The Great A.I. Debate
aka The Buggy Whip Dilemma
And the tech bros wait with bated breath to see what I type next…
And thems what hate A.I. have their fingers hovering above the “Unsubscribe” button…
Look, I work in entertainment. Writing, editing, making “art,” whatever you wanna call it. I don’t particularly want a machine making my art for me.
It will, though.
One day, there will come a transcendent work, and it’ll be beautiful, and meaningful, and have character motivations, and arcs, and heroes with flaws and feet of clay, and villains you can empathize with… it’ll be “The Great Gatsby,” “The Wire,” “Sgt. Pepper’s” or the “Apocalypse Now” of A.I.
And at first, we won’t know it. Because the prompter, or whatever you wanna call the person who typed the prompt into the computer, won’t tell us, and will be either lying in wait to see if we pick up on it, or desperately trying to hide it.
But it’ll eventually be found out.
Will it be the exception, or the beginning of the rule?
No idea. Probably closer to the latter, though. Once enough monkeys are typing, the chance of them accidentally kicking out Shakespeare increases exponentially.
I prefer humans making art. Really.
But if you can’t tell the difference who/what wrote it, and it makes you weep with recognition, will you then hate it just because a human didn’t concoct it?
I might. I don’t know. I suspect if it moves me enough, I’ll just sigh heavily and say something that a lot of old people say, “I suppose this was coming.”
Recently, No Film School ran a… well, I guess you’d call it a marketing gimmick, since it wasn’t really a contest. A WGA writer wrote 10 pages of a script, vs. a pair of writers rewriting pages kicked out of an AI generator, both from the same prompt. The idea was to get people to vote on which pages they thought were A.I. and which were done by humans.
The punchline is that the votes ran about 50/50. There was no clear indicator which one was A.I., and which was human.
I myself couldn’t tell, but maybe not for the right reason - not to be mean, but the reason I couldn’t was because both had too many standard movie tropes in them. For cryin’ out loud, the human-written one had a guy about to retire who was too old for this shit. So either one seemed like it could’ve been done by A.I. Neither really sparked.
(I do think that having the A.I. rewritten by humans makes this a false comparison. In both cases, humans had the last word, and I would’ve been curious to see what a true A.I./human writing battle would look like. I suspect the voting results wouldn’t have been 50/50, the A.I. easier to spot.)
But this is early days. A.I. will get better. At least at writing scripts that feel like the same stuff Hollywood has kicked out the last few decades.
Yes, yes, I know… A.I. is a plagiarism mechanism, scraping the better, more thoughtful works of others, and kicking out its own muddy copy. Would it help to tell you, I agree? That “scraping” the works of others is morally, ethically questionable?
And no, I don’t think A.I. should be given free reign to steal whatever, replace whoever, run wild and spread lies and bullshit acrost the globe. I hate that when I type anything into Google, the top answer is AI generated, and most of the time, it’s provably wrong.
But here’s the thing: I’m the parent of a special needs child. My daughter is autistic. Unlike some of her peers, she’s verbal (thankfully, very, VERY verbal). But there are a number of kids who can’t, or won’t, speak or communicate. Some find it easier to “speak” via cards, or iPads.
I can immediately see how A.I. would help folks like that. And not just special needs kids - people with neurological damage. People with dementia. People with aphasia. A mechanism that learns your speech, and helps you get out the intended thought, even when you yourself can’t? Invaluable.
And that’s just one beneficial use that I can get behind. I’m sure there’s many.
And I know just by saying that, and not outright condemning A.I., I’ve just lost some friends.
But am I to weep for the buggy whip makers? Even if I’m one of them?
I think Joanna Maciejewska said it best: “I want A.I. to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for A.I. to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”
Let A.I. make our lives easier, not replace us.
There is a middle ground. A way to please no one, and allow science to march on.
It’s the solution currently (theoretically, though we’ll see) in use: make anything created with A.I. illegal to copyright. More or less solves itself. Studios and publishers won’t touch anything they can’t copyright (and squeeze all the money out of). People who weren’t truly dedicated to the “art” of A.I. would become disenchanted. One of them already has.
And if anything produced by A.I. becomes automatically public domain, those who would advance science and technology with it can still move forward. Having open-source coding hasn’t seemed to slow down computer science any.
Without the ability to profit off half-ass A.I. concoctions, the snake oil salesmen and P.T. Barnums will move on quick enough. They always do.
But, but, but, what about the people that don’t move on? That use A.I. to truly make a transcendent work of genius that touches us as a society, and helps us to take the next step forward? That is the first genuine beautiful work of art by an artificial intelligence?
I mean, relax, you’ll probably be dead by then.
My own short story “Bastards of a Lesser God,” with zero A.I. input, is in Guilty Crime Story Magazine.
And then there’s “Plastic Nest,” at Pulp Asylum, also 100% A.I.-free!
On “The Hold Up,” neither Longino nor I are A.I.
And on “Sensory Overload”… well, it might be better if my part was played by A.I. But Alison is delightful.
© 2024. Except that "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" pitcher, that’s free of charge for all to use
UPDATE: In the original email, I misspelled “feet” with “feat,” PROVING I’M HUMAN SUCK IT A.I.
I actually have made quite a fortune manufacturing buggy whips.