“I DON’T WANT TO BE AN ASTRONAUT,” 2023, AI Generated Image from my prompt. With apology to all human artists whose art was scraped without permission and payment to create a program that degrades art and artists.
[I chose to cut this essay into three parts due to length and the challenge to people’s attention. Each section will appear a few days apart and I will add a link on this essay to the others as I post them for convenience. This is the 3rd and final part. Part 1 can be found HERE. Part 2 can be found HERE.]
This part is long, so you may have to read the whole essay on Substack or take your time and read it in sections. Perhaps it is worth any time you grant what I have to say.
On the other hand, you could go grab a brew and watch one or another sport. I offer no promises of entertainment, but what I present is free of charge.
“Once you get the right image the details aren’t that important. Over-analyzing reduced the myth. A big insight we learned during this period was that you don’t have to explain why. That’s what advertising was all about. “Why” was for the critics.”
***
“The Army recruiting center in Times Square was plastered with stickers: SEE CANADA NOW. Stop signs on street corners now read STOP WAR. Witches in black robes bearing roses, exorcised the FBI building of its evil spirits. Hundreds crowded the lobby of the Daily News smoking grass and passing out leaflets to the employees that began, “Dear fellow members of the Communist Conspiracy.” A tree was planted in the center of St. Marx Place (we took the liberty of changing the spelling [from “St. Mark’s”]) while 5,000 celebrators danced to rock music. Midnight artists snuck in subway stations and painted huge murals on the walls. Naked people ran through churches. Panhandlers worked the streets for hours, took the change they collected to the nearest bank and scattered it on the floor. A giant Yellow Submarine mysteriously kept appearing in tow-away zones.” [Brackets mine.]
Abbie Hoffman
from the chapter, “Museum of the Streets”
pg.108 and pg. 109, SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
1979
I. A Story
Five apple seeds.
Arranged in that miraculous “star” pattern one finds if one cuts an apple in half sideways, sign of Venus, her orbit as it appears over time from our point of view, the Morning Star, the Evening Star.
Or, in this case, anxiety, control, pranksters, and general silliness taken far, far too seriously. Maybe mental illness or a personality disorder was involved, too; certainty is not to be expected in such matters.
The previous week, atop the refrigerator where the seeds were oh so carefully arranged, there rested an apple. Ripe and ready for eating, but not eaten. Not at all.
“This is MY apple,” the owner had loudly announced, placing it up there. “Do not eat my apple.” To whom this command was issued no one knew. All that some of the observers to this ritual noticed was that the apple in question was diagonally in eye-shot of its owner’s office and desk.
Yet, viola!, by the end of that day there was no apple. Gone, as if by magic. Or theft. Which, it turns out, is what its owner was expecting. Oddly, though, because that was the expectation, the fate of our apple was sealed.
It was put to me this way (since I am merely reporting an incident, not confessing my having snatched that apple or anything else): Over the previous couple of months, the owner of the apple had become more insufferable than usual. Which is genuinely saying something. The owner, to begin with, was the manager of our facility, top dog, boss and from time to time seemed to feel the need to make certain we all knew it, no matter one’s position. Power and title was a very important thing for this person.
Problem was, the boss often seemed to feel as if few of us enjoyed how well they wielded the whip or ground their heel into the backs of our hands or was just generally rude and dismissive and unhelpful. Even threatening. We had arrived at a 75% turnover rate per year – people came in the door, were hired, trained, got some experience, and immediately went right back out the door. A couple were fired for ridiculous reasons here and there, but mostly it was resignations. Once in a while, pushed too far, someone quit on the spot, no notice. In a “right to work” state, what’s one going to do about it?
I’ll add, this was a mental health facility. Everyone in this story had graduate degrees in psychology and social work. They had licenses. They were certified therapists and counselors. Except me. My MA is in philosophy as was my year in a PhD program. I taught myself psychology by reading and on the job over about 13 years at that time; so, what do I know?
I do know that our boss, for months, was possessed by the suspicion that their food was being tampered with when they left it in our common refrigerator. This person started saying so out loud when anyone was in the breakroom to hear it. “Has someone opened my lunch?” Later, our victim would say things like, “I could have sworn I had more grapes in this bag” and “I packed more cheese than this.”
To be honest, no one in this story had any idea who was taking the manager’s food… or if anyone was really taking the food. It was more likely a mistake on the part of the boss’ imagination because no one needed the person’s food that badly and only employees ever went in the breakroom. But the boss was pretty damn sure we were all footpads and cutpurses whenever the eyes of authority were turned in the wrong direction.
This built until the apple incident.
With great ceremony and in front of several therapists, the boss laid the apple in its sacred spot atop the refrigerator. “That’s my apple,” said our leader, “and I expect it to be there when I get ready to eat it.”
Myself, I only went in that breakroom when we had our morning briefings and then faded away as quickly as possible before receiving some threat or reprimand for whatever the boss decided to hit me with in front of everyone else. As they say, I was perpetually on thin ice. So, I had no idea any of this was going on until later, a bit after that apple disappeared and its five perfect seeds reappeared about seven days later.
At that point, trading stories with the actual mental health professionals, the possible perpetrators of the scam told me all about the situation, how abnormally… suspicious… our co-worker was becoming about food, their food, and the rest of us, and about how that apple may have ended up no longer an apple.
It may have gone down like this: While the boss’ office door was open, their eyes were doubtless glued to that refrigerator top and The Prize. The Trap. But we were a busy facility, patients in and out all day, a lot of movement in the halls. And at some point, someone went into the boss’ office for a private conference, so the door was shut a few minutes, at least. And when the door opened again, the apple was… gone.
I hear our boss noticed pretty quickly and rushed into the breakroom looking high and low in feverish disbelief. “Have you seen my apple? The one on the top of the fridge? Was there anyone down here about ten minutes ago?” From door to office door our leader rushed and asked each inhabitant for evidence, information,… anything. About anyone.
Me, I was out of the building, on the road as usual. My job was largely doing home visits way out in the mountains and byways of our rural counties. Thank G-d. I’m sure the boss tossed my office anyway looking for that apple while I was out. Perhaps I had telekinetic abilities of which everyone was unaware? That would explain quite a bit.
Alas, alas. I lack such powers. And the apple chase was given up long before I returned to the building.
The fact is, two mental health professionals who will forever remain nameless yet beloved in my heart of hearts, tired of our boss’ weird behavior and accusations, so when presented with the opportunity, they smoothly lifted that apple in a jointly executed maneuver, cut it in half, each ate a half, and then one wrapped the seeds in a napkin and pocketed them. Seven days later when, again, the boss was diverted, the cleaned seeds were carefully placed back where the apple had once so innocently rested.
At some point – and our counselors in question were watching – the boss came in and went to the refrigerator: Behold! A miracle. The seeds of the missing apple. And at that point, our petty taskmaster knew – knew – that someone had their number. Maybe all of us. And short of fingerprints and DNA tests, the boss would never know who it was.
The boss still doesn’t, even though she’s no longer the boss – fired soon after for incompetence. Maybe if the managerial gaze had been fixed on helping the staff and our patients as those eyes had been on that damn apple, our boss might have kept climbing the ladder as she intended.
I wouldn’t tell you the truth about who did it if you cut my fingers off with a bolt cutter. Forget it.
***
People often do not live within the same reality – they do not have a shared reality. No more than our reality is the same as Cro-Magnon Man’s, of that of Medieval Christian monks, Moorish Princes of Al-Andalus, or of European Renaissance artists, or of Galileo’s.
Reality may no more be shared than the reality of the Dominican monks and the armies that followed them was the same as that of Cathars in the south of France who were wiped off the earth due to their “alien” notions, their “heresies” from the point of view of the Catholic Church.
Or the myriad Christians who, from time to time, accused all the Jews of being “Christ Killers” or of “murdering Christian children to make Passover Matzo with their blood” or “secretly running the world” – so said Christians would rape, torture, murder, steal from, and chase all the Jews out of an entire nation to show their Jesus – who himself was a Jew, not a Christian – how much they loved him and followed his way of pacifism and forgiveness. All because Jews do not believe what most Christians believe religiously: the worlds of people from those two religions do not entirely overlap in meaningful ways.
Perhaps the lack of shared reality leads one person to believe others are stealing their food and touching their belongings until others without that belief tire of being interrogated about the non-existent incidents and just… steal that person’s apple and dramatically, mysteriously return the seeds in a star shaped pattern to awaken the overly-suspicious person to the inappropriate absurdity of their nonsense.
****
Living in a common world depends upon people accepting, sharing a set of common facts, common truths. Among these, this means all involved must believe there is “a truth” about aspects of reality that everyone can access simply by being adults, reasonable, and doubtful of the notion there are acceptable “alternatives to facts” – as if wild, entertaining stories will do just as well as facts to hold us together; as if lies and sorry, ragged myths and guesses could replace simple, common facts while, at the same time, holding all people together in a common world.
Jose Ortega y Gasset once stated, in so many words: “The human being is not an herbivore or a carnivore, nor an omnivore. The human being is a veridivore.”
By this neologism he meant the human being lives off the truth; without truth, we die of the worst sort of malnourishment, individually and collectively; and no kind of “truth substitute” will allow us to remain human beings indefinitely or even for very long – because there is no real substitute for truth that is not a mere ghost and an illusion.1
Hannah Arendt’s excellent Between Past and Future contains an essay that could not be more valuable at this moment in history. In Chapter 7, Truth and Politics, she writes:
“The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not – namely, secrets. That their assertion then should prove as dangerous as, for instance, preaching atheism or some other heresy proved in former times seems a curious phenomenon, and its significance is enhanced when we find it in countries that are ruled tyrannically by an ideological government. (Even in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia it was more dangerous to talk about concentration and extermination camps, whose existence was no secret, than to hold and to utter “heretical” views on anti-Semitism, racism, and Communism.) What seems more disturbing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions – as though Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order.” [232]
* * *
“Factual truth […] is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domains of privacy. It is political by nature. Facts and opinions, though they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational thought informs philosophical speculation….” [Ellipses, brackets, and emphases mine.]
* * *
“Even if we admit every generation has the right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has a right to rearrange the facts in accordance with its own perspective; we don’t admit the right to touch the factual matter itself. To illustrate this point[…]: During the twenties, so the story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, in your opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied, “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” We are here concerned with brutally elementary data of this kind, whose indestructability has been taken for granted even by the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in historicism. [Brackets and ellipsis mine.]
“It is true, considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters.”
Hannah Arendt
[232, 234-235; BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE, Hannah Arendt, 1968, Penguin Books; ISBN 978-0-14-310481-0]
And, so, in our own age, we have created Artificial Intelligence (AI) and labor to bring about an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) more like our own except superior in speed and capabilities. It has many features, many possibilities, this technology. In medicine, it has proven itself capable of detecting cancer years earlier than an oncologist can by examining breast x-rays. 2
But one of its major possibilities is also this: it is capable of rendering reality ambiguous and doubtful in ways no propagandist or hoaxer ever dared pray for previously.
In Russia, one of the most effective ways Vladimir Putin undermined any faith in democratic institutions such as political parties or voting was to sabotage the process. Turn it into theatre in which the participants had no idea they were performers until it was shockingly late. As opposition parties arose, no matter their alleged ideology or philosophy: far right fascistic – even Nazi; Communist; liberal democratic; Green; democratic socialist; it did not matter. After these parties attracted people to them and then began competing, protesting, giving speeches, holding rallies, as time to vote for a new leader and representation came, Putin revealed the truth: He had funded all of the groups. He claimed to have paid all the leadership, no matter how disparate. So, sure, go ahead and vote; but in the end, it’s all Putin. There is only Putin and his joke he played on the very notion of having political parties, disagreements, indirect action to settle differences – democracy is a farce because everything you thought was truth and even basic fact turned out to be a lie. The only fact and the only truth you need concern yourself with is Putin. 3
Imagine if Putin had his hands on technology that allowed him to create “deepfake” videos and audio – such as the artificial, false audio that sounded like President Biden used on robocalls in the 2024 New Hampshire primaries by political opponents to keep voters at home.
[Feb. 25, 2024, 3:01 PM CST / Updated Feb. 25, 2024, 10:31 PM CST
Steve Kramer, a veteran political consultant working for a rival candidate, acknowledged Sunday that he commissioned the robocall that impersonated President Joe Biden using artificial intelligence, confirming an NBC News report that he was behind the call.
In a statement and interview with NBC News, Kramer expressed no remorse for creating the deepfake, in which an imitation of the president’s voice discouraged participation in New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary. The call launched several law enforcement investigations and provoked outcry from election officials and watchdogs.
Read HERE at NBCNEWS.COM.]
As right-wing anger at singer Taylor Swift mounted due to her own political beliefs which do not align with theirs, a sudden surge in “deepfake” porn videos of Swift rolled through the internet late January on infamous alt-right stomping grounds 4chan and post-Elon Musk Twitter “X.”
[Inside the Taylor Swift deepfake scandal: ‘It’s men telling a powerful woman to get back in her box’
by Emine Saner
Wed 31 Jan 2024 00.00 EST
“For almost a whole day last week, deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift rapidly spread through X. The social media platform, formerly Twitter, was so slow to react that one image racked up 47m views before it was taken down. It was largely Swift’s fans who mobilised and mass-reported the images, and there was a sense of public anger, with even the White House calling it “alarming”. X eventually removed the images and blocked searches to the pop star’s name on Sunday evening. “
Read the entire article at The Guardian HERE.]
Of course, Swift was never involved in making these videos, nor was her permission asked for or granted, and much less was she compensated. Certainly, these things were not created from respect for, or even a questionable idealization of her, but for several reasons aside from sexual fantasies, including: public humiliation; devaluation of her opinions and ideas; her reduction to a sexual fetish; and, as with rape, power over her body, even if it is not her body and not her, but a digitized look-alike. But “when we can’t tell the difference, is there a difference?” – to paraphrase an oft asked question on what was HBO’s WESTWORLD. For some people, there is no practical difference. Some, in other words, act as if there is no difference between the real and its imitation, between fact and opinion, between truth and misinformation or disinformation.
Since, in our day, all fact and truth has been reduced to opinion and stories and Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” it may as well have happened becomes it did happen for many, too many people.
Though many, many deepfake porn videos of Taylor Swift still fill the internet right now – easily found with a search if you can’t simply take my word for it4 – and Swift certainly has the power to retaliate and sue where possible, if she should pursue that route; and she has legions of loyal and appreciative fans to stand up for her… what happens to those of us who don’t?
‘ “It is, she says, “just the new way of controlling women. You take somebody like Swift, who is extraordinarily successful and powerful, and it’s a way of putting her back in her box. It’s a way of saying to any woman: it doesn’t matter who you are, how powerful you are – we can reduce you to a sex object and there’s nothing you can do about it.” In that way, it’s nothing new, says Bates, “but it’s the facilitated spread of this particular form of virulent misogyny that should worry us, and how normalised and accepted it is”.
‘ “We know, says Rani Govender, a senior policy and public affairs officer at the NSPCC, “that this is an issue which is absolutely impacting young people. In the same way that other forms of image-based sexual abuse work, it particularly impacts girls.” There have been cases of children creating explicit deepfake imagery of other children, often using apps that “strip” a subject in a photo. “Then this is being sent around schools and used as a form of sexual harassment and bullying. Fear is a theme that comes up a lot: worrying that people will think it’s real, that it can lead to further sexual harassment and bullying. [There is] worry about what their parents might think.”
“One 14-year-old girl told the NSPCC’s ChildLine service last year that a group of boys made fake explicit sexual images of her and other girls and sent them to group chats. The boys were excluded from school for a time, but returned, and the girls were told to move on, which they struggled to do. Another girl, 15, said that a stranger had taken photographs from her Instagram account and made fake nudes of her, using her real bedroom as a background.” [The Guardian; ibid]
What happens when deepfake videos proliferate of average people, adults, involved in, say, virtualized child rape which causes them to lose their reputations, jobs, families, and lives? Or deepfakes of people stealing when they have never stolen a thing? Go down the list of crimes that raise the public’s ire and now imagine that, for say $20.00, any kid or any group of sociopathic people lacking a conscience decides to destroy someone, torment them with deepfake videos and audio. Just because the technology allows that and they have vengeful intentions – or, being nihilists, they just think it’s a big kick to cause chaos.
Worse, what happens when actual video and audio emerges of wrongdoing and the perpetrator immediately drops the defense that “it’s a deepfake.” Roger Stone has already taken this position recently towards video/audio evidence of his involvement in the 6 January insurrection. As the technology improves further, how much tax money will be required to establish, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that one digitized video is “real,” and the other is “manufactured to seem real”?
How many wealthy people, like a Putin, say, would flood the internet and news with hundreds of deepfakes to obscure the detection of real video evidence – so looking for evidence will become akin to looking for a needle in a stack of needles. How expensive will it become to eventually pay AI companies to sort through AI generated material looking for non-AI generated material while the AIs all learn, in the process, how to deceive one another better and make detection of “artificial” from “real,” if not impossible, financially prohibitive?
So, shared facts, a shared reality, enough to live together and agree or disagree peacefully about that shared set of facts using those facts as evidence: Already, we may have crossed the Rubicon, ethics having failed to convince many to consistently restrain themselves, protective legislation left woefully behind, legislators using mid-20th century ideas about radio and television and movies to think about an entirely different technology that only superficially resembles those previously mentioned, and then, only in the familiar products of electronic moving images and sound and, perhaps, writing.
The underlying AI and potential AGI is not images, not sounds, and not the writing of words, even though it can produce these. It is something else, ultimately. It is potentially the next step in an evolution that will render humans irrelevant.
II A. What’s the Point?
Now my journey takes me further south
I wanna hear what the blind men sing
With their fossils and their gypsy bones
I'll stand beside myself so I'm not alone
And how can I make new again
What rusts every time it rains?
And the rain it comes and floods our lungs
We're just orphans in a tidal wave's wake
from “Orphans”
Beck
MODERN GUILT
***
Were I to recommend an overview of the variety of things AI can and is doing, and by this point doing much better than when the documentary was made, I’d send you to PBS FRONTLINE’s “In the Age of AI” from December 2, 2019, available free on YouTube presently here:
The issue to pay attention to initially is how many jobs AI can and will replace, from long haul trucking to warehouse work to assembly line production to code writing.
We’d do well to note how China already uses it in its surveillance state to cause people to self-enforce its authoritarian expectations: absolute conformity to government demands.
Capitalism in liberal democracies has proved no better than Asian authoritarianism: corporations using the AI to gather information on users of various platforms to build predictive models of ways individuals can be manipulated to buy or believe whatever the highest dollar bidder wishes them to, for whatever reason. Our 2016 election and social media pro-Trump propaganda interference by Russia and in the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal are only two examples along with every product or person your phone or browser pushes you to buy or “like” or pay attention to… or ignore.
AI and AGI as a complete topic is too broad for me to research and face in a space such as this, but one aspect of it I can and must respond to. As a visual artist and writer, I had my choice of which aspect of the technology I’d discuss: how the AIs were trained using information scraped from digitized art and writing without asking permission of living authors and artists, much less offering compensation, while, at the same time aiming to compete with and, ultimately replace the same artists and writers; but, really, a proper examination of this requires a book-length treatment by people with better access to facts than I do.
But the act of writing, I decided, is the thing I should face since I am presenting this essay in three chunks of written material. It’s also less… egocentric or vain than complaining about being replaced as a visual artist when, really, my visual art is relatively unknown at this point. People have at least been reading some of my public offerings, fiction, essays, TTRPGs, comics, and commentary, for around 30 years online and in print.
Albert Camus famously asked The Philosophical Question in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The Question is: Why should I not commit suicide? In the face of a universe that does not care about us and appears meaningless, why should I decide to wrestle with problems, to work, to choose to bear burdens – to continue the act of choosing at all – when it all appears absurd, pointless, and soon to be forgotten? If you don’t know, Camus argues that he, you, and I should not, must not commit suicide, even slowly and tacitly. And if you don’t know his “why,” I send you to go read the essay, an essay that only a human being could, with all honesty, have pulled out of his own soul to share in writing with others. [Read it for free at the Internet Archive: HERE. ]
I will quote Camus’ own introduction to this essay written at a later date, appearing in the edition I provided a link to above:
“The fundamental subject of "The Myth of Sisyphus" is this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in God, suicide is not legitimate. Written fifteen years ago, in 1940, amid the French and European disaster, this book declares that even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to proceed beyond nihilism. In all the books I have written since, I have attempted to pursue this direction. Although "The Myth of Sisyphus" poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”
Albert Camus
Mirroring Camus, then, I have my own minor question, focusing as much as I can: In the face of AI that can write and will improve to be able to replace even professional writers, why should I not just stop writing? What’s the point of anyone doing it at all?
At this time, even offering my work for free, maybe I have, what? 20 regular readers, assuming they read an entire essay? Let’s pretend I do have 20 sets of human eyes on my essays all the way through right now. The problem is, soon, it seems even this audience will probably diminish or disappear. Here I quote from professional comedy writer and publisher Michael Gerber’s Substack “The American Bystander’s Viral Load”:
“I think the best human writers and artists can hope for is to create original IP that is then bought from them and expanded infinitely by corporate-owned AI. But I think that will only really be an option for the first few people, because AI-driven expansions of whatever the corporations own are going to be immediate. It will fill the bucket past full. We’re already at full. This week I unsubscribed from about 20 Substacks because—forgive me—I just wasn’t reading them. Writers may need to write, but do the rest of us really need more to read? And what is writing without being read? It is a question worthy of a Zen koan.
“There is a finite amount of attention, and every new thing is competing with all the other media that came before. There was a finitude to the pre-streaming media ecology that essentially forced support for new creation, and artificially expanded the scale of success for new things. SNL became a cultural phenomenon because of scarcity; if SNL’s audience in 1975 could immediately watch the best comedy of the previous 50 years, plus Lemmings and The Committee and every Carlin routine on YouTube, and stream the previous five years’ of Pryor small-club gigs via RichardPryor.com, and get new Richard Klein material sent to them via email for $9.99/year at Icantstopmyleg.com…SNL would not have achieved escape velocity. AI isn’t solving a reader-side problem of not enough content; it’s answering the corporate prayer of creative content without creatives.”
Michael Gerber
THE AMERICAN BYSTANDER’S VIRAL LOAD
“Burning Answers #6: All-In for AI”
8 December 2023
[Read the full article HERE. ]
Pay close attention to these sentences of Gerber’s:
“Writers may need to write, but do the rest of us really need more to read? And what is writing without being read? [….]
“There is a finite amount of attention, and every new thing is competing with all the other media that came before.”
I paid close attention to this revelation and the effect was akin to a devastating punch in the gut. Still is.
Maybe my shock is, in its own ridiculously minor way, analogous to when, in the late 1700s, Immanuel Kant read the works of David Hume who had just cast the entire belief in “cause and effect,” physical causality, into near absolute reasonable doubt. Which, if true, meant: All the new modern sciences, such as physics, are impossible – they are not giving us truth of any sort about reality.
So, Kant went to work to show Hume was wrong and why – hence THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON which none of you have probably read nor will you. But it saved the project of modern science from radical skepticism for a while. Ask Einstein about his reliance on Kant and Ernst Mach in working out a new epistemology for his theories in physics.
But I am not a Kant, not a genius, and in the face of the situation as it stands – that is, exactly as Mr. Gerber laid it out so plainly – why should I or anyone write anything anymore? As is, and I stated so in my first essay in this trilogy, after reading this, I was stunned to silence. The essay contest I intended to enter came and went while I had much to say, but an utter lack of confidence in my ability to say it, say it well, say it right, or that it mattered one way or another if I said anything or not in writing.
Because as much as a writer needs to write, do people really have time for more to read? The firehose of content is about to overfill that bucket of attention Gerber spoke about, and it’s a firehose that, soon enough, will not even require writers at all.
In our present situation, the probable scenario, as explained to me by a friend familiar with the subject, will look something like this: The generative AIs will “create/generate” material – scripts, books, stories, essays – for corporations such as publishers and studios. The AIs will be asked to write using intellectual properties these companies own or have optioned; after the machines spit out their products a very few writers on staff will have the job of punching up the material, making it more entertaining, human-sounding, and editing it before it goes down the assembly line to be packaged in whatever form will sell.
In the end, the closer AIs come to being Artificial General Intelligences or trained by humans to generate human-sounding content in specialized lanes, such as script production or essay writing, the fewer human editors will be required… until there will very little, if any, assistance from a human needed. And jobs and audience for human writers will evaporate and the audience, if there is an audience, will neither care nor notice a difference.
Corporate structure that demands maximal profits and minimal expenditures will drive the process. The best capitalist model for profits demands paying as few humans as little as possible while creating saleable material. Paying no humans for labor while still creating saleable material would be capitalist heaven. And I’m sure the rent for the use of the AIs will easily undercut the wages humans require to simply survive, much less to live decent, comfortable lives.
Certainly, there will be Luddites who attempt to push back, perhaps even destroying and sabotaging the AI programs.5
Nonetheless, this is merely a delaying tactic, a short-run response, not one that will convince the human owners, developers, and users of the technology to turn it off and quarantine it like so much radioactive waste buried in concrete or lead-lined pits in cavernous salt mines.
As surely as, in our myths of resistance to the progress of the industrial revolution, weaver Ned Ludd was eventually strung up by his neck for breaking Arkwright looms, any contemporary attempts at actual Luddite rebellion will meet some similar fate – doubtless to be prosecuted as a form of terrorism should such a movement decide to destroy the machines, not simply rage at them.
“Corporations are people, too, my friend,” famously claimed Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 race. And corporations are not only treated as people, but they wield power and money, they lack remorse or mercy, and no mere human is usually allowed to stand in the way of their goal of profit at all cost. This includes corporations involved in the creation of AI. If we wreck the generative AI training models as vigilantes – even starving, unemployable ones – the full force of law will be brought to bear on behalf of the corporate interests as surely as the armed bulls and military were brought to bear in the Colorado mine worker’s strike of 1914. That resulted in the Ludlow Massacre, which one may look up if unfamiliar with the tendency of these issues.
Or dissidents may simply be arrested or ostracized.
Perhaps, reading this, you are thinking this sounds like a paranoid fantasy. Indeed, writing it, speculating on where we are, sounds like a paranoid fantasy to me, as well. But facts force me to consider that this world, the human world we have allowed to be created, has become… a paranoid nightmare where reality and unreality seamlessly transition into one another, where some people work tirelessly to destroy the very idea of paid labor of most sorts, even creative work… especially creative work… by replacing humans with semi-autonomous artifices that aim to make humans obsolete without losing “human-esque” products such as driving, flying, teaching, programming, art, journalism, memoir. We are well within Phillip K. Dick territory now, and where once his speculations appeared as “science fiction,” some now appear as darkly prophetic.
II B. …Or Not To Be?
‘ The ragamuffin Gunner is returnin' home
Like a hungry runaway
He walks through town all alone
"He must be from the fort"
He hears the high school girls say
His countryside's burnin' with wolfman fairies
Dressed in drag for homicide
They hit and run, plead sanctuary
'Neath a holy stone they hide
‘ They're breakin' beams and crosses
With a spastic's reelin' perfection
Nuns run bald through Vatican halls pregnant
Pleadin' immaculate conception
And everybody's wrecked on Main Street
From drinking unholy blood
Sticker smiles sweet as Gunner breathes deep
His ankles caked in mud
‘ And I said, "Hey, Gunner man, that's quicksand
That's quicksand that ain't mud
Have you thrown your senses to the war
Or did you lose them in the flood?"
from “LOST IN THE FLOOD”
Bruce Springsteen, 1973
GREETINGS FROM ASBURY PARK, N.J.
*******
Until you figure out
A way that you can live without
Stories with happy ends
Everyone I know is trying to get by
Fighting all the half-true lies
Nobody can win
from “NOBODY CAN WIN”
Garbage [Shirley Manson]
BLEED LIKE ME
*********
My story will not have a happy ending. Humanity’s story never ends happily in this world – it ends being crammed in a box and dropped in a hole; burned to ashes and scattered; thrown into a mass grave and covered with quicklime; carelessly tossed to the side of a road, raped, strangled, discarded; dangling from the end of a rope picked to bits by crows; lost in the depths of a lake or ocean; brains splattered on a wall by the pistol you finally decided to eat.
What we leave behind – if anything is left behind to echo even a few moments – is our testimony; and our testimony about life here can be told by us, by writing, recording, making art or it can be told by others: coroners, pathologists, an autopsy report if we are reduced to mere evidence of a natural death or a murder. Or we are forgotten.
These are unpleasant things to contemplate, but they are our shared reality, the possibilities of how we will end – but, regardless of how we end, each and every one of us will, sooner or later, justly or unjustly, die. Because that is the universe in which we live.
Rather than evade looking at that weighty fact to begin telling stories, the stories of our hope and faith in an “afterlife,” or “the world to come,” or “resurrection,” let’s stick with this, what we know with certainty: each of us comes to an end as surely as we had a beginning. And what we leave behind us – what we did, how we did it, our intentions, cannot be undone even if unknown by others; and we each can leave behind something of our work, our attempt to contain something of our irreplaceable perspective on this world, our dreams, our despair, our madness, our love. Yes, and bitterness, hatreds, disapproval, and explanations why. We can choose to not leave our testimony to be made by others who cannot tell it right, no matter the effort, or who won’t because it is meaningless to them… even distasteful or threatening.
We can make our testimonies whether they survive us or not. We can try.
So, I decided to try long before I understood what I was doing or reasons for it.
***
As a child, I recall lying in the floor for hours each day, drawing. I made up stories I told myself involving things that interested me from books – wars, sea life, archeology, prehistoric humans, dinosaurs, monsters, beings from other worlds. There on page after page of paper, I made sprawling panoramas of fantastic destruction, battlefields of overlapping periods of history and speculation about the future, usually adventurous and violent. There were heroes and villains, but mostly there were groups and the remnants of groups caught in horrific struggle.
There was no peace in my early art because there was none around me – I watched the Vietnam War on TV every evening during the news, saw wars reported in the newspapers, saw Rangers and Special Forces men on leave or permanently back “in the world” and stationed at the nearby Mountain Warfare School to teach the next batch of Rangers and Special Forces soldiers. I heard about people dying. I read about other wars.
It would take some time before I realized history is not mainly military history, but the history of the periods between wars, how violence was avoided, how average people lived in peace, what they did and contributed to the world in their day that made my better world possible. Or where those people failed and left me and my generation with a mess to clean or avoid – or just deal with. Mainly by suffering through.
I learned to read when I was 3 and steadily progressed because I wanted to know. There were secrets adults kept from children locked up in those difficult words, so I wanted to understand. And the more difficult the subject, the greater was my desire to own the difficulty, to bear it, to master it… even if it took years. I mean, what else was I doing? This seemed part of my purpose. With absolute certainty, I was here to make art and initially, “art” meant “visual art.” But a visual art informed by knowledge of the world, of people, of who we are, where we are: and I had time, so I filled it with trying to figure these things out. Not for grades, not for attention (I rarely showed my art to anyone and didn’t make it for anyone except myself), but simply to know truth or something about truth.
One essential item of knowledge I lacked for a very long time concerned how out-of-step I was with the people around me, our culture, my country, the world. My aims and desires were foolishness to adults; then again, for a while, that was perfectly fine – I was a young boy and some measure of idiocy is expected of young boys, I suppose. It was when I became older and people began to notice how out-of-place, how not-with-the-program, how disinterested in cooperating with the official view of “the future” I was – well, then I became seen, in general, as problematic.
In response, I realized I had need to explain myself (because I was under the delusion I’d be given a hearing about such things). Art did not explain anything – it showed things and, at that stage, I did not consider mine good enough to even share, much less rely upon as evidence in some sort of defense. So, I turned to writing, and that meant reading a great number of essays to see how others did this – and my first guide was Hunter S. Thompson, and his just printed volume called The GONZO PAPERS Vol. I; The Great Shark Hunt that fell into my 14-year-old hands completely by accident. Reading, I marveled; and I weighed myself in the balances and realized I was severely wanting – my writing was awkward and childish. I had a long way to go to be a true writer whose words would even be allowed in a room with Thompson’s. I dreamt of defending my way of life in words, not of making a fool of myself in the process. That takes no skill. So, I got to work teaching myself how to write essays by reading Orwell’s books on political writing and reading more high-quality essay work to get the sound and feeling of it.
***
“So there I sat and smoked my cigar until I lapsed into thought. Among other thoughts I remember these: “You are going on,” I said to myself, “to become an old man, without being anything, and without really undertaking to do anything. On the other hand, wherever you look about you, in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much heralded men who are coming into prominence…, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier, some by railways, others by omnibuses and steamboats, others by the telegraph, others by easily apprehended compendiums and short recitals of everything worth knowing, and finally the true benefactors of the age who make spiritual existence in virtue of thought easier and easier, yet more and more significant. And what are you doing?” Here my soliloquy was interrupted, for my cigar was smoked out and a new one had to be lit. So I smoked again, and then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: “You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier than it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder.” This notion pleased me immensely, and at the same time flattered me to think that I… would be loved and esteemed by the whole community. For when all combine… to make everything easier, there remains only one possible danger, namely, that the ease becomes so great that it becomes altogether too great; then there is only one want left, though it is not yet a felt want, when people will want difficulty. Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier…, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere. I was struck also with a strange reflection, whether it was not really my indolence I had to thank for the fact that this task became mine. For far from having found it, as Aladdin did the lamp, I must rather suppose that my indolence, by hindering me from intervening at an opportune time to make things easy, has forced upon me the only task was left over.”
Soren Kierkegaard
from “Becoming Subjective”
pp. 165-166
in CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT
Lazy.
From a fairly early age – 9, 10, 11 – my father’s constant judgment of me was that I am lazy. This verdict was most often delivered when I was sitting and drawing or reading or writing. Worse, I may have been silently staring blankly at the wall, lost in wondering, thinking, imagining other times, places, real and unreal. None of it was homework and he knew it because around then I gave up on doing assigned homework. I did what seemed valuable to me.
But my father’s voice was the voice of the general belief: If what you were doing was not useful, and by “useful” everyone meant instrumental in getting money or solving some immediate problem, then what you were doing was a waste of time. At best a “hobby,” and poor people did not indulge in hobbies aside from watching television now and then or drinking. Mechanics were useful; auto body men were useful; working at the yarn mill was useful; involvement in the chicken industry was useful; managing a store was useful. Art and writing and reading were only useful if they led directly to a useful job. And art led to nothing except poverty and debt; also, maybe drug abuse according to the stories. Writing and reading might open doors to management if one had skills in math and, to be honest, I gave up on math around the time I decided homework was optional, not unavoidable.
Music of a sort was the sole valued artform in my culture of origin. The Holiness Pentecostal faith sticks to a pretty rigid interpretation that claims all making of “images” is idolatry – even if you don’t try to worship the image or confuse the creation with the creator. Theological subtlety got you nowhere in my father’s religion, and the surrounding Baptists were pretty much in accord about this issue. The Methodists were, in my youthful opinion, sane – they had great figurative stained glass in their church, large Victorian-esque images of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, and so forth. But the church I was forced to attend didn’t even have a poster with a Jesus image. We had some abstract stained glass.
Music was seen as useful in worship and the creation of songs to be sung was also valued, though poetry was held in suspicion – so we produced no new hymns, just made use of what was available. Electric organs were used, pianos, even electric guitars and drums or tambourines a bit, when available. My father played said electric guitar when I was very young. But all this was seen as a means for getting the attention of the Almighty to gain favor and hopefully avoid ever-imminent wrath, preferably by being “raptured” – airlifted or “beamed up” – out of this wicked hell called Earth; secondarily it stoked the emotions needed for those who practiced glossolalia, which was most people in my father’s church, and those who ran around the aisles or fell out in ecstasies, those who jumped benches, screaming. I was 4-years-old; these were adults and I was stuck, embedded, in their version of reality as little as I fit there.
My more cynical guess was music really was entertaining for the human listeners – they were not singing prayers or Psalms --- and it gave them a creative outlet humans need but people like my father could not admit exists. Therefore, it was called useful and allowed to exist.
I did not sing and the music I preferred was not stuff allowed in that religion… along with the visual art I made and studied as I grew.
Had my father been a Roman Catholic and versed in theology, he may well have accused me of acedia, of having dealings with “the noonday devil.” But he had no recourse to such concepts. Not in those words.
So, “lazy.”
How many hours as a young person I spent bent over a drawing or a book, no matter the hand cramps I got from writing late into the night things no one would ever read because I knew none of it was good enough to share yet – none of that mattered. I was lazy. Nothing I did was worth money or grades, nothing I did was considered work, no matter how exhausting nor how many hours in a day were spent doing it. My father had no belief what I did was valuable – useful equaled valuable. Value had to be quantifiable in some way. It had to make life easier, as Kierkegaard says in the above quoted passage, and I was already on the path of creating difficulties – not that I understood at the time.
Being perverse, I gave up on being “useful” as any sort of goal for my life. Being useful here and there was only valuable to me for being able to pay bills and buy enough time and material to create art and try to write essays and study philosophy – all of which I saw as an extension of this creative urge that burned deep inside of me, that I had to do whether I could reduce it to an explanation or not. It was why I was here and I’ve known that as long as I’ve been conscious of making marks on substrates with pencils and pens. You may devalue and explain this away, but it is the central fact of my life, my existence.
My mother called me a fool. She really meant it. So, lazy and a fool by the age of 12.
”THE FOOL,” Card Zero, The Rider-Waite Tarot. The title my mother bestowed upon me in my 1970s childhood, tattooed on my upper left arm since 1999.]
My father could not beat it or deprive it out of me. My mother could not insult, scream, rage, or ignore it out of me. Nothing short of death or illness is apt to stop me from doing it, even if surreptitiously, even without an audience. And I’d sooner die than voluntarily stop making things, useful or not, noticed or not.
Who around me understood – or cared – that my choice of path, my destiny, small as it is, would be repaid measure for measure with difficulty, with effort atop effort just to go a little way further, with opposition, with being ignored, invisible. Yet… I had to do it, the art, the writing, the reading, responding to ideas, replying to life through participating in the Great Conversation that is humanity. To bear witness – not to myself (Alone, who am I?) – but to what I witness from this position in time and space and thought and knowledge and ignorance that is, incidentally, seen by me and is my burden to bear to the end. As pointless as that end may appear, if it is noticed at all in the flood of words, the deluge to be unleashed by the shrieking firehoses of AI generated faux literature: An illusion of writing. The artificial replacement for a lived, human perspective on the world, on reality that pretends to speak in human ways to humans – yet utterly devoid of humanity and our cares, our dread.
***
Engineer the future now.
Damn tomorrow, future now!
Throw the switches, prime the charge.
Yesterday's for mice and gods.
from “Mice and Gods”
CLUTCH
ROBOT HIVE/EXODUS
“A camp of techno-optimists rebuffs A.I. doomerism with old-fashioned libertarian boomerism, insisting that all the hand-wringing about existential risk is a kind of mass hysteria. They call themselves “effective accelerationists,” or e/accs (pronounced “e-acks”), and they believe A.I. will usher in a utopian future—interstellar travel, the end of disease—as long as the worriers get out of the way. On social media, they troll doomsayers as “decels,” “psyops,” “basically terrorists,” or, worst of all, “regulation-loving bureaucrats.” “We must steal the fire of intelligence from the gods [and] use it to propel humanity towards the stars,” a leading e/acc recently tweeted….
“Grace’s dinner parties, semi-underground meetups for doomers and the doomer-curious, have been described as “a nexus of the Bay Area AI scene.” At gatherings like these, it’s not uncommon to hear someone strike up a conversation by asking, “What are your timelines?” or “What’s your p(doom)?” Timelines are predictions of how soon A.I. will pass particular benchmarks, such as writing a Top Forty pop song, making a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, or achieving artificial general intelligence, the point at which a machine can do any cognitive task that a person can do. (Some experts believe that A.G.I. is impossible, or decades away; others expect it to arrive this year.)”
Among the A.I. Doomsayers, by Andrew Marantz, March 11, 2024, The New Yorker; Read it HERE.
“OpenAI’s latest system, Sora, creates videos on the basis of text prompts. You write a prompt and Sora does the rest. The result: highly photorealistic videos and endearing animations. From mammoths sauntering through a snowy meadow to a market full of people in Lagos, Nigeria, in the year 2056. Nothing seems too wild for Sora’s imagination.
“Sora is not yet available to the wider public, because OpenAI is first letting “red teamers” assess the product in regard to its potential for abuse. OpenAI also asked creative professionals for feedback on how Sora can benefit them, framing Sora as a tool that could enhance their output.
“At the same time, however, technologies like Sora may render many creatives irrelevant. Just last month, famed director and producer Tyler Perry halted an $800 million studio expansion after seeing what Sora is capable of. It would eliminate the need for him to build sets or travel to film on-location. “I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.”
How Much of Our Humanity Are We Willing to Outsource to AI?, by SAGE CAMMERS-GOODWIN and ROSALIE WAELEN; MARCH 27, 2024; THE NATION; Read it HERE.
"Creatives."
From the tone and direction of that article from The Nation quoted above, one may well wonder if the buyers of "creativity" really mean "recreatives" – making things for recreational purposes -- when calling those of us who make things "creatives" instead of artists and artisans. It seems implied that what we do is more of a recreational activity, a hobby, a pastime -- a mere bagatelle, as they say, for the wealthy to underwrite and pursue for frivolous reasons, if any at all aside from seeing one’s name in print. It’s a rich kid’s passtime, as one of these articles reports working writers saying.6
Being creative in general -- or, as we used to say, being artists, writers, and craftsmen of various sorts -- is certainly now seen as replaceable. It’s a thing we may do without. ChatGPT is not your friend if you intended to make a financial living, even a partial one, making art. In the long view, which may not be nearly as long as one might guess, that's going away.
In the Hollywood system of movie making, television, and streaming content, even before AI was created that could displace a writer [or even most production members except the cast… yet], economics already pushed the entire process in the direction of diminishing the role of artists, as a report in the May 2024 issue of HARPER'S amply argues and shows ("The Life and Death of Hollywood," by Daniel Bessner, May 2024, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, pgs. 25 - 32).
AI simply speeds and facilitates the end of humans writing human things that human audiences have living responses with.
Myself -- as this is my testament of a sort, my rant, my complaint -- I've already admitted I did not become an artist nor begin writing or continue out of a desire for money. Just to do it, do it well, and perform the activity I am performing now: To explain, argue, persuade, critique, bemoan, warn, examine, wonder, hypothesize, guess, meditate, joke, to laugh. To participate in the long conversation that is humanity.
But I did not set out to be considered worthless, either, that my work be seen as pointless -- if noticed at all -- and myself to be seen as disposable.
No, this is not a new phenomenon. Humans of certain classes and types, have been considered expendable ever since the eruption of civilizations, at least. Some are made to be sacrificed or wasted or left behind to die of exposure, neglect; to fall dead of starvation, plagues, want, shelter, war, natural disasters and humanly intended ones. Death camps, genocides, nuclear weaponry, chemical weapons, gang rape, hails of shells rained on and bullets hurtled through towns and villages to create terror and gain territory and "victory" for those defined as being "worthy" of the gifts brought by such misery.
But to write and no longer even have the vague hope of a readership except oneself, even when shared publicly, freely? Well, as the man said a few paragraphs ago: A writer may need to write, but do people really need more to read? Do people have time to wade through something of any length that was not marketed to them by corporate advertisements and paid "pushes" on Google or other browsers?
And since AI is at the gates to consume all paid work for writers and other "creatives," even the lowest, least paid, least admirable of hack jobs and tabloid exploitation, what audience will a writer have except oneself and, perhaps, one's Creator -- if that? So, as I keep asking myself, why do it?
We've repeatedly established this writer does not make any money to speak of from his writing, nor is his audience growing: once, for five or six years early in the 2000s, I wrote editorials for a weekly newspaper in a small town and enjoyed a rather large audience, even if I tended to enrage some of them. I knew I was being read then because there was human response: once in a while in person, sometimes in letters to the editor, sometimes in private e-mail and letters. There was approval and disapproval and misunderstanding, but mainly there were human beings on the other end who read the words, my words. It could be terrifying and it set off anxiety sometimes to know living people were reading what I wrote; but as different as my opinions may have been from those dominant in that community, I was included within the community in the way the cranks and town drunks and prostitutes were included. I had company and ears for what I said, so a hope something might break through the cultural crust now and again. The ideas I presented: there was hope someone might see something by their light common opinion had previously missed.
Now, not so much. Not really at all.
Is there a difference between what I am doing and just not typing all this out to begin with, spending the hours required to make something for... no one?
Does my “output” require “enhancement” by machine learning? Will my work or me be benefitted in any way by “increased productivity?” OpenAI and associated companies work to maximize economic value for other corporations until, perhaps, OpenAI absorbs those corporations or vice versa. In between, “creatives” are going to be removed from the economic picture. No one is going to work three rotten jobs to subsidize a newspaper, a movie studio, a streaming service owned by faceless billionaires and their investors just so they can write and have an audience; meanwhile, AI doesn’t care about such issues. It is unconscious of human, or any, realities. It just pukes “content” on demand. Feed it IP, let it spew 100 different scripts on the same subject, pick one, clean it up – or don’t, eventually – and have Sora vomit the whole movie out in a few minutes. Make adjustments, ship it out to the remainder of people who can afford to watch it. Hyper-realistic cartoons for adults.
It'll sell.
But I don’t need or want it. Nor can I afford the high-powered versions of any of this technology behind the pay walls. Meanwhile, playing with the free version of ChatGPT is essentially training ChatGPT to sound more human. You’re handing away your life and livelihood by using it, as far as I or anyone can tell.
“What’s your p(doom)?” he asks pretentiously, knowing full well his personal, individual doom has arrived and he’s eking out his final days trying not to fall into the most miserable sort of grave imaginable. Boy, that’s the dream, isn’t it?
When I was three and watched the first moon landing, I recall desiring to go into space. Images from Kubrik’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” promised it. I was told of the advent of flying cars and the widening of human rights and freedom to all. Not that those were connected issues, but in my kid-mind, they were: Progress. We were progressing from a worse and more hopeless state to a better, more hopeful, wide-open future, a clean, peaceful horizon. Penny Lane, Strawberry Fields Forever. The aesthetic of Jack Kirby super-machines doing Good For All.
[Jack Kirby; DREAM MACHINE at the Jack Kirby Museum; see HERE.]
An old dream, gone now. What the hell, I AM the Walrus, but all I know is without some degree of physical and mental stability, creatives cannot continue to be creative, even for free, even for no audience, damn it.
“G'goo goo g'joob.”
***
Last year, a couple of folks wrote singer-songwriter Nick Cave about the subjects of creativity and what the problem might be with using ChatGPT to “make things faster and easier” in the arts. His response has become well-known and oft quoted. I’m going to quote it at length because, in making my final statements, I believe Cave has the same intuition about the process of making things I’ve discovered looking back at what I was doing and what many have been doing as artists and why:
“In the story of the creation, God makes the world, and everything in it, in six days. On the seventh day he rests. The day of rest is significant because it suggests that the creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place. This struggle is the validating impulse that gives God’s world its intrinsic meaning. The world becomes more than just an object full of other objects, rather it is imbued with the vital spirit, the pneuma, of its creator.
“ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.
“ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.
“ChatGPT’s intent is to eliminate the process of creation and its attendant challenges, viewing it as nothing more than a time-wasting inconvenience that stands in the way of the commodity itself. Why strive?, it contends. Why bother with the artistic process and its accompanying trials? Why shouldn’t we make it ‘faster and easier?’”
Nick Cave
from THE RED HAND FILES
Issue #248/August 2023
[Read the entire letter/essay HERE.]
There’s the main thing that I’ve had to recall and have reinforced by hearing from other creative people: When I began drawing, when I began writing, I did it in a conversation with what seemed myself, but more than myself, too. Making art is an activity, it is the doing of the activity: I am a painter while I am struggling my way through a painting, creating vessels to contain meanings with my pen and ink work, hammering symbols and sounds to bring images and symbols beyond merely me into the world.
Art is the activity of creating. The residue of the creativity is what many people mistakenly, solely, call “art”: the finished painting; the completed drawing; the recording of a symphony; a novel; a book of poems; cinema. No, all of that is the evidence an artist was in the world, working. It is the part in which others may share to some degree, from the outside as observers after the fact of creation.
But the art, the creativity is, at root, the struggle, the honest struggle to speak and respond to life, human life in this world. That it often leaves behind an object that goes on to have its own existence, its own “more-than-life,” is a separate subject. But the demand for that object, the salable commodity, the collectible thing, the concretized expenditure of a creative life reduced to monetary values, capitalist demands, is the only thing our culture presently cares about. The inherent value of the life of the human, the human activity of creation, of bearing the burden of wrestling with the angel for the secret words, the glimpse of dreams… well, from the point of view of money, all of that is so much nonsense and waste.
So, the efficient thing is to minimize and eradicate that part of the process that gives the salable objects or events. Art without an artist becomes optimal, and so it has been optimized. That is why ChatGPT exists, ultimately, and that is why image generation AI like Dall-E and OpenAI’s new Sora exist: to deliver the concrete, salable “product” without the problem of artists and their desire to create: artists wastefully throw themselves into the activity of diving for treasures in the depths or coming up empty handed – hit or miss; our moods are often unstable, disordered — there are often heavy personal prices paid to even pursue an artist’s voice and vision; what we do is as often as not an experimental shot in the dark. We continue for the sake of creating and saying what we need to say and show.
On the other hand, the economy and the society that created the values of the market do not need or want artists. They just want an unending stream of art, entertainment. Where it comes from is of no importance. Cheap and mediocre and predictable will do as well as surprising and sometimes horrifyingly unmarketable echoes of the ineffable.
We can toss or warehouse the unmarketable and there is no one to complain. The machines don’t care one way or another.
I think Cave said this succinctly and beautifully. Honestly.
Kirby Ferguson, who, G-d bless him, is trying to cobble together a living in part teaching people to use ChatGPT and AI in their creative work, read Cave’s letter/essay and, I think, missed the point. Or intentionally side-stepped Cave’s point. His response was not worthy of what Cave wrote; Ferguson claimed Cave has jammed the new technology into a fear-based Christian narrative of an “Apocalypse” following the ruin of creation — though none of that latter bit is apparent in what Cave wrote. He stuck with the metaphor of the Genesis creation myth, which is Jewish, and never moves on to some analogy between AI and the purely Christian theory of “original sin” (not a Jewish belief — because not in the Torah, including “Bereshit” - aka “Genesis”) and the imminent destruction of a sinful Earth found in the Christian Book of Revelations. Also unlike the Genesis story of creation Cave sticks with as a poetic framework.
” “The Shock of the New” is culture’s allergic reaction to new art forms. It’s an attempt to kill off the invader…
“This doesn’t just happen with art, it happened with the internet, cars, trains, factories, or electric lights. Anything that was once new – which is everything – was subjected to the shock of the new and targeted for defeat or elimination.
“This is happening now with AI…
“Cave argues that writing song lyrics with ChatGPT is “participating in [the] erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself.”
“Holy shit guys!
“Nick Cave certainly has wisdom to share about the value of art and how it enriches your life. But he doesn’t have wisdom about ChatGPT, and c’mon, has he ever used this stuff? Judging by his level of revulsion, which is extreme, I’d guess he’s probably never typed a single prompt…
“One of the weaknesses of the artistic mindset can be insularity. Put more bluntly: your head is stuck up your ass. Sitting by yourself and composing your great thoughts often means you’re pretty into yourself. I’m speaking from experience here. [Capitals mine; italics in the original.]
“Cave is guilty of this in his letter. He’s thinking of his own struggle and striving, but he’s not thinking of his partner in the dance, the listener.
“I’ve spent thousands of hours of my life as a listener. The listener is seeking connection with another soul and insight into themselves and into life.
“Only extraordinary experiences can do this. If good art is easy and common, then good art is worthless. If everybody can spit out great lyrics with ChatGPT, nobody will be paying attention. The truly great work will have to be even better – or at least different.”
Kirby Ferguson
from “AI and The Shock of the New”
EVERYTHING IS A REMIX (Blog)
Read it all HERE.
Ferguson equates art only with the product one can share with listeners and observers from the outside – what I’ve called above “the residue of the activity, the evidence.” Of course, since this is the part people who did not create the art can participate in, it is over-emphasized in our culture – but mistakenly.
“[Cave’s] thinking of his own struggle and striving, but he’s not thinking of his partner in the dance, the listener.”
If only things were that simple, but no artist can wait or even count on “his partner in the dance” to even show up. The art must be made – the true partners in the dance are from the history of humanity, largely gone, and from memory, and through the lenses of the artist’s knowledge, beliefs, traditions, rebellions, ignorance, and foolishness. The making of art – which alone IS art, strictly speaking – is a damn lonely business, Mr. Ferguson. There’s no real audience during the act of creativity, high brow, low brow, no brow, pop culture or otherwise – and I don’t recognize a real difference, ultimately.
In fact, the conscious mind has to get out of the way in order to let the work flow through – the glass of the self has to allow the light of whatever sort through to fill the vessels the artist prepares. It isn’t so much a matter of having one’s “head up one’s ass” during the making of art as it is getting one’s head out of the picture, setting personal damage and fear and desires out of the way – to stop thinking about making in order to just get on with creating. We think about and edit and theorize later, after the fact of making a work of art, before turning the object, the evidence of artistic activity loose into the world. And then others can join in or not.
But, as I’ve previously stated, the AI does not exist for artists – it exists to create a faux product, an art-like product that can act in the place of what once the market depended on artists to hand over at the end of their work. The commodity without the creator. Golden eggs without the geese.
“I want it NOW!”
And so Veruca Salt, dear soul, now has her cake without a baker and a firehose of binary code entertainment and wealth at will – since that is all money and digitalized content are in essence.
***
And so, I will write for the sake of bearing witness to humanity and being a human at this most bizarre of moments. If, in the end, I’m doing it by hand in notebooks again, that’s where the writing will be, just as a few decades ago, that’s the only place it existed to begin with. There are boxes full of such in my garage.
In more hopeful moments, I consider, perhaps, there is a mystical aspect involved in human existence. Even if not seen by anyone else, the very fact that I was here and I did my work in the silence cannot be undone, as I’ve noted before. Now I will add: that I did as I should have done and tried to perform my part of my work, that, in itself, may make some minute change in existence. Perhaps something similar is what Nick Cave means by the “collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.”
I am in the process of converting to Judaism. Tikkun Olam, the repair of “fixing” of the world is something I deeply believe in – something I believed before studying its real meanings and depths: And doing my work, “becoming who I am” to repair what small thing I am here to do, is the thing I must choose to do, hard or easy. The only “reward” is that I made the attempt, that maybe I can stand before G-d and report that I was closer than further to being the best “Richard Van Ingram” that could have been in this time and place.
None of that is a rational, philosophical reason. It’s certainly not scientific. But it’s meaningful for me. It’s a human, humane meaning I don’t need to prove. It kindles hope. It orients me. So I create, I write. If there is no audience, if I cannot make a living even teaching, cannot get affordable insurance, if humans are valued solely as a means to someone else’s ends instead of being inherently valuable, well… I have to, and long ago did, redefine “success” and “winning” in life. It’s not a game, life: it’s an activity, a doing that must be performed aiming at high levels intensity, bringing true values into the world in one’s concrete actions – justice, mercy, courage, self-control, patience, good judgment, care, hope. Love of all sorts. Doing these things make me a better than worse person and these ethical values tend to improve the world around me, help the people around me simultaneously. Part of this I do through writing and making visual art and sometimes teaching when I can get hired.
I will not know the effects of anything I do – ultimately no one does, even if they can see effects in the immediate moment. In 500 years, how will the world be different because of the convergence of all these ripples from the undeniable, though unknown, fact people – all of us -- kept creating even without audience, without care, without vital support?
I do not know. But I do fear if I do not do what I came to do, things may be worse or delayed or even slide off backwards, historical level lost in an avoidable avalanche of idiocy and carelessness. My responsibility is not to cooperate in such “going backwards” and loss of historical level. If I choose to throw off the task, why will everyone else not do the same? And if only I pick up my task, what harm have I caused? Especially in the face of AI eventually making what one does appear pointless at worst, a vanity project at best.
That part of the work – the effect, what occurs due to the residue of my actions left behind – isn’t mine to be concerned with. That requires the voluntary cooperation of other humans to attain its best possible effects. The “partners in the dance” have to decide to show up. I am not the Divinity – such issues are the domain of the Creator, HaShem, not the likes of me.
My task was to work for its own sake, even if the circumstance has made it spiritually bleak to pursue and makes culturally imposed poverty likely unavoidable. It makes me seem more of a useless fool, just as my father and mother predicted in their wisdom. My bank account gives testimony to the clarity of their utilitarian vision as well as the absence of any class respectability; so, certainly, my biological parents were partially right, but they had no idea why they were right. It was only because they gave voice to the general tendency of American cultural values in the final half of the 20th century. Just as most people did – a mass opinion was imposed on reality; thus, it became a self-fulfilling prophesy. The useful, cheap, and easy is preferred to the difficult, the experimental, the inherently valuable especially when not efficient, free, and “good enough” for mass consumption.
“Poor, poor pitiful me,” sang Warren Zevon.
“Partners in the dance,” indeed. They did not and do not show up. Perhaps in 20 years, 200 years, 2000 years. I will never meet them in this world; but perhaps some scraps of my life as contained in what is left of some work may be seen by others. Perhaps not. That’s why the artistic life and task is “insular,” but not in the sense of being parochial and egocentric, self-enclosed and vain – it’s simply a thing done alone, but in conversation with all that came before. It is the work of introversion, not extraversion initially.
But if I do not do the work, my own part of the work, there will be no evidence I did any work or even gave consideration to doing it. In the undeniable “it has been done,” whether anyone knows or not, that is history, time – well, I turned in my homework finally. And if I do not do it, no evidence, no residue will be left in time that I did my work whether any human ever knows it or not. But I’ll know and I will not depart from my chosen path. And my G-d will know as well, and knows my intentions; and though the audience’s beliefs about that may differ, I have chosen my path, so I must walk it till I am done. To do otherwise is to choose to be a different person than I am – it would be existential suicide without any reason other than “times are hard.”
What sort of example would that be, to quit because the task has no external rewards and even comes demanding payment of a price?
Time, human time, is always and has always been hard if one bothers to notice.
***
EPILOGUE
Command: "Write an epitaph for the human race once it has died."
Chat GPT Answer:
Here Lies Humanity
In the quiet embrace of eternal slumber, Rests the legacy of a once-vibrant species. Born of stardust, fleeting as the morning dew, Whispers of progress now silenced, overdue.
Through towering cities and boundless dreams, Humanity danced in the cosmic streams. From ancient tales to the digital age, A chapter ends on this earthly stage.
In quest for knowledge, in love and strife, They navigated the tapestry of life. Yet, the threads of existence now unwind, Leaving echoes of a species left behind.
Gone are the voices, the laughter, the tears, In the cosmic vastness, silence appears. On this pale blue dot, a memory fades, As the last heartbeat of humanity cascades.
May the echoes of their stories remain, In the cosmos, an indelible stain. A testament to dreams that dared to soar, In the grand tapestry of forevermore.
Chat GPT
5 January 2024
(With apologies to all human writers whose works were data mined to train this monstrosity on its LLM. Yes, I gave it the command written above that resulted in this.)
I could spend some time picking this thing apart – for example, the line:
“May the echoes of their stories remain, In the cosmos, an indelible stain.”
So… the “echoes of our stories remain” but in the cosmos they create “an indelible stain?” That may or may not be true in the long run, after all humanity is gone, but an epitaph is usually praises – this one was praising in a bumper sticker, Hallmark card sort of way except for slips like this one. “Stain” does not have a positive connotation outside the use of dyes on cloth, for example, or the stuff we put on raw wood to bring out its coloration or change it. That doesn’t seem to be the point here. It appears superficially that the machine was aiming at saying, “Gee whiz, y’all will be missed! You was purdy nifty and all, y’know,” and wound up making us sound like an oil spill on a white carpet or other mess that the cosmic maid service will have to clean… which, the program having no intention, while funny, is just unintentionally “off.”
It’s obvious ChatGPT did not learn by listening to the words, their musicality, their weight — or lack thereof. And so this thing sounds generic. I cannot imagine this recited by a human voice. Certainly, not an adult one.
“…the threads of existence now unwind, Leaving echoes of a species left behind…”
How much noise does an unwinding tapestry make? What sort – is it squeaky? Like a kazoo? Harmonica? Screaming-chicken-esque? Loud enough to leave metaphorical echoes? Or has this thing not mixed its metaphors?
Plus, what the hell does this line even mean to say: “Leaving echoes of a species left behind…?” Does this mean 1) the passing of our species would leave metaphorical echoes behind; or does it mean 2) our species was left behind – whatever that means – and the “poet'“ can hear the echoes from “back there” where we’re still complaining or crying, trying to call the Galactic Taxi for a ride out of wherever we were “left behind”?
And can “heartbeats cascade?” As in run down a mountainside, like a river and waterfalls? I can’t make that into a mental image without it becoming cartoonish and absurd.
I’ll stop there. Comb the rest of it on your own.
It's low grade, “It’ll do,” I-did-the-bare-minimum-for-homework poetry. Or an imitation of poetry, rather. It’s not even mediocre unless we mean this is what an average person who really doesn’t care about (thus has never experienced from within life), oh: humanity; cosmic destruction; death; life; meaning; why we speak or why we write poems to begin with… – this is what that sort of person would turn in as an answer to the assignment assuming they understand how to lay out an appropriate poetry form.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re all real sad. What a bummer. Thoughts and prayers. Enough of that: Move on.” That’s what I get from this – pretty much nothing. To quote the Weaver Brothers, “Meh.”
Had I given an epitaph for humanity, I think my first choice is Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, 2nd Movement, Allegretto. No words.
However, soundtrack folks began associating this piece of music with rather apocalyptic events in movies some time ago so it may now seem cliche; I think I first recall it from the final sequence in the movie ZARDOZ where it was both poignant and celebratory – though, even for 1974, that movie is far from the majority’s tastes, though I’d recommend it. It’s on topic for what we’ve discussed here. John Boorman – what can I say? He’d just made DELIVERANCE, another famous movie that is also a sort of examination of what human beings are and how far they can be pushed before the veneer of civilization washes right off; that is, what does it take to de-humanize human beings and what sort of vicious thing would be left over after such a disaster?
I lack the hubris to believe I can write a genuine potential epitaph for an extinct humanity; and humans have already created wonderful things, any of which or all of which are the best of epitaphs. Who we were at our best is its own testimony. As is what we were at our worst. An ikon of “Humanity” would just as likely have a mushroom cloud as a halo and at least one fistful of machineguns. A bandolier of children’s surprised and severed heads tied by the hair, a golden Dollar Sign for a belt buckle.
All of that is silly. I’ve made the point I set out to make – I’ll publish it on my Substack and see where, if anywhere, it goes.
Assuming you made it to the end, I thank you. Assuming you didn’t, I thank you. Sadly, maybe, but truly, I’d write it even if no one would ever read it. Yes, that’s unsatisfying for me, lonely, but this is not done for an extraneous reward… doing it is the privilege.
Once, as a college instructor, I gave an hour lecture to an empty room. I did not record it, the students were responsible for knowing the material, and they all decided to lay out on the same day to watch sports and party. My duty and desire was to give the lecture to any and all who cared to learn what I had to share – I did my part. My absent students had to figure out that material on their own — had to read and try to figure the subject out. They were amply warned. Their job was to show up and hear the lecture; they blew it off; maybe they learned not to do that to a professor at a real school… or they didn’t.
As for this writing, the residue and its marketability or complete lack of appeal is simply the circumstance of making a thing in this world and sending it on its way. The art was made. My homework has been turned in along with the dog that contains it. No other way I could figure to do it.
Richard Van Ingram
aka Gershom
September 2023 – 19 April 2024
NOTE: I cannot remember in which essay Ortega made this statement — Possibly History as a System?; but its implications are woven throughout his philosophy of vital reason.
NOTE: In my brief naivete, I thought these Taylor Swift videos had all been removed by threat of a lawsuit, but after checking, I was very wrong; there’s too many videos and too many locations and no real law or regulatory agency governing this issue.
NOTE: For digitized art, there already exist programs designed to “poison” the images – Glaze and Nightshade. If an AI attempts to scrape these images, it will upload the “poison” which, uploaded just a few times, interferes with the AI’s ability to produce the correct recognizable images based on written commands. And it does this across the board with all the images the generative AI attempts to present. By poisoning a fraction of the training base, AI creators are now faced with the reality of needing to think about admitting whose original art is being used royalty free and in violation of copyright and other agreements – and eventually, perhaps, offer to pay for the use of human art instead of vacuuming the art up to create the training models “for free” before replacing the artists altogether. Alternatively, the AI companies may design other AIs to repair the poisoned programs, recognize the digital presence of scraped up poison, and even remove the poison so the images can, again, be used to train the image-making AIs. Which will, in turn, require the creators of Glaze and Nightshade to change and improve the variations of poison pills available to embed in imagery. Again, the hope is the corporations decide it is easier to pay and acknowledge the artists instead of stealing their images to feed into training models. Programs such as Glaze and Nightshade have the possibility of forcing the AI companies to be ethical for a brief time and compensate artists when human-created images are needed in order to, eventually, destroy the market for human created art. (All this said – I see no analogous programs for writing – and it is probably too late for writers to fight back in this way.) See “This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI,” by Melissa Heikkilä, October 23, 2023, MIT Technology Review; Read it HERE.
and “What Is Nightshade?” by The Nightshade Team, University of Chicago; Read it Here.
"The Life and Death of Hollywood," by Daniel Bessner, May 2024, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, pgs. 25 - 32