My friend and fellow Resnick Award nominee Jason Boyd sent me this Penny Arcade comic from a few days ago:
That last panel… woof.
(As a side note, I’ve actually met Jerry Holkins in person. I think that if you spend enough time in tabletop gaming stores in Seattle he will just make himself manifest. As I recall, he was buying Age of Sigmar figurines.)
Aside from the perils posed by the other issue discussed in that last panel (I speak as someone who has, on occasion, consumed a wee bit too much of humanity’s favorite recreational hydrocarbon), there’s a lot to be said about the act of “creation” under AI that I still have a lot of thoughts about. As far as I can tell, the proponents of AI-based “writing” tools seem to have this belief that the reason writers write is to have a salable produce at the end of it – that the point of writing is to have written. In this worldview, books and stories are entirely fungible, and the act of creation is a burdensome chore. Think of how much time you’ll have, they imply, now that the boring writing part is out of the way!
I think that, all things considered, if I had more time to write, I would probably spend that time writing.
Perhaps I should view this narrow, ultracapitalist view of artists and creation as sad, or reprehensible. But I mostly find it confusing. For people who make tools that are ostensibly intended to help artists, I wonder if these tech bro AI proponents have actually ever interacted with an artist in any meaningful way. Or, perhaps, do they only socialize with other brogrammers in their spare time, and their worldview is so warped by that tiny echo chamber?
This is largely the same reason why I don’t argue with fundamentalist Christians. Not because I think that they’re right, but because it would be impossible. The parameters by which our worldviews operate are so fundamentally different that communication couldn’t exist between us. In order for a discourse to occur, there has to be some kind of consensual reality that we can use as a basis. Otherwise, it would be like trying to discuss which pizza topping is best, only to learn halfway through an increasingly heated argument that when your interlocutor says pizza, they mean small cherrywood box filled with decorative painted thimbles from the Scandinavian region. There is an inherent incompatibility that becomes impossible to overcome.
If you see nothing fundamentally different between a book written by a human and a hundred thousand words of Markov-chain generated text, maybe AI writing tools are a good idea to you. I suppose they both contain letters and words, and can be held in a .doc file. But if that’s the case, then you must genuinely believe that there is no difference between a human and a Markov-chain computer program, and when you’ve reached that point, our universal parameters are so contradictory that communication between us is impossible.
~ Ian (listening to Spine by Myrkur)
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