Word count to date: 33,388 words
Weekly count: 3,989
I wanted to put my two cents into the ring about AI.
I am always wary of standing firmly on one side of an argument over another. I think polarizations almost always lead to hypocrisy and so here is my opinion and belief about what AI is to me, it’s future, and a case study of how it doesn’t live up to the hype.
Here are the main points of the above video
AI is a new shiny tool
AI will be making certain services accessible to people who have never been able to afford them
AI will not be replacing human artistic output
How I use AI
Why I will not be using AI to help me write my novel
AI is a new shiny tool
Like the internet or mobile phones, AI arrived quicker than we knew what to do with it. Our early relationship with AI will be one of clumsiness, rapid experimentation, bubbles and bursts, and gradual adaption.
When the internet was knew, we didn’t really know what to do with it. It started to replace things like fax and telephones. But it took some time for e-commerce to take off, and the technology needed massive advancement in order to supply things like streaming video.
The same is true for mobile phones and smart devices. Now they form such a central role in our lives it would be hard to imagine what the world would be like without them.
AI will go the same way. It will evolve, we will adapt and the technology will iterate itself until using AI is as common as our smartphones are today. By this time, the ethical debate about using it at all will be reserved for the very small minority of people who have managed to abstain. But most of us, will see that there wasn’t much to fuss over.
AI will be making certain services accessible to people who have never been able to afford them
The middle and lower classes have never been able to afford a personal assistant who can do almost anything.
That time has come to an end. We will soon have PA’s at our disposal who can teach us a new language, buy our groceries, screen our calls, and help us decide what restaurant to go to on Thursday nights.
We’ve never had access to this kind of service before but we will in the future (if not already). It will be hard to think of a time before we used AI in the same way that we think about using Google Maps now. I see this as an inevitable outcome of this kind of technology.
AI will not be replacing human artistic output
I do not believe the hype about AI replacing human artistic output. It’s not because AI won’t make something good, or interesting, or insightful. It’s because we like our art being made with an intention. We put artists on pedestals. We want to read an author’s next book, we want to see our favorite celebrities in that new movie.
We will care less about AI’s output from an artistic perspective in the same way that we don’t congratulate a printer for printing a painting.
We care too much about the artist and their unique perspective. We may see human’s use AI as a tool to create art, in which case we will ask: who thought of how to use AI like that? Can they do it again?
So, don’t worry about AI taking those jobs. It will try, but people are still creating art like they have since the beginning of the species.
How I use AI
I do use AI. I want to be ethical where I can with AI. I don’t think it is unethical to use it. I don’t think it is interesting to have AI write words for you and pass them off as your own. I don’t think its wrong, but I wouldn’t be very interested in reading anything that was.
I use AI as a tool to help me organize, categorize, and understand information. So I have used it to analyze spreadsheets, teach me Japanese, write code, and teach me how to understand software.
I would say that my relationship with AI is quite surface level. It is a helpful assistant, but not much more.
Why I will not be using AI to help me write my novel
After having some frustration with my latest chapter I decided to get some feedback on it using ChatGPT. I plugged in the chapter and asked for feedback. It was complimentary and the feedback was OK. I figured it was holding back.
I asked it to eviscerate my writing, really tear it to shreds.
It did. It was pretty good to. I felt like it provided some interesting insights about tone and voice. I rewrote the scene and plugged it back in.
Once again it did not hold back in its criticism.
Again, I rewrote it, taking on the advice and once more, asked for feedback. And once more, it demolished the writing. It was then that I realized it was only doing what I asked it to do. It was providing a tough love approach to giving me feedback. By this time the charm had worn off.
I realized I needed to know in advance what kind of feedback I needed so that I could get ChatGPT to give it to me. Which defeats the whole point.
In the end I was thankful for the initial insights it gave me but I will not be using it again as I could sense the echo chamber I was creating.
In Conclusion
AI is here to stay and our relationship with it will change and evolve over time. I would urge anyone to withhold themselves from falling into an absolute stance on their relationship to it lest they eat humble pie in the not-too-distant future.
I think it will provide a lot of people with affordable access to helpful tools and services but it will not replace human artistic output. The demand for human made art will continue to exist however some services (like logo design or Facebook ad copywriting), will probably become largely outdated.
I use it to help me with organizational tasks in my life but I don’t consider it useful as a creative output machine.
The experiment of using it as an editor for a chapter of my novel made me realize that its limits outweigh its novelty.
I am happy to say that my novel will be written by me, for you.
END.
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