the congeniality and horror of the artificial
To refute/rebel against something: an idea, a movement, a reality, one must consider being familiar with it. Even though I stayed away from AI for a good amount of time, later, the impressive artificial got me interested with its quick response (however, the quality is absurd at times; but you know it’s learning, which is a horror story in real-time). Long after religion, AI really has the potential in Marxian theory to be called Opium dex Volkes (not kidding).
But, to my utter un-surprise, I tried my hands on it, until the congeniality of the tool got me even more skeptical.
AI makes me think about the most beautiful things I know in my life and I question: why are we trying to achieve that through AI? As a marketer and a writer, will I ever speak what I want to if I rely on the support of a tool, that learns and paraphrases from millions of sources and gives me an output, that is collectively not natural, or mine?
If you believe in endorsing and acknowledging works and also expect the same for your work, imagine the work that has gone into the processing and learning of AI, and it’s perennially cyclical.
Maybe we need more people like Boris Eldagsen who gave back the reputed photography award to prove a point and start a debate: if AI-generated work carries the same implications as human-generated ones. Even with some apocalyptic warnings, right in front of us, AI continues to startle and impress the (corporate) world every single day.
A friend recently shared this famous speech by Yuval Noah Harari and which undoubtedly is one of the most influential and cautioning speeches that everyone must listen to. The speech not just opens a conversation about the future of another existential challenge, but also tells us the implications it is already making, in a grand scheme of things: culturally and politically; the worsening future of developing countries.
What will we call as masterpieces in the future? As a society, will we collectively fail the intelligence we found original at times? Or originality will become an obsolete/far-from-the-truth concept; maybe it already is.
