The humanity motif is running its course. Our ideas of what creativity is, what makes art valuable, what makes a human valuable, are being challenged and forcibly intruded upon in our lives. We joked the NFT craze was just that. This, AI, everything about it. It isn’t going away.
Money is the driving factor behind all of it. Cutting out the middleman, I thought I’d never say that about creativity, about the damn writers and artists. And here we are, apparently they're the middleman between creativity and the slot machine bingo rolling deep into the eye sockets of frothing corporate knuckleheads. They’re the bad actors, the early adopters of the technology who’re pawning themselves off as artists. Where we once viewed it as a craft to be mastered and never perfected over many lifetimes, what AI does is comparatively sacrilege to all of that. They’re the companies who are forcing me into opting into systems that integrate their AI. Who, in honest goodness, asked for AI in Whatsapp, of all fucking places? Who decided to name Facebook, META? We know who. Those with stars in their eyes blinded by possibility and those with dollar signs in their eyes blinded by the glistening gold like King Midas did. The reaction to AI is very much expected. We’ve been raised on an idea of what creativity is, what art means, and that has been foundationally ripped apart. We’ve been raised by media where AI is a cautionary tale of man’s hubris at best, and the loss of the human essence at worst. There’s always been another side, though. One talking about how technology becomes more human than the cold corporate calculating sacks of bone and flesh. Those stories were effective, but I can’t help the sting of cynicism given the context, now that this age of technology is upon us. That it is an agenda, forcing its way into our lives to get us accustomed to it, so we continue to mindlessly consume, mindlessly unquestion, mindlessly unchallenge.
Frankly, I was scared by the possibility of AI. Now? I am exhausted. Because I know it is a battle of attrition, and time has shown self-serving interests is a persistent mother fucker. They will ride out the storm, inching bit by bit, acre by acre, continent by continent, and people can’t hold out forever. Every shitty decision made by companies they reverse, and sneakily add in later. Game companies sneaking in paid mods. Reddit and their API changes. Unity being brazenly hideous, and rolling back most, but not all, of their changes. They win by margins we never get back.
Earlier, I said the humanity motif has run its course. Because our definition of value as humans are being brought into question. If an AI can do jobs, then how do we determine the value of an individual? What separates the Barrack Obamas from the Bob lastnames? That’s an entire discussion apart from this.
Maybe this is a good thing. Creativity was never profitable, never safe. It always promised the allure of stardom, drawing away from the corpses littering the gilded path to get there. At least, if you’re still into it, you’re in it for the purest reason of all. For the sake of it. For the sake of creativity, of your creativity, rather than the idea of success. That modicum of promise evaporated the moment there was even a sub-par replacement. There’s no money to be made, an audience of one, with a belly filled by only self-fulfilment. Perhaps you will starve if it is the only path you take, but where hunger kills in days, without fulfilment, you die either way. Differently. Worse. A slow process, piece by piece, year by year, until there is nothing left to live for. It staves off the other hunger, satiates the voices in your head. Perhaps this is the endpoint of creativity.
