outputs
Lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about AI. The thrust of this thinking has revolved around how everyone is blaming ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Gemini, and so on for things that the technology itself is not doing.
Like, the technology was created without any input in that decision. It didn't ask to be born. It does not and cannot make decisions re: how it's programmed, built, and used.
People do that. People make those decisions. The frustration and confusion and anxiety and fear that a lot of people (including me!) have in re: living in the Age of AI is understandable but the ire and invective is misdirected. We're getting mad at the mirror instead of what's reflected in it.
People bitch about AI like it has agency (which it doesn't) and ignore the decisions made by the humans who do. You got laid off because of AI? No bro, you got laid off because a person prioritized cost-cutting over keeping you alive. Like, Skynet isn't taking over. Creative fields aren't getting "disrupted" by AI. Humans are being tossed in the rubbish bin by people who view creativity and labour as obstacles to be navigated around instead of celebrated and supported. As usual, we're watching what the sociopaths who run the world are cool with sacrificing (i.e. us) for convenience or profit. You can't make an omelet without breaking a few global economies, apparently.
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Anyway, last week I posted this on Threads:
GenAI isn't replacing creatives, C-suite types are.
I followed it with this:
To be clear I’m still wary of the tech despite how impressive its outputs are. I’m just saying the tech didn’t create itself. The tech didn’t say “hey, dudes, let’s devalue human creativity!” People did that. People with motives did that.
Someone pushed back. I don't mean to shame or insult him, so I won't write his name or handle and I won't link to what he wrote. The text of his post in its entirety was this:
Show me one impressive output…
Reader, this annoyed me to no end. Was it a troll? Did he really not know? Was he just posting some throwaway thing without actually reading what I had written? IDK. What I do know is that after I read his reply I did some deep lunges and then unloaded the clip.
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Reformatted into paragraphs (shout out to Cory Doctorow and Pluralistic) to enhance readability, what I wrote looks like this:
This is going to be long, so please bear with me.
While I am wary of GenAI technology and disappointed by some of the ways it's being used — GenAI is not harming you, me or other creatives. It isn't nuking jobs or choosing to Ghibli-fy photos. People are doing that. People are eliminating creative departments because of the most boring applications of this tech (content generation). Like, the "impressive outputs" of GenAI aren't being spat out of ChatGPT.
The "impressive outputs" are happening elsewhere. AI "outputs" are leading to medical advancements (e.g. protein folding; drug discoveries; diagnostic imaging), and accelerations (e.g. cancer research; designer antibiotics to treat drug-resistant infection strains; contact tracing to slow disease spread).
"Outputs" are helping environmental scientists make significant improvements in re: climate modelling and renewable energy (e.g. more efficient grid management; more useful understanding of consumption patterns).
"Outputs" are leading to better educational modalities (for the purposes of equity and equality) which are leading to better educational outcomes, which eventually lead to smarter and more capable communities. "Outputs" are leading to advancements in cybersecurity capabilities which lead to better protection for our sensitive financial, medical, and identity-related data.
Yes, we need to deal with the downstream implications of consumer versions of this technology (e.g. energy expenditure; environmental damage; water consumption; job losses; economic contraction; the general dumbing down of society), but I simply refuse to see this from one perspective.
Gutenberg's printing press was instrumental in the Enlightenment, but eventually people used this technology to circulate hate speech and junk mail. I'm not going to judge the technology itself by the way bad people have applied it and respectfully, you shouldn't either.
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I'm not sharing this to further dunk on the guy. I already did that, and, because I don't like that side of me and that side of social media, I still feel bad about it. I really did try to be as kind as possible, though.
I'm sharing this because if we're going to deal with actual problems we have to talk about the actual problems. The conversation about AI is kind of dumb and basic because the vectors of examination are dumb and basic. The second we start talking about how AI is being wielded as a weapon by people who have no empathy and do not understand economics is the day we start figuring stuff out.
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