Oy Vey I
Greetings to my all-natural, meaty readers. Can we have an eyeroll for the subtitle? I created it in the style of the subtitles output by ChatGPT.
If you missed the Bob Brightburn Blog the last couple of months, it was because I was yet again being macerated by the “health” “care” “delivery” industry. Do. Not. Get. Sick. Especially if you have something that takes two hours of searching on Pubmed to find. I will share more later, but can’t write about it yet.
Instead, we have a guest post by someone of whom I am a great fan, and with whom I share many similar philosophical and social points of view. Here she offers her view of how human artists are devalued in the post-human anti-biological future culture wave breaking the world.
[For context, I was sharing some scarily accurate scene recognition dialogs with ChatGPT 4. She responded]
By Ruth Peloni
AI Weirdness has many examples of AI failing at image recognition. It's a total crapshoot, and people give it much more weight than it deserves. There's a reason scientists use citizen science instead of AI. AI literally can't do it with enough accuracy to rely on; human eyes and minds can't be beat.
The biggest danger of AI is that people expect it to be more than it is and use it as if it's infallible. It's just computer programs using open-source data as fodder, whether the data comes from The New York Times, Pubmed, The Onion, or a Q-anon message board, doesn't matter.
And the other danger, and the one that really disturbs me, is the devaluation of humanity's perhaps most unique quality: the ability and desire to make art (blanket term art), for emotional expression, connection, aesthetic appreciation, or the joy of creation. There is already very little space left for artists to survive as artists, people who frequently throughout history have struggled to function as a part of "normal" "productive" society in any other way than through their art. (Can you imagine Mozart or Van Gogh forced to work an office job or in customer service?) It's never been easy to make a living as an artist (not many openings on the court portrait painting market), especially an independent one, but historically, art has been considered culturally valuable enough for people to respect-- and pay-- artists.
AI could be used to help with necessary but mindless menial processing work, freeing people up to do things more meaningful and fulfilling with their time and energy. Instead, the opposite is happening. Society has been lowering the value of artists for many decades anyway, and now there's a cheap replacement. Apple's latest iPad ad was very telling. [Recently Apple apologized and pulled it. Ed.] And now it's not just pixels replacing paint, as was portrayed in the ad. Why hire an artist for a couple hundred bucks of thought, effort, time, skill, and care when you can just type a couple words in for free or almost free, and in a couple of minutes get something close enough that you almost can't tell? We don't need artists, we just need their bodies to fill out the customer service hotlines (oh wait, they’re using bots for that too now). My late fiancé paid for therapy with money from his art-- which is why he stopped going to therapy. There was more going on with him of course, but I have always wondered, if art was valued as highly as it has been at various points in history, how much longer would he have lasted? If he had the opportunity to sustain himself with his art instead of facing life in a society incompatible with his needs, capabilities, and passions, could he have found life worth living?
So when I see AI "art", whether it's music, visual art, writing, whatever, I don't think "oooh so creepy AI, so good wow, doesn't this look odd, doesn't that sound funny, it's crazy haha weird, perfect for that video thumbnail, lol so silly, actually pretty cool" I think of the artists that weren't paid to make this, and how crushed their souls are by what they're having to do instead.
AI is becoming such a ubiquitous thing, whether it's in the news or casual conversation, that I feel the need to say something. I know most people don't take it this seriously, and I'm not criticizing anyone for not sharing this perspective. But …
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Thank you, Ruth! Well said.
bb