'A grotesque mockery of what it is to be human': Last thoughts on ChatGPT/AI

I will shut up about AI for a bit, because I've been posting about it a lot, and I've largely exhausted what can be said about the matter for the time being. I've also come to a point of smelling a bit of a rat with regard to all the hype about it. Silicon Valley transhumanists have an incentive to overegg the pudding with respect to what the technology can do, especially if they own equity in companies producing AI and AI-adjacent software, and I'm not sure what we're seeing is going to be anything like as transformative as was first thought. My own experiences with ChatGPT reassured me in this regard - what we are talking about is simply not 'intelligence' in any meaningful sense.

The chief danger, really, is that we make the mistake of thinking that because an algorithmic process can produce something that looks a bit like what humans can do, humans themselves are basically algorithmic. Once we decide that this is a convincing description of what we are, all really will be lost, because it is only a short step from there to deciding that, since humans are just vessels by which inputs become outputs, one simply needs to give everybody the same inputs and squish, mould and shape them into the same form so as to get the same desirable output. That is an old story, told in many different ways - always with a bad ending.

I was intrigued to read, this morning, of Nick Cave's visceral reaction against AI song lyrics, which chimed with my own, and which forced me to reconsider a songwriter whose music I have always cordially disliked. (Recognising it is objectively good, but finding it somehow alienating all the same.) It is worth quoting him at length:

What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognizable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self. This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering. This is what we humble humans can offer, that AI can only mimic, the transcendent journey of the artist that forever grapples with his or her own shortcomings. This is where human genius resides, deeply embedded within, yet reaching beyond, those limitations.

He could not be more right, of course, and this is part of what reassures me. All that I have seen of AI-produced art, read of AI-produced writing, and heard of AI-produced music is deeply unimaginative and often even parodically so, precisely because all it is doing is taking pre-existing cultural product and mashing it together (admittedly in sometimes highly 'creative' and unpredictable ways) to produce more. This is precisely not what human beings do when they create real art, which is precisely what no artificial 'intelligence' can ever do, because real art is not 'product' in the first place and human artists do not simply pastiche what came before. Indeed, this is why we despise pastiche and consider it contemptible - exactly because it is not what Cave calls 'self-murder' and is merely churned out to order.

And this is, indeed, why we should not worry at all about the fact that AI can produce a passable version of the pop music of the day. The whole point about music produced by the likes of 'Drake' and 'The Weeknd' is that it is disposable, formulaic, repetitive nonsense that is designed to serve as an empty vessel into which the artist-as-brand can pour his personality and the listener can then drink to get a cheap endorphine rush. It is not remotely surprising that it can be easily replicated by an algorithm - because it's nothing like art, nothing like beauty, nothing like what Nick Cave is talking about - because it is, in short, shit. 

All we really need to worry about it is that there are millions, nay, billions of people around the world who know nothing better than to aspire to the kind of bilge that contemporary pop culture serves up, and therefore are unable to discern (as one person quoted in the BBC article linked to above puts it) 'what's legit or fake anymore'. Of course one can't tell what is legit or fake when what is 'legit' is so deeply and profoundly worthless. What we need to work on, and hope for, is a renaissance (I mean that literally) in the arts that will result in more aspiration, more transcendance, more beauty, more humanity. In its own small way the OSR was the beginning of that in our little corner of the hobby - and long may that tiny candle continue to gleam.