Perhaps it may lead to a blossoming of local talent. People learning, and playing and making and doing together... just for that sake of the experience - as people once got together to sing around the piano for no other reason than to sing. Not to make money or to show off their talent for an audience... just to sing, and to dance and to play charades and tell stories to each other. In the end, what's the point of consuming another AI generated image or video or song or article? If it helps to teach you something, well and good. But then what is the purpose of learning? If it is for the sake of mastery itself, and for the enjoyment of company... that seems to me to be a worthwhile exchange :)
Thanks for the comment Michael. I actually am a musician, so I know the fun and creativity of jamming, and I've also seen how that can be extended into forms of automation technology - such as DJ equipment that allows new forms of creativity to emerge. In these cases, however, there's always been a kind of balance of power between the toolbuilders (e.g. the guitar maker or DJ deck manufacturer) and the artists. The businesses that want creative output still require the artists to exist, whereas the generative AI moment appears as a categorical win for the capitalist class, and even when it's used informally it's still very heavily weighted towards reliance on the toolbuilder
True... but the capitalists may find that in time, as we get more and more automation and then a UBI, and a declining population, that people will be far less interested in what automation offers creatively... except for those drawn into the virtual world. Assuming we don't destroy the planet or descend into a dystopian authoritarian nightmare, humans could be living in the modern equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Most people already have no idea how stuff gets made and provided... it just appears, like fruit on a tree. It is then left to people to work out how to celebrate life. I reckon there are infinite ways... as long as people have the money to express their needs for what remains as 'scare' resources. In my view, there will always be scarcity, even a specific view out a specific window (though it could be replicated in VR, the 'real thing' will remain scarce). And there will be work for a looong time to improve and beautify our built environment and to better care for each other, while cleaning up the environment and allowing the wilderness to return to many places. Imagine if in 200 years there was a stable population of one billion spread across the world, in pockets that celebrate our diverse ancient cultures, speaking their different languages, just for the pleasure, while technology bridged the communication divide when required and provided all the goods and services we needed! OK, I know it's not going to happen that way... we are not going to change human nature... we are still going to have narcissists and psychopaths seeking and gaining power, and every other human frailty... but I can still dream. Sorry for the scrappy note... but you get my drift :)
Well, that's a particularly optimistic scenario, and while I do think it's important to allow space for optimistic scenarios, I'm not going to bet that it will transpire
I guess I have a more angsty view on human society than you might. I sense that you allow more space for that progressive left tradition that believes a good society can be built and locked in, hence the progressive 'Garden of Eden'. My sense, by contrast, is that humans are always locked into contradictory meshes of conflicting forces, and there is never any final stable state that is reached. Even if you get to the Garden of Eden temporarily, you're still going to have to fight for it on an ongoing basis, and people might quickly becoming complacent and dissatisfied. This doesn't mean I'm 'pessimistic', though. Rather, it means my vision tends to be more about managing conflicting forces than locking one set of forces in
Brett, I agree that the struggle between good and evil is eternal. There is no 'end state'. In fact, it is the struggle that makes the world perfect as it is. It's not possible to have heroes without villains. How could you have a doctor saving a life, if life was not imperiled? How could a detective solve a crime if there were no criminals, or a life-saver have a job if drowning was not possible. How could you aspire to a better life, if life was not hard? The stories that make up every life are all part of the 'heroes journey'. It is a tragedy and a comedy rolled into one. The Earth is a wondrous terrible place... and I'd have it no other way :)
I guess it depends on your life experience. I see everyone I know and their kids who have enough money, find interesting things to do with their life. People can be divided into 'tribes' and manipulated, but humans are by nature a collaborative species. Collaboration rather than our competitive streak has been the main driver of civilization. Our supply chains are the essence of collaboration. Most competition (apart from war) occurs in the mind when making a choice between which product or service to buy. Once the decision is made, it draws into action the whole supply chain that spans continents and generations of people (during which the knowledge, equipment and processes now in place were developed)
Being supported with the bare necessities hardly qualifies as having the means to pursue an interesting life. There are experiments that show when humans and other creatures lack an interesting environment and the means to pursue meaningful activities, they revert to destructive behaviour. Also, many behaviours are learned. If you are brought up in a destructive environment, that is how you learn to behave. A UBI set to keep the labor market in balance means that those working will be doing so by choice (because they want the added benefits the extra money brings), while those not working will also be doing so by choice (otherwise, they would still be looking for paid work). Of course, a UBI alone would not be enough to change destructive behaviour, but it can provide a base from which to change (with help and guidance). It also gives the local community some means to work out their own problems too... knowing the extra money is flowing into the community. Gangs are a major problem that also require specific strategies to tackle
You're assuming that people choosing to live on the UBI will be packed into separate areas like 'welfare communities' now. If we use the UBI to balance the labor market, people can opt out and back into paid work as their circumstances, capacities and needs change throughout life, including family responsibilities. This means the people not in paid work can be sprinkled throughout the community.
As you imply, it's not the product that matters, it's the process. The creation, the fucking up, the sharing, the fulfilment, the learning.
Yet we are so sickened and diminished by this culture that we start to think someone offering "hey, I'll give you the product without the process" is a good deal!!
Wow, the conclusion without the reasoning — what could be better!?
Enter the engineers:
"YES!! not only will we take this away from you, we'll take it away from everyone! You'll forget it ever existed!!
Hey, we'll even get you safely to death without having to live at all."
"Capitalism is constantly trying to appropriate and eat the very angst it generates." Thank you for such a succinct description of this paradox.
Could it be argued that industrial automation was "the first time we have seen such a full-frontal assault on the romantic twin of the Enlightenment"? That period seemed to also be "a definitive statement that scientific tool-builders are on top and creatives below, mechanical form over emotional substance." Which famously led to resistant "angst" in the form of the Arts and Crafts Movement but then also the field of Industrial Design.
What's different, of course, (and discomforting) is the scale and speed of impact of AI automation...which like much of modern society, is scaling at a superlinear pace (the increasing returns to the scale of cities and economies) in a race toward some kind of impossible finite time singularity (which I can't believe any kind of manifesto or techno-fantasy can overcome).
All fed, as you efficiently describe, by a human's desire to consume the products of a form of capitalism that "is constantly trying to appropriate and eat the very angst it generates."
Hi Brad, thanks for your comment. Yes, I'm sure there are many waves of the assault. But I guess that industrial automation didn't attempt to replace arts in quite the same way. I suppose the new technologies of amplification, electrification and reproduction affected how art/music/etc was made and distributed, but there was still a very strong component of the creator. What seems to be different right now, is that direct attack on the creator
But you're totally right that this is not entirely new. People like Walter Benjamin did fascinating work on how industrial processes and innovations affected our relationship to arts (see The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), and - as you mention - the arts and crafts movement were trying to go against the industrial automation and to return to the act of using your hands and connecting with your work. I feel we'll probably see a lot more of that right now, as people start to place an emotional value on trying to do handwriting, or drawing, or writing your own essay, even as the economic system tries to subordinate those things (or tries to repackage those as a kind of elite product)
Wow, you ended with such a tremendous emotional punch! My stomach dropped.
The twisted genius of that advertising is hard to fully articulate. ChatGPT is the cutting edge of a movement that has been going on for decades toward deeper and deeper social anxiety and isolation. A world where we are addicts peeling off beer labels—trying futilely to get underneath the branding to something real?—instead of interacting.
Chat bots offer a safe alternative to chatting with strangers. You won’t catch covid, or put yourself in the AR15 sights of a maniac or terrorist, or potentially be raped, or abused, or traumatized, or embarrassed, or ashamed, or canceled.
“You don’t have to talk to that cute person across the bar. It’s too scary. But we have a solution to your loneliness: stare at a screen while locked in your WFH home office. Talk to this soulless confidant.”
The ad scares me. It gets me. Maybe it wants what I want? But. Should I not be human? What’s the implication here?
Framing this as a full-frontal assault on the still living artistic soulful counter-culture… what a stroke of genius.
Frankly, I don't see the point of generative AI other than to make even more money for the purveyors of this toy. Even that description is a disservice to toys which usually have an embedded educational function. As a woodworker, writer and musician much of the value of what I create is in the process of creating it and the rest of the value is in the creation representing the soul of the creator. The value to others is beyond my control but there is an inherent connection, where value is perceived, between the creator and beholder. AI creations can have a passing interest which inevitably will garner less and less attention as the beholder comes to expect there is no soul behind it. It may be a massive boost for live music an attributable art.
That sounds depressingly correct! I guess the next question - just to inject a bit of my own cynicism - is whether the elites will fall through mass mobilisation or through economic collapse. The former might be the less rocky ride if we can avoid the French Revolution type scenario but is perhaps the less likely route. Think you’ve caught me on a bad day!
Good point. On a slightly more cynical note, though, what might start to happen in a capitalist system is a twin track of cheap generic AI crap and 'premium' non-AI stuff. I.e. there will be a push to automate everything for 'the masses' (e.g. mass pop music, online articles, images), while an elite signals status by rejecting it.
This process already occurs in our culture - in fact, corporate capitalism often tries to justify itself by saying it has a popular mandate, because poorer people who are paid low wages by the corporate sector are more likely to eat mass junk food, shop at mass discount supermarkets, consume aspirational mass media shows, follow mass culture etc, while the rich has their own private bubble world, and the alternative counterculture has their own parallel world. Right now, the AI engineers etc are coming from elite circles, and they are likely to project AI stuff downwards onto non-elite parts of society (e.g. claiming they're helping students in poor neighbourhoods to pass by auto-generating essays, while the kids of elites go to fancy schools where you do handwritten essays etc)
I don't think that's possible. Rather, I think a better strategy is to co-opt these tools, using them to build something to take power out of these delusional maniac's hands and put it back where it belongs: in the hands of the people.
There is strength in numbers, but the masses are dumb/delusional, and disorganized. This can be fixed.
I don't believe humans splitting into different paths feels this far out to the majority of people. As polarity and division increases, as it has been for quite some time, people get to choose a path that fits them better, realizing the otherness of some paths that are offered to us.
Paradoxically, i believe it also makes people more united, at least within the group they are choosing to be part of (which can be and often is borderless), and accross groups sharing similar untertwined values. It's a bit of tribalism, and somehow could be seen as something from the ancient times coming back in a different shape; it makes sense because in the end, we as humans need community. The extreme choices crystalizing before us makes us strive to find our tribe, and from there... powerful things are emerging.
Perhaps it may lead to a blossoming of local talent. People learning, and playing and making and doing together... just for that sake of the experience - as people once got together to sing around the piano for no other reason than to sing. Not to make money or to show off their talent for an audience... just to sing, and to dance and to play charades and tell stories to each other. In the end, what's the point of consuming another AI generated image or video or song or article? If it helps to teach you something, well and good. But then what is the purpose of learning? If it is for the sake of mastery itself, and for the enjoyment of company... that seems to me to be a worthwhile exchange :)
Thanks for the comment Michael. I actually am a musician, so I know the fun and creativity of jamming, and I've also seen how that can be extended into forms of automation technology - such as DJ equipment that allows new forms of creativity to emerge. In these cases, however, there's always been a kind of balance of power between the toolbuilders (e.g. the guitar maker or DJ deck manufacturer) and the artists. The businesses that want creative output still require the artists to exist, whereas the generative AI moment appears as a categorical win for the capitalist class, and even when it's used informally it's still very heavily weighted towards reliance on the toolbuilder
True... but the capitalists may find that in time, as we get more and more automation and then a UBI, and a declining population, that people will be far less interested in what automation offers creatively... except for those drawn into the virtual world. Assuming we don't destroy the planet or descend into a dystopian authoritarian nightmare, humans could be living in the modern equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Most people already have no idea how stuff gets made and provided... it just appears, like fruit on a tree. It is then left to people to work out how to celebrate life. I reckon there are infinite ways... as long as people have the money to express their needs for what remains as 'scare' resources. In my view, there will always be scarcity, even a specific view out a specific window (though it could be replicated in VR, the 'real thing' will remain scarce). And there will be work for a looong time to improve and beautify our built environment and to better care for each other, while cleaning up the environment and allowing the wilderness to return to many places. Imagine if in 200 years there was a stable population of one billion spread across the world, in pockets that celebrate our diverse ancient cultures, speaking their different languages, just for the pleasure, while technology bridged the communication divide when required and provided all the goods and services we needed! OK, I know it's not going to happen that way... we are not going to change human nature... we are still going to have narcissists and psychopaths seeking and gaining power, and every other human frailty... but I can still dream. Sorry for the scrappy note... but you get my drift :)
Well, that's a particularly optimistic scenario, and while I do think it's important to allow space for optimistic scenarios, I'm not going to bet that it will transpire
I guess I have a more angsty view on human society than you might. I sense that you allow more space for that progressive left tradition that believes a good society can be built and locked in, hence the progressive 'Garden of Eden'. My sense, by contrast, is that humans are always locked into contradictory meshes of conflicting forces, and there is never any final stable state that is reached. Even if you get to the Garden of Eden temporarily, you're still going to have to fight for it on an ongoing basis, and people might quickly becoming complacent and dissatisfied. This doesn't mean I'm 'pessimistic', though. Rather, it means my vision tends to be more about managing conflicting forces than locking one set of forces in
Brett, I agree that the struggle between good and evil is eternal. There is no 'end state'. In fact, it is the struggle that makes the world perfect as it is. It's not possible to have heroes without villains. How could you have a doctor saving a life, if life was not imperiled? How could a detective solve a crime if there were no criminals, or a life-saver have a job if drowning was not possible. How could you aspire to a better life, if life was not hard? The stories that make up every life are all part of the 'heroes journey'. It is a tragedy and a comedy rolled into one. The Earth is a wondrous terrible place... and I'd have it no other way :)
This explains my viewpoint: https://medium.com/@michael-haines/no-debate-consciousness-is-the-ground-of-being-c29f4f7929db
I guess it depends on your life experience. I see everyone I know and their kids who have enough money, find interesting things to do with their life. People can be divided into 'tribes' and manipulated, but humans are by nature a collaborative species. Collaboration rather than our competitive streak has been the main driver of civilization. Our supply chains are the essence of collaboration. Most competition (apart from war) occurs in the mind when making a choice between which product or service to buy. Once the decision is made, it draws into action the whole supply chain that spans continents and generations of people (during which the knowledge, equipment and processes now in place were developed)
Being supported with the bare necessities hardly qualifies as having the means to pursue an interesting life. There are experiments that show when humans and other creatures lack an interesting environment and the means to pursue meaningful activities, they revert to destructive behaviour. Also, many behaviours are learned. If you are brought up in a destructive environment, that is how you learn to behave. A UBI set to keep the labor market in balance means that those working will be doing so by choice (because they want the added benefits the extra money brings), while those not working will also be doing so by choice (otherwise, they would still be looking for paid work). Of course, a UBI alone would not be enough to change destructive behaviour, but it can provide a base from which to change (with help and guidance). It also gives the local community some means to work out their own problems too... knowing the extra money is flowing into the community. Gangs are a major problem that also require specific strategies to tackle
You're assuming that people choosing to live on the UBI will be packed into separate areas like 'welfare communities' now. If we use the UBI to balance the labor market, people can opt out and back into paid work as their circumstances, capacities and needs change throughout life, including family responsibilities. This means the people not in paid work can be sprinkled throughout the community.
Fantastic piece Brett, and I think complemented rather well by this from Bertus Meijer:
https://bertus.substack.com/p/image-generation-beyond-better-and
As you imply, it's not the product that matters, it's the process. The creation, the fucking up, the sharing, the fulfilment, the learning.
Yet we are so sickened and diminished by this culture that we start to think someone offering "hey, I'll give you the product without the process" is a good deal!!
Wow, the conclusion without the reasoning — what could be better!?
Enter the engineers:
"YES!! not only will we take this away from you, we'll take it away from everyone! You'll forget it ever existed!!
Hey, we'll even get you safely to death without having to live at all."
Very well put
Damn. "We'll even get you safely to death without having to live at all." - That hits hard
"Capitalism is constantly trying to appropriate and eat the very angst it generates." Thank you for such a succinct description of this paradox.
Could it be argued that industrial automation was "the first time we have seen such a full-frontal assault on the romantic twin of the Enlightenment"? That period seemed to also be "a definitive statement that scientific tool-builders are on top and creatives below, mechanical form over emotional substance." Which famously led to resistant "angst" in the form of the Arts and Crafts Movement but then also the field of Industrial Design.
What's different, of course, (and discomforting) is the scale and speed of impact of AI automation...which like much of modern society, is scaling at a superlinear pace (the increasing returns to the scale of cities and economies) in a race toward some kind of impossible finite time singularity (which I can't believe any kind of manifesto or techno-fantasy can overcome).
All fed, as you efficiently describe, by a human's desire to consume the products of a form of capitalism that "is constantly trying to appropriate and eat the very angst it generates."
Hi Brad, thanks for your comment. Yes, I'm sure there are many waves of the assault. But I guess that industrial automation didn't attempt to replace arts in quite the same way. I suppose the new technologies of amplification, electrification and reproduction affected how art/music/etc was made and distributed, but there was still a very strong component of the creator. What seems to be different right now, is that direct attack on the creator
But you're totally right that this is not entirely new. People like Walter Benjamin did fascinating work on how industrial processes and innovations affected our relationship to arts (see The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), and - as you mention - the arts and crafts movement were trying to go against the industrial automation and to return to the act of using your hands and connecting with your work. I feel we'll probably see a lot more of that right now, as people start to place an emotional value on trying to do handwriting, or drawing, or writing your own essay, even as the economic system tries to subordinate those things (or tries to repackage those as a kind of elite product)
That might be the creepiest advertising yet. Horrible
Yeah... they have one of their offices here in Berlin
Exactly what I was thinking...it isn't even cringe, it's *creepy*.
Wow, you ended with such a tremendous emotional punch! My stomach dropped.
The twisted genius of that advertising is hard to fully articulate. ChatGPT is the cutting edge of a movement that has been going on for decades toward deeper and deeper social anxiety and isolation. A world where we are addicts peeling off beer labels—trying futilely to get underneath the branding to something real?—instead of interacting.
Chat bots offer a safe alternative to chatting with strangers. You won’t catch covid, or put yourself in the AR15 sights of a maniac or terrorist, or potentially be raped, or abused, or traumatized, or embarrassed, or ashamed, or canceled.
“You don’t have to talk to that cute person across the bar. It’s too scary. But we have a solution to your loneliness: stare at a screen while locked in your WFH home office. Talk to this soulless confidant.”
The ad scares me. It gets me. Maybe it wants what I want? But. Should I not be human? What’s the implication here?
Framing this as a full-frontal assault on the still living artistic soulful counter-culture… what a stroke of genius.
Great stuff.
Glad you like it Geoffe!
Enjoyed the article.
I have been following your work since I found you on Macro n Cheese, with Steve Grumbine.
Keep them coming!
Frankly, I don't see the point of generative AI other than to make even more money for the purveyors of this toy. Even that description is a disservice to toys which usually have an embedded educational function. As a woodworker, writer and musician much of the value of what I create is in the process of creating it and the rest of the value is in the creation representing the soul of the creator. The value to others is beyond my control but there is an inherent connection, where value is perceived, between the creator and beholder. AI creations can have a passing interest which inevitably will garner less and less attention as the beholder comes to expect there is no soul behind it. It may be a massive boost for live music an attributable art.
That sounds depressingly correct! I guess the next question - just to inject a bit of my own cynicism - is whether the elites will fall through mass mobilisation or through economic collapse. The former might be the less rocky ride if we can avoid the French Revolution type scenario but is perhaps the less likely route. Think you’ve caught me on a bad day!
Good point. On a slightly more cynical note, though, what might start to happen in a capitalist system is a twin track of cheap generic AI crap and 'premium' non-AI stuff. I.e. there will be a push to automate everything for 'the masses' (e.g. mass pop music, online articles, images), while an elite signals status by rejecting it.
This process already occurs in our culture - in fact, corporate capitalism often tries to justify itself by saying it has a popular mandate, because poorer people who are paid low wages by the corporate sector are more likely to eat mass junk food, shop at mass discount supermarkets, consume aspirational mass media shows, follow mass culture etc, while the rich has their own private bubble world, and the alternative counterculture has their own parallel world. Right now, the AI engineers etc are coming from elite circles, and they are likely to project AI stuff downwards onto non-elite parts of society (e.g. claiming they're helping students in poor neighbourhoods to pass by auto-generating essays, while the kids of elites go to fancy schools where you do handwritten essays etc)
I did not see that ending coming, nor was I aware of that project. Has it really come to this? Is this or world?
Anyhow, good piece!
Thanks Johan. Well... it hasn't come to this yet, but there are certainly groups trying to make the world like this
Nice work
> I wish we could train back.
I don't think that's possible. Rather, I think a better strategy is to co-opt these tools, using them to build something to take power out of these delusional maniac's hands and put it back where it belongs: in the hands of the people.
There is strength in numbers, but the masses are dumb/delusional, and disorganized. This can be fixed.
I don't believe humans splitting into different paths feels this far out to the majority of people. As polarity and division increases, as it has been for quite some time, people get to choose a path that fits them better, realizing the otherness of some paths that are offered to us.
Paradoxically, i believe it also makes people more united, at least within the group they are choosing to be part of (which can be and often is borderless), and accross groups sharing similar untertwined values. It's a bit of tribalism, and somehow could be seen as something from the ancient times coming back in a different shape; it makes sense because in the end, we as humans need community. The extreme choices crystalizing before us makes us strive to find our tribe, and from there... powerful things are emerging.