Kids, don’t drink the AI Kool-Aid. Adults, us neither
“I hate writing. I love having written.”
A quirky quip by novelist Dorothy Parker, according to Google. Also, according to Google, a quote often misattributed to Dorothy Parker.
It’s hard to know what’s true these days, or who said it.
This is particularly true today, now we’ve got AI smoking its socks and filling the interwebs with a psychedelia of canned fruit cocktail fabrications. It doesn’t help that an uncomfortable number of journalists are unquestioningly using AI to research and write their copy.
Although that’s not why we should’t drink the AI Kool-Aid.
Sidebar: kids, the aphorism isn’t a warning to avoid the fruit punch cough acid trip cough. It made its way into the urban dictionary after cult leader Jim James sweet-talked nearly 1,000 followers to necking some cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid. Mass suicide for the adults, murder for nearly 300 kids in their care. #JonestownMassacre.
No matter how convincing the dogma, no matter how charismatic the people peddling it: don’t drink it.
The AI overlords in Silicon Valley will have us believe that their agents’ take-over of the creative industry is inevitable; that their baby bots are better writers and artists than us; that they’re faster and slicker; cheaper.
Some of that may be true. AI creatives’ domination and our replacement does seem inevitable. They’re speedy, for sure.
But again, that’s not why humans should bend the knee to the tech-bros, or hand our work over to their bots.
These illustrations for a recent infographic took a day to draw. AI did something similar in five minutes. Thanks to Mongabay’s policy on only using stuff made by wetware — geek-speak for humans, as opposed to hardware like CPUs and external drives — we went with the human-generated drawings. Disclaimer: I didn’t have a real-life cube to draw, as someone would if they were doing a still life, for instance. So I asked AI to generate one, and used that as reference material, as someone might with any image found on the internet.
Creativity oxygenates the human soul
If we stopped creating, we might as well stop breathing. It’d be psychological suffocation.
But creativity is painful; breathing, not so much.
It’s agony to hogtie the squirming five-year-old in us to the desk and push through the stuck moments. The psychologically torture of staring down the ghoul voice that tells us a piece of writing is shite. The damp squib moment when we realise the twelfth re-write of the intro still isn’t gonna grab the reader’s confetti attention.
The blank page may seem like a bully. But it’s really a sparring partner. After 20-plus years of brawling, it’s not so intimidating. I know that filling the blank page will hurt, but I also know the particular kind of giddy delight that comes with having done so.
If I’d had a short-cut through this pain back when I was a rookie, I would likely have taken it. When we’re starting out, and haven’t proven to ourselves that we can write/draw/create. The lack of confidence might easily sweet-talk us into handing the heavy lifting over to an AI assistant. Just a little help here, or there? What’s the angle on this piece? How should I structure the argument? What’s the best prose for a grab-you-by-the-throat scene?
But if we do this, if we don’t push through every gruelling step of bringing a piece of writing to life, we deprive ourselves. We impoverish ourselves. We may as well hand our humanity away.
Bret Stephens explains here why doing so enfeebles us.
Once we’ve handed this part of ourselves over to a machine, what is a human for, asks Charlie Warzel.
Cheating: cardinal sin to the community, or to ourselves?
Plagiarism used to be the writer’s cardinal sin. It’s easier to weed this out nowadays. Selling AI-generated content under our own byline is harder to spot, but there are some tells, according to the emerging experts in the area. The author’s voice seeming a bit off; the high turnover of content that we know should take weeks to produce, not days; supposed over-use of the m-dash, or is it the n-dash, I’m losing track. There’s an arms race of bots trained to spot the bots. It’s gettin’ cray-cray.
It’s tempting to take the drink, for sure: the pain of writing; the pressure to keep our byline at the top of a Google search; the bills to pay when we’re being undercut by cheaper content generators.
At the end of the day, though, we’re accountable only to ourselves. If we choose to drink the AI Kool-Aid, we might be caught out by our colleagues and readers. We might not. But each of us will know if we’ve chosen to enfeeble ourselves and starve our souls of oxygen by handing the hard work of writing over to the machine.
Taking a stand might mean we end up living under a bridge somewhere. Who knows how we’ll pay the bills in the coming months and years? For the time being, here’s to us holding the line.
Viva, wetware, viva.