Resistance is futile. I don't buy into Charlie Stross' argument (whose opinion I respect most of the time) that AI is just another venture capitalist bubble in the making. The fact that investment far surpasses returns at this stage isn't necessarily indicative of that and negates historical precedent where that is often necessary for the eventual success of an endeavor (i.e. Facebook, Google, petroleum, electricity, telephones, etc.). I don't say this because I'm one of those ultra pro AI fanatics. In fact, I think it's fair to say that my tendencies seem to veer towards neo-luddism most of the time. Ask anyone who might've paid me a studio visit and finds the abundance of ink and paint and paper to be a laughing matter (actually), or heck, anyone who reads THE SOLAR GRID for that matter.

I say this because we are already seeing the incorporation of AI in many of the things we use without actively trying to seek it out. Photoshop now incorporates AI tools to help realistically "de-crop" backgrounds. Instagram's search function now uses something called Meta AI. It is AI that helps our word processors suggest sentence completions for us. The list goes on. The way I see it, AI is going to increasingly become infused into our everyday existence not so dissimilarly to how the internet has, or how electricity has before it. That is not to say we have to necessarily embrace this infiltration in its entirety. There are always knobs and dials that allow us to adjust this infiltration enough to our liking.

To use the electricity analogy, not everyone has or uses a dishwasher, even if they can. Same goes for laundry machines even. Some people still handwash their clothes (in fact, certain types of clothes should only ever be handwashed). Some people draw and write on tablets, others still use good ol' fashioned paper (hi). Some even bake their bread in the sun. Same goes for the internet; some of us stream our music while others are bringing back vinyl. And it's not like if you listen to vinyl then every aspect of your being is going to harken back to old timey nostalgia. There are no hard and fast rules. Just as it would be inappropriate to paint people with one big brush stroke, it also isn't entirely accurate to paint any new technology with one big brush stroke. A rejection of proclamations that it will be the be all and end all of the future is certainly in order, because that is simply part of the hyperbole put forth to attract investors as well as encourage widespread adoption. But to reject AI's existence altogether I think is pretty futile at this point. It would also point to a failure of the imagination to see where the elimination of certain human tasks (or their reduction at least) would indeed be positive.

Anyone who decries the loss of jobs as the only reason for rejecting a technology is certainly missing the bigger picture. There are places in the world where the only way to obtain a metro ticket is by giving money to a person sat behind a subterranean glass window under white fluorescent light for many continuous hours on end. This is clearly a job that really needn't exist. Replacing it with a machine is on the whole beneficial, include to the person whose job it would take away, because they would be freed to funnel their potential elsewhere, hopefully at something more worthwhile. The same I would argue applies to screenwriters hired to work on corporate IP that they do not own. Let's be honest, 99% of American film and TV is nothing but repetitious schlock. 99% of popular music is nothing but repetitious schlock.  99% of "journalism" is nothing but schlock at this point. 99% of books too. It would be a far less depressing reality if all that schlock was the output of machines rather than humans gleefully giving in to the "market forces" their bosses and agents claim to be at play.

That is not to say this tsunami of AI we're about to experience won't come without its fair share of dangers. One of the ads that's been frequently popping up on my internets is one pushing some sinister bookmaking tool that seems to allow you to create an entire book by simply plugging in the subject matter and page count. An entire book, ladies and gentleman, including title, cover art, content, layout, the whole shebang. Now, with the amount of schlock that is already being produced without this evil tool, one can only imagine the sheer abundance of even worse schlock that would be produced with it. The same applies across media. We are bound to be overflowed by terrible atrocious schlock (or "content" if you will) in the years to come, because there are a great many corporate entities in need of a great flow of abundant content to survive. The nature of said content need only be determined by data (I've met producers at Netflix who confessed as much over a decade ago). 

The Counter Upside

Romanticism emerged as a response to what would later be called the "Industrial Revolution" (certainly a misnomer, but that's a story for another day). It is the movement that gave us William Blake, George Byron, Alexandre Dumas, Edgar Alan Poe, and even Mary Shelley (sometimes credited as being the first author of science fiction, but I have opinions about that as well). The "New Hollywood" of the 60s/70s (not to mention the beginnings of what we now know to be "Video Art") emerged as a reaction to big studio spectacles that were divorced from the realities of the real world (sound familiar?). It is the movement that resulted in grittier, more character driven films shot in real locations far from the hyper controlled sets of Los Angeles, where directors became auteurs rather than hired hands for the benefit of studio-owned properties (deja vu much?). Punk rock was birthed as a rejection of rock music's corporatization (of course as is often the case, punk rock itself would eventually end up defanged and corporatized).

I suspect, an onslaught of sterile AI-produced sameness will have to result in a countermovement of very real, very good shit. Likely the complete opposite of anything an AI could ever come up with. Very hands on, very tactile, unstructured, unpredictable, unplanned, flawed, dirty, transgressive, and subversive as all hell. The sheer abundance of AI everything may make all that human underground stuff fly too under the radar for most people to find, but picture the sheer joy that comes with finally getting your hands on that rare gem.

New technology will still very likely play a powerful role in the production and consumption of all the anti-AI work, as is often the case with any rebellious art movement. William Blake benefited from advancements in the printing press, Easy Rider would've been a different film without all those shots caught on the ten 16mm Bolex cameras Hopper distributed among his cast and crew, and punk rock benefited from the advent of cassette tapes and photocopy machines.

So even those of us that despise AI and everything it represents, keeping abreast of new developments, while keeping our hands firmly on all those knobs and dials will remain key.

Ganzeer

Houston, TX

25.04.24