A Brief Look at How AI Can be Bad and a Brief Look at How AI Can Be Great (with a fun intermission in between)
Take the Load Off Humanity and (and, and, and) You Put the Load on GPT
That would be the Super Bowl commercial to target to Boomers anyway: a clunky parody of The Band’s “The Weight.” When we speak of AI, it is crucial that we distinguish the type we are talking about. The type that wants to help us carry our groceries and make our bed…RUN! In The Loop, Jacob Ward gives an overview of how we offloaded rational thought over the years. Since our rational minds are newer than our instinctive side, our rational minds offload as many decisions as possible to the instinctive side. Ideally, we would live in a world that was species-minded and strengthened analytical thinking. In our capitalist world of course, emotions are appealed to. And the idea of offloading personal responsibilities to others….the economy would collapse if everyone decided to be self-reliant tomorrow.
And it’s not just responsibilities that we are in danger of offloading to AI. As Mark Murphy says (via Slavoj Zizek) there is an intoxicating titillation at the prospect of having AI say gleefully offensive things for us. The struggle to muzzle ChatGPT from saying bigoted things is so difficult because ChatGPT was raised on Internet data and in that house, Daddy liked to say bad words. Unlike a traditional Internet search, a chatbot answers the question for you or at least presents two sides as if they are equal. Not shocking that Elon Musk wants to invest in tech that says the quiet part out loud for us. The only thing more appealing than offloading personal responsibility is offloading moral responsibility. Wait sorry I was wrong. Even better: you can offload grief. By the end of the year, there is the promise that you will be able to upload a dead loved one’s consciousness. JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS!
How did we get here? To wanting tech to literally become God? This video pins it on our first contact with the alien AI intelligence: social media algorithms.
After our first contact, we have become irrational smartphone addicts. In the 12- step world, addicts need a Higher Power to get rid of the disease of addiction. Wouldn’t that be convenient: an AI Higher Power to help us with our smartphone addiction? Who cares what your ex thinks of your new girlfriend? As long as your brand new AI God can reunite you with your dead grandmother?
OK Mo. Sorry, “modiggs.” How about the social media apps that are currently out that are promoting IRL encounters? How are you gonna rain on that parade? Take it away Drew Austin:
Although we may still pretend otherwise, the internet is no longer able to provide information about the world without also shaping it in increasingly fundamental ways…Given the inversion of the digital-physical influence arrow, there is a corresponding risk that IRL life will instead become more like a scrollable feed.
When the Situationists created the derive in the ‘60s, they weren’t fighting algorithms. They were fighting maps and tour guides. Why do you need them to explore a city? Why not engage all your senses and explore the psychogeography yourself? Now here we are: offloading the responsibility of looking away from our phones to our phones!
From the marvelous God, Human, Animal, Machine:
As soon as we began building computers, we saw our image reflected in them. It was Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, a pair of cyberneticists who pioneered neural networks, who came up with the computational theory of mind.
If you need a computer to quickly compute the best ballistic trajectories to fight the Nazis, it better have something resembling a mind. And now here we are, a long way from the 1940s, having the computer think for us even more. The AI hot topic of the week is Autonomous AI Agents. Please watch this 48 second video if you are unfamiliar:
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You can have AI agents research the top news stories of the past week. Why go on the web and find out for yourself? Take the load off and surf the web….wait the web can surf itself for you. Take the load off and explore your neighborhood…the web can also do that for you….well masturbation is still manual right?
(3:09)
Timeline of Home Entertainment
1950s
As I previously mentioned:
Even though sitcoms emerged in the radio era, that was during the Depression, when people from different households would gather round to listen to one generous person’s radio (much like someone might host a Super Bowl party at their house nowadays). The ‘50s saw the rise of nuclear families in suburbs who felt a stronger bond with the family on TV than with their neighbors.
And they did not only watch sitcoms at home. They watched concerts, plays, anything they could in their safe suburban home away from their possibly Communist neighbors.
1980s-2000s
In the ‘60s. hippies hitchhiked around the world. In the ‘70s, culture moved away from parks and vans and into indoor discotheques and porn theaters. Porn theaters became obsolete when porn was available in VHS form in the ‘80s. Video game consoles also made the arcades of the ‘70s obsolete. Home computers and MTV sucked in the latchkey Generation X kids to make sure that they never had a reason to leave home. Video games got better in the ‘90s. TV itself got better in the ‘00s. And the Internet made generations of youth (including Millennials) want to stay home on their computers till their surge protectors exploded.
2020s
The 2010s gave us the mobile devices. After the great 2020 lockdown though, many of us realized…we can use our phones outside the home, but also inside the home…so why leave home? Even as we reacquaint ourselves with the outside world, we nervously cling to our TikToks more than ever. Ride a subway if you need proof. No one strikes up a conversation anymore. Fingers crossed for the Pear Ring.
The Production Era
As I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, there are many types of AI. The AI that helps us create, that helps us produce higher quality media, that AI is OK in my book. The Midjourneys and Runways of the world. I, for one, would rather see a magazine’s worth of creepy AI images than one more Instagram food pic.
One hallmark of the upcoming production era: more users behind the camera than in front. Fame has increasingly proven itself to be a gift with diminishing returns. As one former influencer told The New York Times, she “was relieved to land a corporate gig as a social media director for a tech platform. ‘I could just show up to work and do work,’ Ms. Tilghman said.”
As Brad Troemel recently pointed out in the Post Internet Report, artists that wanted to combine art with computer technology in the ‘60s needed engineers with technical know-how to help them see their projects to fruition. Now not only do you not need technical know-how, you don’t even need artistic know-how. If the tenor of ‘10s was one of titillation, anger and slander, potentially we can be entering an era of “holy shit look what I just conjured.” “Conjuring” is the right word because it is less like creating and more like reciting magic spells.
One other thing Troemel mentions in the Post Internet Report: the cycle of disappointment for Post Internet artist careers. Museums and galleries would display Post Internet artworks that made more sense online (for example, an Instagram art project that had posts every day for three years). Then the artist, needing to sell to art buyers, would make paintings. These paintings would never be as good as paintings from artists that dedicated their whole lives to the canvas, of course, so the Post Internet artist’s star would wane.
This is not only the story of Post Internet artists, of course. This is the story of all online content creators. The formula for the past twenty some odd years: online content creators that made their bones online needed to adapt to legacy media forms in order to make a sustainable living. Twitter legends wrote disappointing books. TikTok stars were awful Hollywood actresses.
With AI as a production tool, this could all potentially change. This could finally be the missing link between legacy media and new media. A person who makes dazzling sci-fi AI videos could conceivably make great films. An AI animator could bring that skill to the studios with very little loss in translation.
This is, of course, assuming, that the likes online that give fame in the first place are by humans.
"Take the Load Off Humanity and (and, and, and) You Put the Load on GPT"
Hahaha love this