I think about the CEO of an AI song generator A LOT. He said, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>It's not enjoyable to learn or make things<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
This is profoundly anti-human. And it is bound to fail.
This is so dark. It's not new information that it takes time and practice to be good at music (and plenty of other things). It sounds like this person is a) not a musician and b) doesn't actually like music, which makes it even darker.
"It's not really enjoyable to make music now." ...Says who?
+1 to all this. Tangentially, there's an idea, which I heard from Cory Doctorow, of good human-tool relationships as being like a centaur. Using a tool can make us more capable in the way that being grafted onto a horse's body would make us faster and stronger. Trouble comes when automatizing tools turn us into reverse-centaurs, puppeteering us to accomplish their assigned tasks. To paraphrase him, someone who chooses to commute by bike is having a fundamentally different experience than an Uber Eats courier who's being driven to exhaustion and having their wages nipped by a pitiless algorithm.
Even conceding the AI boosters' argument that their tools can help make things - and despite my own visceral dislike of the LLMs and other content generators, I can see their point, in some ways - they can still be harmful. It's about power, and who's doing what to whom. They all still make me want to go full Luddite.
the reverse-centaur puppet is a good figure to help think through this
p.s. speaking of the luddites i keep meaning to read brian merchant's recent book about them..."Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" https://bookshop.org/a/32497/9780316487740
A fascinating thread, with thanks for the heads up on Blood in the Machine - have downloaded on audible and will be listening to later tonight. As for the reverse centaurs, great analogy and I’d recommend visiting a former mill site if you have one locally.
I visited one in the Peak District of northern England, one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, and the guide took us round all the stages of producing cloth. It was amazing but obviously brutal looking and incredibly loud, no doubt appallingly low wages too based on what Dickens and Disraeli reported in England. It’s not called the rag trade for nothing, only now it’s a multinational racket and we need to vote with our $feet wherever we can.
Another good read regarding how technology becomes an "extension" of ourselves. It is literally a tool for extending our cognition; however the trade-offs are what you are describing.
I still make all of my cards, too (though sometimes they are embroidery pieces, needle felting, or other cathartic crafts that often involve stabbing something a million times to morph it into something beautiful). Found an incredible treasure trove of all of the birthday and father's day cards I made my dad when I was preparing to sell his house in 2024. He kept them in the same secret drawer in which he hid his valuables, which might have been the only thoughtful and kind thing he ever did. And if that doesn't emphasize how meaningful and impactful handmade cards can be, I don't know what could.
I once had a conversation with someone I met at a party about AI and children. We’re both parents, and when I told her I’d recently written an article about how kids’ movies seemed to be preparing children for the idea of AI companionship, she replied, “Oh, is that bad? I use AI with my kid all the time.” She said she’d use AI to tell her kid silly stories and make the kid feel reassured about starting a new school.
It took me a while to think through why that creeped me out so much, but it’s not too dissimilar from what you’re saying about making the birthday cards by hand. It’s the challenge and the hard moments of parenting, or anything else that involves our giving of ourselves — love, or grace, as you say — that make these difficult efforts worthwhile. Why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine?
(I should add, I get why some people might have to use these tools for childcare, because the childcare system in our country is ~messed up~, but the examples she gave were some of the aspects of raising a kid that, to me, at least, make the whole endeavor worth it.)
"why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine" really gets to the heart of it (even if "our fucked childcare system" offers one at least partially compelling answer)
Totally! And I can see the case for using AI as a tool, occasionally, even for creativity. (I used to be opposed to drum machines when I was a kid too, till I grew up and realized that, like any musical instrument, they can be used really creatively.) But it’s that whole optimize-at-all-costs attitude (even if it means eradicating what makes something special and imperfect and human) that you talk about that’s so off-putting about AI.
My family always gives very serious and sentimental pre-written cards for any occasion. As an adult, I started buying the blank ones and writing my thoughts out, as I realized these things were meaningless, yet I could never really fully express why. But you fully define how I've been feeling all these years: "To buy a card for somebody you cared about was, however well-intentioned, to put something inert, disenchanted and disposable in between you, your feelings, and the person you felt them for."
I like the frame of embodied human intelligence even though I fall on the opposite view on this one and see LLMs as an intelligence to transform one form of embodied intelligence to the other. May be this is in part due to the fact that English is not my first language but I mostly interact with people in English and hence do this translation continuously (language is embodied intelligence in a Ted Chiang/Sapir Whorf Hypotheisis way). An example I can think of is, I've been reading a lot of continental philosophy this year, something I've wanted to do for a long time but neither had the time or resources to do. Continental philosophers refer other ideas from the corpus in their books like you are just supposed to know them and so its impenetrable unless you read those previous works. So when I'm reading contemporary philosophers like Yuk Hui I use AI to translate the older ideas that he is referring to a form I can understand. Sometimes it does a mediocre job, sometimes it transcends the material and sometimes its sludge. Its not perfect but I dont have the money or interest to go to grad school for philosophy so its a messy way to go about it while acknowledging that most promoter perspectives of AI feel cursed and unorginal.
My favourite example of embodied human intelligence and CGI is "Terminator 2". Yes, the T-1000 sequences were amazing back then (and still are!!) but there are a lot of things in that movie that were practical effects such as the helicopter chase (a real and really dangerous stunt) or the use of twins. It looked real and it looks "real". Also love that pink dolphin in your card!!!
So much that’s interesting here. But something about the distinction between a “creative” and an “artist” needs one more beat. There’s a world of creatives for whom making things (however that happens) scratches an itch. For an artist - regardless of how hard something t is, or impossible- they do it because they can’t not. It’s the Fitzcarraldo effect. Some call it madness. But it is the only way to the sublime.
i always come back to this quote... "As author and engineer Ellen Ullman puts it, this belief that the mind is like a computer, and vice versa, has ‘infected decades of thinking in the computer and cognitive sciences,’ creating a kind of original sin for the field. It is the ideology of Cartesian dualism in artificial intelligence: where AI is narrowly understood as disembodied intelligence, removed from any relation to the material world."
This is so good. Anything worth something of genuine, intrinsic value, is brought by doing. AI art is built by taking, pillaging, plundering. The good news is that the further it pushes inauthenticity, the more it will create a hunger for authenticity. Which puts people like you in a very good place to thrive.
Holly Herndon and Matt Dreyfus have been working with AI for a while, their project Holly+ is quite interesting. But as an art project that is more of an investigation into AI rather than a simply using Canva or something.
Damn, this is why I - a man who hasn't bought a new pair of trousers in a decade - am a subscriber. Thank you.
😂
please update us if / when you break this major pantsless streak ; 0
I think about the CEO of an AI song generator A LOT. He said, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” he said. “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software.”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>It's not enjoyable to learn or make things<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
This is profoundly anti-human. And it is bound to fail.
This is so dark. It's not new information that it takes time and practice to be good at music (and plenty of other things). It sounds like this person is a) not a musician and b) doesn't actually like music, which makes it even darker.
"It's not really enjoyable to make music now." ...Says who?
+1 to all this. Tangentially, there's an idea, which I heard from Cory Doctorow, of good human-tool relationships as being like a centaur. Using a tool can make us more capable in the way that being grafted onto a horse's body would make us faster and stronger. Trouble comes when automatizing tools turn us into reverse-centaurs, puppeteering us to accomplish their assigned tasks. To paraphrase him, someone who chooses to commute by bike is having a fundamentally different experience than an Uber Eats courier who's being driven to exhaustion and having their wages nipped by a pitiless algorithm.
Even conceding the AI boosters' argument that their tools can help make things - and despite my own visceral dislike of the LLMs and other content generators, I can see their point, in some ways - they can still be harmful. It's about power, and who's doing what to whom. They all still make me want to go full Luddite.
the reverse-centaur puppet is a good figure to help think through this
p.s. speaking of the luddites i keep meaning to read brian merchant's recent book about them..."Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" https://bookshop.org/a/32497/9780316487740
A fascinating thread, with thanks for the heads up on Blood in the Machine - have downloaded on audible and will be listening to later tonight. As for the reverse centaurs, great analogy and I’d recommend visiting a former mill site if you have one locally.
I visited one in the Peak District of northern England, one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, and the guide took us round all the stages of producing cloth. It was amazing but obviously brutal looking and incredibly loud, no doubt appallingly low wages too based on what Dickens and Disraeli reported in England. It’s not called the rag trade for nothing, only now it’s a multinational racket and we need to vote with our $feet wherever we can.
Another good read regarding how technology becomes an "extension" of ourselves. It is literally a tool for extending our cognition; however the trade-offs are what you are describing.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andy-Clark-5/publication/266603199_Natural-Born_Cyborgs_Minds_Technologies_and_the_Future_of_Human_Intelligence/links/545e5af30cf27487b44f0a17/Natural-Born-Cyborgs-Minds-Technologies-and-the-Future-of-Human-Intelligence.pdf
Brilliant post Luke, the reference to the gig economy is spot on it’s all about the privilege of having choices isn’t it.
I still make all of my cards, too (though sometimes they are embroidery pieces, needle felting, or other cathartic crafts that often involve stabbing something a million times to morph it into something beautiful). Found an incredible treasure trove of all of the birthday and father's day cards I made my dad when I was preparing to sell his house in 2024. He kept them in the same secret drawer in which he hid his valuables, which might have been the only thoughtful and kind thing he ever did. And if that doesn't emphasize how meaningful and impactful handmade cards can be, I don't know what could.
Damn!
I once had a conversation with someone I met at a party about AI and children. We’re both parents, and when I told her I’d recently written an article about how kids’ movies seemed to be preparing children for the idea of AI companionship, she replied, “Oh, is that bad? I use AI with my kid all the time.” She said she’d use AI to tell her kid silly stories and make the kid feel reassured about starting a new school.
It took me a while to think through why that creeped me out so much, but it’s not too dissimilar from what you’re saying about making the birthday cards by hand. It’s the challenge and the hard moments of parenting, or anything else that involves our giving of ourselves — love, or grace, as you say — that make these difficult efforts worthwhile. Why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine?
(I should add, I get why some people might have to use these tools for childcare, because the childcare system in our country is ~messed up~, but the examples she gave were some of the aspects of raising a kid that, to me, at least, make the whole endeavor worth it.)
"why assign the more rewarding efforts of being human to a machine" really gets to the heart of it (even if "our fucked childcare system" offers one at least partially compelling answer)
Totally! And I can see the case for using AI as a tool, occasionally, even for creativity. (I used to be opposed to drum machines when I was a kid too, till I grew up and realized that, like any musical instrument, they can be used really creatively.) But it’s that whole optimize-at-all-costs attitude (even if it means eradicating what makes something special and imperfect and human) that you talk about that’s so off-putting about AI.
Yes! Making things is fun and it calms the nervous system.
My family always gives very serious and sentimental pre-written cards for any occasion. As an adult, I started buying the blank ones and writing my thoughts out, as I realized these things were meaningless, yet I could never really fully express why. But you fully define how I've been feeling all these years: "To buy a card for somebody you cared about was, however well-intentioned, to put something inert, disenchanted and disposable in between you, your feelings, and the person you felt them for."
Still love a good snoopy-themed card tho.
I like the frame of embodied human intelligence even though I fall on the opposite view on this one and see LLMs as an intelligence to transform one form of embodied intelligence to the other. May be this is in part due to the fact that English is not my first language but I mostly interact with people in English and hence do this translation continuously (language is embodied intelligence in a Ted Chiang/Sapir Whorf Hypotheisis way). An example I can think of is, I've been reading a lot of continental philosophy this year, something I've wanted to do for a long time but neither had the time or resources to do. Continental philosophers refer other ideas from the corpus in their books like you are just supposed to know them and so its impenetrable unless you read those previous works. So when I'm reading contemporary philosophers like Yuk Hui I use AI to translate the older ideas that he is referring to a form I can understand. Sometimes it does a mediocre job, sometimes it transcends the material and sometimes its sludge. Its not perfect but I dont have the money or interest to go to grad school for philosophy so its a messy way to go about it while acknowledging that most promoter perspectives of AI feel cursed and unorginal.
My favourite example of embodied human intelligence and CGI is "Terminator 2". Yes, the T-1000 sequences were amazing back then (and still are!!) but there are a lot of things in that movie that were practical effects such as the helicopter chase (a real and really dangerous stunt) or the use of twins. It looked real and it looks "real". Also love that pink dolphin in your card!!!
So much that’s interesting here. But something about the distinction between a “creative” and an “artist” needs one more beat. There’s a world of creatives for whom making things (however that happens) scratches an itch. For an artist - regardless of how hard something t is, or impossible- they do it because they can’t not. It’s the Fitzcarraldo effect. Some call it madness. But it is the only way to the sublime.
i always come back to this quote... "As author and engineer Ellen Ullman puts it, this belief that the mind is like a computer, and vice versa, has ‘infected decades of thinking in the computer and cognitive sciences,’ creating a kind of original sin for the field. It is the ideology of Cartesian dualism in artificial intelligence: where AI is narrowly understood as disembodied intelligence, removed from any relation to the material world."
Omg thank you! It’s insane how much they’re pushing it too. Check out Guggenheim pushing Ai on artists — ironic considering tech sector notoriously gives zero support to the arts, but they’re out here trying to push their garbage on us. https://calendar.stonybrook.edu/site/cas/event/unsettling-intelligences--politics-of-reason-through-art-and-ai/
This is so good. Anything worth something of genuine, intrinsic value, is brought by doing. AI art is built by taking, pillaging, plundering. The good news is that the further it pushes inauthenticity, the more it will create a hunger for authenticity. Which puts people like you in a very good place to thrive.
Daniel Lopatin is lowkey up there with Brian Eno as one of the great thinkers when it comes to art and creativity. So many fascinating OPN interviews
Truly
Couldn't agree more with all of this. Perfectly written
Holly Herndon and Matt Dreyfus have been working with AI for a while, their project Holly+ is quite interesting. But as an art project that is more of an investigation into AI rather than a simply using Canva or something.