AI AI oh…

My AI manifesto (from a longer post published on my Patreon):

1) It is not the idea. It is the execution. The last “original” story was probably told by Neanderthals around the first fire that the humanoid race ever built to warm their nights. But that story has been told and retold and retold and retold again by so many – it has passed through generations of minds and souls and been added to and subtracted from and reshaped by them. A story is not just an idea – it is not just the destination. It is a journey, and it is a journey shared by two individual nodes – the creator node, the writer, the story teller, and the receiver node, the reader, the consumer. The message is passed between these two poles. The very essence of the original “idea” is changed by that passage. That is the story.

2) A storyteller is not replaceable by a computer. A human soul cannot be. So even if the AI ever learns to “write” it will still not be a real story, just something stolen from real human minds and imaginations and dreams and cobbled back together into something resembling a narrative form. Nothing “written” by an AI is actually “written”. It is just decomposed and recomposed. It is no longer even that original Neanderthal story; it is no more than a pale reflection of it in a mirror.

3) No writer I know has given permission for their work to be used in this manner so any AI “work” is by definition plagiarism, and it is stolen from real people. Real people who have to earn enough money to keep a roof over their heads, to feed themselves and their children and their cats, to light a metaphorical fire to keep warm when the winter nights draw in. Every single AI “theft” of such people’s work is literally an act of aggression towards the creative survival of an irreplaceable unique human being, human mind, human creative spirit. In the end you will end up with chewed and rechewed pablum, because nothing AI-created will ever have the spark of human originality – you will have worshipped at the altar of the Idea, but you will have worn it out and it is going to be flat and boring and completely irrelevant in the end because the AI “author” cannot lift it, fold it, shape it, change it, participate in its metamorphosis to the point where you will still be able to find it gripping no matter how many times you’ve seen something “like” it – because every human iteration will be different and in the end every machine one is going to end up being pretty much the same (because they work on algorithms, not inspiration). I’m not saying that human-wrought art cannot ever be boring or blah – I mean, there is ample evidence to the contrary and a lot of people who think they can write… are wrong. But at least it’s HUMAN-bad, not computer-bad. There is something to be said for that.

4) Treasure your creatives, because if you do not by the time you wake up to the fact that AI has erased them (people have to survive. If you cannot survive as a creative you will stop creating.) it will be too late, and you will only be able to mourn what you have lost. Believe in us. Believe in people. AI may be useful in niche applications where it erases simple drudge work – but for GOD’S SAKE let us not feed our creative spark to it in order for it to exist – and in fact I will argue that if THAT is what it needs in order to exist then it should not exist at all. Someone said in a meme somewhere that AI should free people from washing dishes in order that they should be able to write poetry, not free people from writing poetry in order that they should be able to wash dishes. Never forget that. Anyone can scrub a pot. Your poets are rare and precious. If you have to sponge down an extra plate or an extra cup in order to be rewarded by a real genuine human emotion in the form of a poem, consider that to be cheap at the price.

I could go on. But I will stop here.