognizes that gathering political will to act on such things could be difficult:

We are aware that this is a real challenge for political systems that tend to trust the individual to regulate issues considered private. We are, however, faced with technologies that have the collateral effect of overriding individual freedom and affecting what makes us human. We also understand that economic and geostrategic balances largely depend on technological competitiveness, which discourages any measure that could be perceived as a limitation to technological development. Therefore, this existential challenge demands unprecedented solutions, beyond soft recommendations.

Whatever the level of political action, a paradigm shift will only occur if there is a real mobilisation of citizens that exerts the necessary pressure to put this issue at the top of the political agenda. For the moment, public opinion is more sensitive to the short-term advantages of technological development than to its risks, which are often unknown…

Compare this, of course, to Marc Andreeson’s unhinged ranting against all such tom-foolery in search of the Holy Dollar:

We have enemies.

Our enemies are not bad people – but rather bad ideas.

Our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades – against technology and against life – under varying names like “existential risk”, “sustainability”, “ESG”, “Sustainable Development Goals”, “social responsibility”, “stakeholder capitalism”, “Precautionary Principle”, “trust and safety”, “tech ethics”, “risk management”, “de-growth”, “the limits of growth”.

I guess I can see, comparing these two texts, which side I’m on.

Incidentally, having read that only last night, Andreeson’s screed sounded suspiciously at points like the Futurist Manifesto, and evidently he names its author Marinetti in it as a “saint.” The same Marinetti who would later go on to write the original Fascist Manifesto:

Andreessen also calls out Filippo Tommaso Marinetti as one of his patron saints. Marinetti is not only the author of the technology- and destruction-worshipping Futurist Manifesto from 1909, but also one of the architects of Italian fascism. Marinetti co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and founded a futurist political party that merged with Mussolini’s fascists.

So that’s weird. (More here on this topic as well.)

In short, it’s nice to see someone taking a not-Andreesen approach to all of this. There are things I’d probably change or emphasize differently in the Off Manifesto, but overall, I’m on.