FUCK AI

A music colleague recently posted a defense of AI-generated artwork as unworthy of the word fake. It exists, therefore it is real. So of course, I had to chime in with my two-cents, generated from my own brain and passing through my own emotions that the topic unleashes. As follows:

 

From my point of view, to deserve the word art, something has to pass through the emotional layers of a live human being. I wouldn't use the words "fake" or "real," just "art" and "something else." 

 

And in full disclosure, I hate AI with every fiber of my being. It's just the next technological distraction that is trying to replace and displace human beings at a time when the real task is to grow more soul and celebrate the human intelligence and imagination. I just did a 90-minute class with 3rd graders based on nothing more than letters—their sound, their shape, words that start from them— and the room was alive with laughter, connection, creative imagination and sheer delight. Nothing plugged in anywhere. I would wish us to be less fascinated by the next machine and turn our whole energy back to the human beings we have not yet become.

 

The deeper truth is this: we are not morally, emotionally, politically or spiritually prepared for the kind of power AI generates. Already the news is coming in about AI generated nude images of high school girls being flashed around social media. The old “it’s just a tool that we need to learn responsibly” is bullshit because no one is preparing us to use it responsibly. As Marshall McCluhan said years ago, “the medium is the message.” Just as e-mail and texting is inclined to bring out the worst of us in human communication by removing us from face-to-face conversation and accountability for our words and the responsibility to think before speaking, so is AI a toy now for adolescent brains (of all ages) with no developed empathetic frontal lobes to do some deep damage to other people with their “harmless” vicious postings, both words and images. If we agree that developing human eloquence and intelligence is a good goal, then chatgpt is the medium that shoots us in our foot. And take another look at the film "Wag the Dog" to consider how now there is another tool available to the powerful and greedy and evil to manufacture consent and sway elections with truly fake news, images, quotes and more. 

 

It's all distraction, distraction, distraction from having to attend to the difficult work of growing our own souls and counter-evolutionary to everything we need to survive and thrive. All the hours we'll need to spend to legislate abuse and take training for responsible use, the hours spent in courts, the precious time spent talking about all this instead of the conversations we really need to be having. And for what? Do we really need any more interesting images that a person can't create? More articles written without a moral point of view because a machine is soulless? More ways to make the cab drivers, the TV writers, the actors in films increasingly obsolete? 

 

In over 4,000 posts, I don’t believe I’ve ever used a four-letter word, but I stand by my title here—Fuck AI. Let’s get down to the real work