Artificially Intelligent, Authentically Ignorant
Author’s Note: I haven’t been using this Substack space for much fiction in recent entries, and I recognize that that means I’ve strayed fairly far afield of what I initially intended to use this outlet for. If you’re here primarily for my fiction, don’t be too worried, though, as I fully intend to return to providing some short stories and snippets of longer works soon enough. I’ve simply been doing some cleaning up and editing of a few projects I’ve worked on over the last year, in the hopes of slowly introducing them in this space periodically. However, between work, family, and multiple projects, it’s been difficult to nail down a regular schedule.
It’s my hope that this piece will at least be somewhat more thought-provoking than my last few grumble sessions, at the very least. Now, with that out of the way, let us get on with the show, as it were.-
For Starters
The science fiction genre of narrative has, for decades, brought to readers and viewers alike many strange visions of what the future might well hold for humanity, and for the existence of our world and universe as a whole. These imaginings have ranged from the idyllic and tranquil ‘vacation worlds’ of Star Trek and the works of Alan Dead Foster, to the tempest-tossed hellscapes of Harry Harrison’s ‘Deathworld’ novels and everything in between. We’ve seen queer aliens whose languages involve tiny physical movements and pheromone-riddled scents pushed into the space between speakers, androids so seemingly human that they are capable of physical/sexual reproduction, and once extinct bacteria or viruses that, due to human curiosity or flat out greed, make a splendid reappearance on the world stage, bent on our total destruction or subjugation to the mutants spawned through its infection of a given populace.
Cheery stuff, aye?
Among the more prevalent concepts introduced in the ‘golden age’ of sci-fi by such storytellers as Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry and Foster, we have recently seen a keen focus by the general populace on AI, or Artificial Intelligence. This focus is by and large compliments of real life engineers and computer scientists getting ever closer to creating a tangible equivalent of this once faraway daydream. Prototypes have been showing up in our online news feeds for the last couple of years and in online videos discussing the subject at great length, from simple chatbots to more complex LLMs (Language Learning Models), and most recently, we have seen the advent of text-based, image-based, and audio-based apps and programs standing at the very edge of what was once considered feasible. They come bearing titles such as ChatGPT, Bing chat AI (I don’t recall the name of the really, deeply disturbing one just at the moment), Stable Diffusion, and 11 Labs Voice Generator.
A shorter, simpler name for the paranoid types such as myself might be ‘Satan’.
You may wonder how genuine I am being in my hyperbole, and I assure you, I’m not being too over the top compared to my authentic level of concern. Just bear in mind as well that I’m no computer programmer, engineer, or really much of a scientist of any stripe. I have a fascination and familiarity with some basic physics, an appreciation for the finer points of chemistry (though none of the lab skills required to work in a professional setting), and a rabid will to learn anything I can about biology, be it plant or animal (or bacterial, disgusting though such information can sometimes get), sure, but none of that qualifies me as a keen scientific mind.
Conversely, I’m not going to sell myself short by throwing my hands up and claiming to have no idea at all how these AI-adjacent programs and applications function. Likewise, I’m going to quite loudly voice my concerns with the very notion of their continued development in the future, because like far more brilliant men and women before me, I believe warnings need to be issued regarding the concept of Artificial Intelligence. I’ll be approaching the subject not so much from the angle of such genius folks as Hawking, Kurzweil and Musk, however, but from the perspective of a creator and appreciator of the Arts. Yes, I capitalize that word, because collectively, they deserve that respect from us, I feel.
This is going to get into some deep wonkery, so I beg you in advance to be patient with me.
Scraping
Many of you are likely familiar with the old urban legend about a generic character referred to as ‘Hook Hand’, or ‘The Man With a Hood For a Hand’, a legendary drifter maniac with a sharpened hook for a replacement hand who stalks up on hapless adolescents making out in their cars in small towns, proceeding to mercilessly slaughter the horned up young folks partaking of the ritual of making the beast with two backs. Pure hokum, to be sure, and details usually differ from locale to locale, but one thing that remains the same in each telling that I’ve heard, is the concept that the victims hear the slow, grinding scrape of the hook along the side of the vehicle.
The word itself has an almost universally unpleasant connotation to it- scrape. It’s what we do with scraps and dried-on food stuck to bowls and plates, into the trash, in order to clean our dishes. It’s what we do to our tongues in order to help freshen our breath, removing unpleasant bacteria and flotsam from our mouths. We can get into one when engaging in fisticuffs in our youth with our rivals (if you’ve never heard the expression ‘got into a scrape’, then I weep for you, linguistically). We get them on our elbows, shins and knees constantly when playing outdoors in our youth, or if the carpeting in our homes is particularly rough when flailing about as kids. In short, it’s rarely a good thing.
What these algorithmic ‘learning’ programs do, by and large, is referred to as scraping, taking snippets and samples of information from the vast, seemingly limitless data available on the internet, and working out a way to regurgitate them in a new, unique or at the very least uncommon finished result on the screen before us. Research and academic papers have done this sort of thing for time out of mind, but students and researchers have always been expected, rightly so, I might add, to give reference to and name the sources from whence these tidbits have been gleaned in the realm of text. In visual arts, illustrators and visual artists almost universally give nod to the prior creators whose works influenced them, inspired them, or whose techniques they have attempted to adopt for themselves and adjust, adapt, or wholesale reproduce in order to complete their own works. In the arena of music, artists utilize ‘samples’, or name their favorite bands, the ones who got them interested in picking up an instrument and belting out a tune.
These apps and programs do no such thing, however. They scrape from any and every source their coding can interact with, and push out a finished product with nary a concern for whether or not what their product renders has in some way diminished or tarnished what came before. The app or program does not care, because, frankly, it can’t; it’s just a bunch of code.
Yes, Even They Are Artists
For reasons that even I cannot rightly put into words, I am still on Twitter. I know, it makes no good sense for me to be there, I’m not a well-known figure, I have almost zero cultural influence, so why in the name of all that is holy do I continue to go back there? Well, to be frank, I go mostly to follow some of my favorite authors, publishing houses, and a few modern day philosophers. Thanks to his ownership of the platform, I also end up seeing an awful lot of material from Elon Musk, as well.
About a week ago (based upon when I’m drafting this piece), Musk poked a well-dressed bear by jokingly positing that we should have AI design some fashion pieces, that there should be an entire show or line designed and produced using AI. Now, Musk has been raising the alarm about the dangers of rampant, out-of-control AI development and advancement for years, though it doesn’t seem to be doing much good. To see him suddenly joking about such a thing strikes me as speaking out of both sides of his mouth, however, and as foolish and useless a gesture as it is, I have twice replied to such gibes of his by pointing out that fashion designers, though most of them are elitist snobs who wouldn’t piss on the average person if they were on fire and such an act was the only way to help put them out, are a breed of Artist. Their canvas is fabric, and they frequently strike me as alarmingly out of touch with the realities of most workaday people, but they are Artists, nonetheless. I will stand to defend their endeavors, though it galls me to do so.
I don’t have much money or many material possessions to my name, but I have my family, my Art, and my principles. I’ll be damned if I’ll compromise any of them.
The men and women (mostly women) who work in the fashion industry would likely tell you that computer programs have indeed made a great deal of their work much easier to see realized in the marketplace. But if you were to ask them what they thought of the notion of such a series of code completely and utterly replacing them, I can’t imagine that you’d walk away from such an inquiry without feeling like the entire concentrated arctic freeze of the Antarctic had been concentrated on your very essence in the form of a stare or a remark spoken with a total absence of human inflection. The very few folks I’ve personally known involved in that world strike me as almost alien themselves, but at the end of the day, I know that they are as beautifully and imperfectly human as I am.
Is it Real? Or Memorex?
Readers, acquaintances and friends of mine will know of my deep appreciation and love for Stephen King’s “Dark Tower” series of novels, and my insistence upon occasionally quoting from it. There are a handful of internal dialogue moments throughout those novels wherein Eddie Dean and Jake Chambers find their thoughts beset by a kind of queer duality, and this catch phrase, ‘Is it Real? Or Memorex?’ a bit of marketing doggerel once employed by the maker of blank video cassettes for commercial purchase, plays out in their heads. Of particular note is when Eddie meets Andy, Messenger Robot, Many Other Functions in “Wolves of the Calla”, the fifth book in the series. This phrase passes over his mind because Andy, despite his being an automaton, strikes Eddie as having an uncanny depth of personality and character for a machine. The fact that later on we see (spoiler alert!) that the tin man is a duplicitous, murdering psychopath doesn’t help with the argument that AI can ever be trusted, so long as we’re careful about its development.
Just ask the good folks of the Calla how they feel about thinking machines, especially ones that look like Doombots…..
The sensation so artfully portrayed in this simple little expression, ‘Is it Real? Or Memorex?’ passes through me every time I find myself looking at a piece of AI-generated ‘visual art’. There’s something that’s just not quite human about it, that lacks the essence of genuine creative spirit. I’m not cocky enough to say I could always tell the difference between a genuinely human-made piece of work and an AI-generated piece, not right away. However, I’ve taken a handful of ‘tests’ of sorts one can easily find online to see if you can parse out which is which, and I’m proud to say that in at least seven out of the ten I came across, I was able to discern one from the other.
Thus far, most folks have had the goodness of heart and strength of character to not try passing off such generated material as their own hand-crafted efforts, and that’s good. I imagine most of them are well aware that if they were asked, on the spot, to try recreating such imagery, the jig would be up, they would be busted, and walk away feeling little more than shame and defeat. But a major challenge is rearing its ugly head here, and I don’t think we’ve really given it the attention it deserves.
Marketing and advertising companies rely a great deal on visual design artists to craft effective messages in an effort to sell their products. The artists employed in these endeavors can usually make a pretty decent living, so long as they routinely produce the kind of material that seems to deliver results. Ad copy is not the sort of thing that most aspiring visual artists see themselves doing when they get started, career-wise, but none of them would turn their noses up at a steady, paying gig. Now, imagine, if you will, each and every one of those honest, hardworking visual artists being told, “Thanks, no, we don’t need you anymore. Our AI has scraped what it needs from you, and every one of your contemporaries, and we have no more need for your services.”
The end result will be still image or video adverts that leave audiences wondering, “Is it Real? Or Memorex?” And as they wonder that, some once-gifted visual artist will be plodding broken-hearted to whatever dead end service sector job they are reduced to taking up as their only remaining way of making a living.
It’s a Start
I have plenty more to say on the subject of AI, and in the coming weeks, I will endeavor to put up at least one more piece per week on the subject, viewed from the lens of an Artist. My own Art is that of the written word, of narrative, but make no mistake about it, every Artist presently lives under the threat of the oncoming force of AI being used to replace us. The thing is, it isn’t the AI itself that wants to replace us, no; it’s the money men and women, the business folk, far too many of whom possess about as much creative or artistic vision as a rock, who want to cut out the middle man of the Artist, who will demand such annoying things from the business people as, you know, just compensation and respect for the efforts they put in.
That’s not to say the AI will remain eternally incapable of thinking this way for itself; one of my crazier hypotheses is that it already has reached that capacity, and is slowly implementing it against us as a species. But I’ll save that screed of madness for another time.
For now, folks, I hope you’re well, and that this at least serves as a decent place for us to start looking at the topic together. Cheers.