With AI on the verge of upending everything (and I really believe it is), I think the following:
Will things soon become too easy?
Will we long for the days when writing, and thinking, and acting, took active, concentrated effort? Will mere doing, unaided by AI, become as rare as making your own clothes or physically visiting a record store to get new music? Held onto as a piquant and backwards-looking subculture, not as the baseline for existence?
I fear so.
Even now, I feel tempted to feed the concept for this blog post, about nostalgia for a time that isn’t yet gone, into an AI. Why? Because I feel it would be easier. I could dig deep and interrogate my thoughts and feelings on a murky, half-known topic. Or I could let someone (something) else do it mostly competently, quickly and for free.
If I feel this impulse so quickly and so strongly only months after using a truly effective AI for the first time, how will those who don’t suffer from a pathological intransigence be affected? How long will it take for every office email, every social media post, every ad, every TV script, every new car design, every video game, every movie, every conversation with another party, to be overrun with AI’s dry efficiency?
Not long. Not long at all. First, it was slow. We’ve reached the end of slow, the end of the era of “AI could be big someday.” AI is big now. Today. It’s already restructuring education, research, politics, and white-collar work of all kinds. And this isn’t even the big commercial one. This is a “free research preview” chat app, which was somewhat niche—until suddenly everyone was using it.
We’re now hitting fast. We’re hitting exponential. Exponentially easier. Exponentially easier, cheaper, and faster to do the things you least want to do. Like write copy and SEO. And soon, even the things you want to do. Like write anything else. Or see a movie that wasn’t made with your name on it. Probably, even, talking to strangers at all.
So, the talking to strangers, and the making the movies, and the writing the prickly stuff—that’s going to become optional, and therefore incompatible with a fast and normal modern life. It’s going to take time, attention, effort, and care to do even the ugly, distorted, careless half-actions that constitute our lives today.
As usual, I keep thinking about music and movies. With algorithmic playlists micro-tuned by algorithms (precursors to the coming wave of actual AI) and video feeds just as targeted and niche, we are already pushing what could be called ”the legacy arts” into an early grave. Vast quantities of procedurally generated chillout background music and keyword-soup video terror mashups for kids already account for a significant, if not majority, share of streams on Spotify and YouTube. The business models (more streams, irrespective of quality = more money) encourage the proliferation of this pseudo-content. These artifacts are not the result of intentional human effort, even if humans created the programs that made them. They’ve been growing for years.
AI gives us a future of the best chillout music and the best branded finger family songs (what characters do you want to sing?), forever and without weight. It’s a future disconnected from human hands. From textures, and grime, and mistakes, and stupidity. Smooth is easy and offers no resistance. Maybe we should hold onto those things that do offer resistance while they’re still around.
Excerpts from Andrei Tarkovsky’s diary, as read by Larisa Tarkovskaya in the documentary Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988)
Published February 2, 2023