Jaron Lanier once said that what he didn’t like about Google was that it requires us to alter ourselves unnaturally in order to get out of it what we want. He said we “make ourselves stupid so the machine looks smart.” That’s not unlike what generative AI is like, at least for now. That said, as a contributor to the interplay of variables in a multilectic, the product of generative AI can play a role. Its value in producing basically cogent narrative search results, for instance, is obvious. But that undefinable quality that much time of practice at crap has produced is what it is missing. Another writer said it lacked “elan,” a good word that isn’t used often. Will generative AI manifest elan with time? Unlikely. Because the machine doesn’t seek pride or satisfaction or glory or praise or any sense of accomplishment; all of which contribute to a creator’s understanding of the quality of their output and to the creator’s vision of their goal. The machine just is. Like those computers that win at chess: to win a game it has to know it’s playing a game. But it doesn’t, so we make ourselves think it’s playing a game so that we can then say it won. We make ourselves less so that the machine looks like it’s more.
Jaron Lanier once said that what he didn’t like about Google was that it requires us to alter ourselves unnaturally in order to get out of it what we want. He said we “make ourselves stupid so the machine looks smart.” That’s not unlike what generative AI is like, at least for now. That said, as a contributor to the interplay of variables in a multilectic, the product of generative AI can play a role. Its value in producing basically cogent narrative search results, for instance, is obvious. But that undefinable quality that much time of practice at crap has produced is what it is missing. Another writer said it lacked “elan,” a good word that isn’t used often. Will generative AI manifest elan with time? Unlikely. Because the machine doesn’t seek pride or satisfaction or glory or praise or any sense of accomplishment; all of which contribute to a creator’s understanding of the quality of their output and to the creator’s vision of their goal. The machine just is. Like those computers that win at chess: to win a game it has to know it’s playing a game. But it doesn’t, so we make ourselves think it’s playing a game so that we can then say it won. We make ourselves less so that the machine looks like it’s more.