In one episode of the cool-lady 90s Canadian spy show with the best soundtrack La Femme Nikita they just can’t seem to catch the Really Bad Guy. So the spies kidnap the Really Bad Guy’s accomplice and they do spy things to him until eventually he talks: Really Bad Guy was never seen in person, and the actor delivers a deadpan line: the Really Bad Guy has a “cool, mechanical way of communicating”. Fast forward a bit and it turns out Really Bad Guy is an AI, and the episode was attempting to weave future technology into 90s storytelling. Back then I remember thinking what a dumb idea that humans would be so gullible that they’d take instructions from a digital overlord, and I changed the channel.
So here I am in 2023, thinking about 1999. The Peripheral series came out late last year (William Gibson!) and does it ever go down a most excellent sci-fi rabbit hole of who can control you, and how. I couldn’t stop thinking about the series for weeks after I watched it. I don’t want to spoil anything, but stream that business ASAP and get back to me! It’s a bit psychological thriller at times and if that’s something you need to mitigate, I watched it on low volume with captions - it’s worth it.
And in our bright and shiny new 2023, all of a sudden and seemingly out of nowhere we have ChatBot AIs too. After hearing about AI text generators from all angles of the internet, with more and more alarm in each article written about them, I caved in and signed up for ChatGPT from OpenAI. What’s going on in there?
It seems the first thing someone thought to do with this new technology is to cheat on their homework with it. So is written content worthless now? Do we ascribe any value to it anymore? Will we even trust the written word? And how do we authentically communicate now?
I thought I’d see if ChatGPT can give me the main title for a pattern design workshop I’m teaching this spring. Yes, I wondered if I could cheat a bit. I figure if I’m looking at a thesaurus anyway, trying to name something on a theme, and this might be a good phrase stimulator. Here is the ABSOLUTE COMEDY that came out:
Three minutes with the AI Chat Bot showed me:
it’s terrible at creativity;
there is no shortcut to your own human creative process.
Maybe it’s a good tool to generate some basic points of entry for your mind, like Oblique Stategies, but I seriously doubt the AI can creatively name anything like a human can. This is “writing” only for whomever the phrase “ARTISTIC JAMBOREE” would spark a connection.
I used to work as a designer in marketing departments and six people would spend hours coming up with lists like this in a typical brainstorming session. What didn’t happen with the chatbot, that does happen in those marketing meetings, is the completely unexpected but still delightfully logical human ideas. The AI writes some weird words, sure, but without humans making intense connections only real creativity can provide, it fell flat. I closed the tab and didn’t look back. Half an hour later, a word floated up to me from nowhere: duplicata. Creativity comes from absorbing the things around you, processing them through your own experience and humanness, and reflecting that back into the world. You’ll never teach an AI that.
To be fair, ChatBot may level some playing fields: imagine being an immigrant to this country and not knowing how to write a North American style cover letter to apply for a job. Yes, there’s all sorts of work training centres that might help you, or online blog posts on the topic, but ChatBot feels like a more direct and quicker way to jump through some basic, standard hoops that others have learned from a lifetime of applying for jobs in this culture. I saw this tweet on Garbage Day - at least we’re boiling down how a lot of hoop jumping is entirely worthless:
Kevin Cannon@multikev
The future of email with ChatGPT.
1:07 PM · Jan 21, 2023
3.24K Reposts · 20.1K Likes
Laura Preston recently wrote about her work life as a backup for a real estate chat bot (it’s in audio form too, if you want to listen instead). It’s mindblowing to think that some our our work lives may eventually (if not are already) going to be around to fix the computer’s mistakes, not the computer fixing our mistakes. She describes how after months of doing the job of refining the responses of the real estate chatbot called “Brenda”, she starts neutralizing a lot of her more human responses to get people to chat with the bot less. She ultimately makes herself sound more robotic. As a user of the “Brenda” system, I’d go insane. It even sounds worse than calling your bank and having to push 1 for this option and dial 6 for that option. At least in that case you get the reward of speaking to a human at the end because, wait for it, the computer couldn’t solve your problem or else you wouldn’t put yourself through the particular hell that is calling 1-800 corporate service lines.
What an incredibly sad and ineffective replacement for discussing something as nuanced as a problem with paying the rent, or having black mold on your walls.
The very idea that I would prefer to use an AI to write this blog, or do any of my creative work, is just so out there. If you don’t do the work, if you don’t think about these ideas deeply and then write words or draw pictures about them, how will you ever get through the process of creativity and of trying to express something? How will you communicate authentically, how will you connect? Do we value creative attempts anymore, the try of it all?
Are we a society that values shortcuts above all else? I was going to ask the ChatBot, but its servers were at capacity, and it wrote me a limerick about being too busy instead. I’m hitting publish on this, trust me, it’s better this way.
Click + think:
Metaverse? Nah, the technocrats are just trying to download their consciousness into the cloud and we’re getting dragged along for the ride. Figures.
Marginalia: a DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of. Can I make it my default in the Chrome search bar, I wonder?
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