Yeah, AI can be pretty useful for many, many things but when it comes to art, I’d much rather consume content from a genuine human being. And I think most people might agree with me. What’s the point of art if there isn’t a creative process behind it, feelings or emotions to be expressed?
Btw, love the newsletters on voicenote format! Feels more human.
I read your words, because you speak from lived experience. Rather than reporting exclusively about what other people have experienced or how other people want you to.
The idea of art, of any sort, being "created" by AI I just plain revolting. I had a conversation with somebody a while back on a post with the subtitle "What do you think about this beautiful AI art"? I commented that it's not art, it's data. Hooboy, were people pissed off at me. But here's the thing: a lot of people seem to think that the software is creating in the same way as a human would. I gave the example of a Picasso. If you ask for a version of poker playing dogs done in his style, the software is not creating an image and then evaluating it for its "Picasso-ness." No, it's taking images that it already has in its database (from "training," another disgusting term) and smooching them together.
As a retired software engineer, I do think that the methods are transforming the data are impressive. The results? I'm not interested.
This isn't all that different from what goes on with AI "writing." If the software didn't have the entirety of the internet to chew on in its training phase, it couldn't write a thing.
I'm not hopeful about the future with this stuff. Capitalism is fueled by the religion of maximizing shareholder value. And if they can figure out how to do that with AI, from getting rid of employees (already happening) to "generating" their own content (hello there Spotify), they'll continue to do so.
As has happened so many times, you'll read the lovely idea that this will "free people up to do other things." Really, what might that be? My guess is that you'd better practice saying "Do you want fries with that?"
I worry a lot that the "humans innately want human-made art" line is a way of burying our heads in the sand a bit. Two reasons for this:
1) Human brains are weird: for example, the infinite reels-style feed is incredibly addicting, and I don't see any reason not to believe there's some infinitely generated feed you'd find more engaging than anything a human could produce, for reasons you won't be able to articulate.
2) The line is conditioned on us *knowing* when a piece of art was created by humans vs non-humans; what happens when you can't tell the difference anymore?
For what it's worth, I share the optimism about the future, because there are more and more people working on making sure this goes well. I just think the above framing is setting ourselves up for harsh lessons.
The most remarkable thing AI has done is revive the need for human connection. More and more people are "waking up". We don't want perfect; we don't want polished; we want raw, real, unfiltered expression of our flawed nature. I don't care if AI can write better copy than me or in 15 years make my marketing knowledge completely obsolete. It can never feel what I feel and it can never channel those feelings into art.
The world isn't ending, it's entering an era of flux and it's our task to steer it in the right direction.
While reading this, I started to think about how reading anything is much more a dialogue than we realize. How I interpret your words and how I feel about your words is influenced by more than the words themselves: I build stories around your words. I bring in my own experiences and place them in conversation with what I imagine yours, the author, to be. I feel understood and comforted in reading your words because in a real way I am imaging the presence of another human being who has felt what I have felt.
In this way, I truly believe that if I were to find out that this entire blog was penned by an LLM, the words would be exactly the same as they are now, but the dialogue I'm having with them changes dramatically. Same words, but in a very real sense this becomes a completely different piece of writing.
As a Painter, I much relate to this. What I see here is that many people realize the growing distance between ourselves, humans, and wish to remedy that. We want connection, support, meaning, and we are tired of the capitalist grind, especially upon realizing that so few actually benefit from most of it. Capitalism helped our global society to evolve and create new technologies, but everything is a cycle, right?
I do think we are at an inflection point, but I don’t really know what to expect.
But you and people in these comments give me hope that we can still built good societies.
Love this perspective as a new take on the idea that--yes the world is ending as we knew it. But who said that had to be a bad thing? Have you read parable of the sower at all?
I’m so glad I received this in my feed this morning. I’ve been thinking recently as well about what our future looks like with AI and what the worth of humans is now. Seeing this post made me feel less alone. And I resonate deeply with you and Bart. I want to hear what a human has to say or express. *That* has meaning to me. Not from a robot. A huge challenge now in my view is ensuring the authenticity of content online, given that it’s difficult to tell whether something was AI or human-generated. Maybe something that can help with this is the presence of more accessible third places
I saw someone phrase this sentiment well - AI is most successful when it lies to you about it's content being from a human. Meaning, what we value is the idea it came from a human. I truly think this is something that will never go away, so I don't think it's all hopeless.
At the moment what shakes me is how fast things are changing. The company I work for grew very fast thanks to covid and employed a group of international people to attend their customers all around Europe. They need to save money now and carry on growing so one of the solutions was to integrate more and more AI to the platforms used for communication. Long story short half of the team was fired last week. I have always evolved and learned to adapt to the circumstances..if it is time for me to go I will find a new open door however hard it is in the place I call home for now, but I doubt the machine has my experience and knows how to read between the lines and understand customers psychology. A machine cannot change the track of a conversation by just using the right tone of voice... It took us many many years before we thought it would be important to regulate the content of social media and screens. I hope we will be better at it with IA.
With humans around, we always have a place. It's our society that we still run, and have a will to run things. There's always been a ton of garbage art that gets generically made: generations before it was copying another artist, or other ways of "cheating the system" to make a buck. Today it's AI. But all in all, what actually impacts humanity, what actually gives us a will to live, is making the thing with our own hands, thinking it up ourselves. No matter how advanced technology becomes, it will always come with the motivation of "now ____ is easier and we can focus more on ____ in the creation process" ...cheaper, faster, easier, whatever. (There's still a part of me that is worried about sentient robots, and the exponential growth aspect of it...but not like I can change that outcome if it ends up happening. So i'll just enjoy life as i know it to be now.) ;)
I consume content because of the humans behind them. I don't believe AI are gonna replace us (and maybe that's innocent of me, but I really don't believe it).
Nostalgia is growing and people are giving more value to things that last, to things that are physical and to things that can be experienced gradually─especially between other people.
We cannot run away from our primitive instincts: humans need humans.
Yeah, AI can be pretty useful for many, many things but when it comes to art, I’d much rather consume content from a genuine human being. And I think most people might agree with me. What’s the point of art if there isn’t a creative process behind it, feelings or emotions to be expressed?
Btw, love the newsletters on voicenote format! Feels more human.
I read your words, because you speak from lived experience. Rather than reporting exclusively about what other people have experienced or how other people want you to.
The idea of art, of any sort, being "created" by AI I just plain revolting. I had a conversation with somebody a while back on a post with the subtitle "What do you think about this beautiful AI art"? I commented that it's not art, it's data. Hooboy, were people pissed off at me. But here's the thing: a lot of people seem to think that the software is creating in the same way as a human would. I gave the example of a Picasso. If you ask for a version of poker playing dogs done in his style, the software is not creating an image and then evaluating it for its "Picasso-ness." No, it's taking images that it already has in its database (from "training," another disgusting term) and smooching them together.
As a retired software engineer, I do think that the methods are transforming the data are impressive. The results? I'm not interested.
This isn't all that different from what goes on with AI "writing." If the software didn't have the entirety of the internet to chew on in its training phase, it couldn't write a thing.
I'm not hopeful about the future with this stuff. Capitalism is fueled by the religion of maximizing shareholder value. And if they can figure out how to do that with AI, from getting rid of employees (already happening) to "generating" their own content (hello there Spotify), they'll continue to do so.
As has happened so many times, you'll read the lovely idea that this will "free people up to do other things." Really, what might that be? My guess is that you'd better practice saying "Do you want fries with that?"
I worry a lot that the "humans innately want human-made art" line is a way of burying our heads in the sand a bit. Two reasons for this:
1) Human brains are weird: for example, the infinite reels-style feed is incredibly addicting, and I don't see any reason not to believe there's some infinitely generated feed you'd find more engaging than anything a human could produce, for reasons you won't be able to articulate.
2) The line is conditioned on us *knowing* when a piece of art was created by humans vs non-humans; what happens when you can't tell the difference anymore?
For what it's worth, I share the optimism about the future, because there are more and more people working on making sure this goes well. I just think the above framing is setting ourselves up for harsh lessons.
The most remarkable thing AI has done is revive the need for human connection. More and more people are "waking up". We don't want perfect; we don't want polished; we want raw, real, unfiltered expression of our flawed nature. I don't care if AI can write better copy than me or in 15 years make my marketing knowledge completely obsolete. It can never feel what I feel and it can never channel those feelings into art.
The world isn't ending, it's entering an era of flux and it's our task to steer it in the right direction.
As a dev and an AI geek, I might be biased but AI is getting good at a lot of things at an exponential pace.
The nature of work won't be the same in 5,10,50 years as we know it now.
Unfortunately, a lot of people will suffer.
But the more AI advances, the more human rawness, weirdnesses & connection appreciates in value.
This essay is a great example.
AI will do a lot of work for me.
But why would I stop reading a real person's ideas, experiences, beliefs, story and fuck ups?
While reading this, I started to think about how reading anything is much more a dialogue than we realize. How I interpret your words and how I feel about your words is influenced by more than the words themselves: I build stories around your words. I bring in my own experiences and place them in conversation with what I imagine yours, the author, to be. I feel understood and comforted in reading your words because in a real way I am imaging the presence of another human being who has felt what I have felt.
In this way, I truly believe that if I were to find out that this entire blog was penned by an LLM, the words would be exactly the same as they are now, but the dialogue I'm having with them changes dramatically. Same words, but in a very real sense this becomes a completely different piece of writing.
As a Painter, I much relate to this. What I see here is that many people realize the growing distance between ourselves, humans, and wish to remedy that. We want connection, support, meaning, and we are tired of the capitalist grind, especially upon realizing that so few actually benefit from most of it. Capitalism helped our global society to evolve and create new technologies, but everything is a cycle, right?
I do think we are at an inflection point, but I don’t really know what to expect.
But you and people in these comments give me hope that we can still built good societies.
Love this perspective as a new take on the idea that--yes the world is ending as we knew it. But who said that had to be a bad thing? Have you read parable of the sower at all?
I’m so glad I received this in my feed this morning. I’ve been thinking recently as well about what our future looks like with AI and what the worth of humans is now. Seeing this post made me feel less alone. And I resonate deeply with you and Bart. I want to hear what a human has to say or express. *That* has meaning to me. Not from a robot. A huge challenge now in my view is ensuring the authenticity of content online, given that it’s difficult to tell whether something was AI or human-generated. Maybe something that can help with this is the presence of more accessible third places
I saw someone phrase this sentiment well - AI is most successful when it lies to you about it's content being from a human. Meaning, what we value is the idea it came from a human. I truly think this is something that will never go away, so I don't think it's all hopeless.
I love you man
This is really well written, and comforting point of view 🩷
At the moment what shakes me is how fast things are changing. The company I work for grew very fast thanks to covid and employed a group of international people to attend their customers all around Europe. They need to save money now and carry on growing so one of the solutions was to integrate more and more AI to the platforms used for communication. Long story short half of the team was fired last week. I have always evolved and learned to adapt to the circumstances..if it is time for me to go I will find a new open door however hard it is in the place I call home for now, but I doubt the machine has my experience and knows how to read between the lines and understand customers psychology. A machine cannot change the track of a conversation by just using the right tone of voice... It took us many many years before we thought it would be important to regulate the content of social media and screens. I hope we will be better at it with IA.
With humans around, we always have a place. It's our society that we still run, and have a will to run things. There's always been a ton of garbage art that gets generically made: generations before it was copying another artist, or other ways of "cheating the system" to make a buck. Today it's AI. But all in all, what actually impacts humanity, what actually gives us a will to live, is making the thing with our own hands, thinking it up ourselves. No matter how advanced technology becomes, it will always come with the motivation of "now ____ is easier and we can focus more on ____ in the creation process" ...cheaper, faster, easier, whatever. (There's still a part of me that is worried about sentient robots, and the exponential growth aspect of it...but not like I can change that outcome if it ends up happening. So i'll just enjoy life as i know it to be now.) ;)
I consume content because of the humans behind them. I don't believe AI are gonna replace us (and maybe that's innocent of me, but I really don't believe it).
Nostalgia is growing and people are giving more value to things that last, to things that are physical and to things that can be experienced gradually─especially between other people.
We cannot run away from our primitive instincts: humans need humans.