Are We Letting AI Change Us?

The Chicago Sun-Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer recently printed a Recommended Summer Reading List that was generated using AI. How did people figure this out, you might ask? Well, maybe because ten of the books on that reading list DIDN'T ACTUALLY EXIST!

We have become so desperate for escape and that we are willing to let robots feed us digital Kraft Macaroni and Cheese that dissolves into nothing by the time it reaches our stomachs. No wonder I feel so gross and empty inside when I look at AI art. Because the machine felt nothing while making it.

I used to wonder why there are so few good critics anymore. But this AI Reading List debacle was a painful reminder that the amount of content people demand every day is so enormous that it is not only impossible for critics to spend the time required to put together a coherent thought beyond “THIS GOOD, THAT BAD” anymore, but their desperation has brought them to the point where they are now using AI to create that content. And the newspapers are so understaffed that the AI Reading List with fake book titles gets printed without being questioned.

Part of the problem is that we have allowed rich tech bros who own social media platforms (and AI tools) to turn us into a quantity over quality people. And I bet that a surprising percentage of the content we see when we doom scroll through social media is created using AI and we don't even blink. But this isn't because AI has gotten so good that it is indistinguishable from real, good content; it is because we have grown accustomed to a constant stream of cud: consumed, partially digested, regurgitated, and consumed again content.

When asked if he thought AI would eventually turn on us, computer scientist and artist Jaron Lanier said:

To me the danger is that we’ll use our technology to become mutually unintelligible or to become insane if you like, in a way that we aren’t acting with enough understanding and self-interest to survive, and we die through insanity, essentially.

My fear is that AI Art is a sign that this transformation has begun. And we need to course correct now.

The flip side of the argument is this: AI is a tool, and it's not going away anytime soon, so what are we supposed to do, not use it at all? And while I understand that argument, we should also ask ourselves if the benefits of using the tool outweigh the cost. Because AI is different from other art making tools in that it isn't just replacing or enhancing something we do with our hands, like a pen or a paintbrush; it is used in place of our minds, in place of all those idiosyncratic choices we make when we create a work of art.

What are we giving up when we let a machine make those human choices for us? When we change ourselves through our use of AI, what are we changing ourselves into? I don’t know. But given the current state of the world, I can’t help but think about this scene from the Mike Judge film Idiocracy (linked below):