Because I’m a person who used to be terminally online — probably still is online too much — I have lots of loose connections. A lot of casual friendships with people who mean well, who I’m happy to see when it’s possible, folks who vaguely know what’s up in my life and when things are rough, want to help. One of these folks connected me with an old friend of hers — I’m guessing it’s because she knew about my work situation — and I went to meet him for coffee.
It’s graduation season, and watching the graduating classes boo commencement speakers boosting AI from the podium is giving such joy and hope. The speakers seem genuinely surprised by this reaction, but it just shows how out of touch the speakers are. AI boosters are telling a class graduating into a job market where AI is eating entry level jobs and creative roles with the voracity of a teenager who runs cross country that they should embrace AI? Of course they’re booing!
Music biz c-suite dude Scott Borschetta responded by telling the kids to “Deal with it,” underscoring the inevitable acceptance execs want from everyone regarding AI, ours is not to question why. Former Google suit Eric Schmidt suggested the kids needed to engage with countering viewpoints. A classic lazy play in which you’re considered unreasonable because frankly, you’d rather avoid the person — or technology — who sees you as less than. Real estate exec Gloria Caulfield scolded the graduates and said “We’ve been here before” with revolutionary technology, but she failed to mention that it wasn’t good for workers.
When I met that guy for coffee, he didn’t understand why I didn’t want to use AI tools to “optimize and monitize your content.” He didn’t understand my AI skepticism, he didn’t understand why people wouldn’t whole heartedly embrace this new technology to see what was possible. He felt like AI got him about 70 percent of the way in his writing projects, and he did the remaining 30 percent himself.
I was not as snarky as I’d like to have been, in part because I was so confounded by his take. It was both an enlightening and confusing experience. Why would anyone care that I don’t want AI in my creative process? Why do I need to see AI as anything but an automated word or picture generator?
“That stuff isn’t interesting to me,” I said.
“So, you optimize on… interesting?”
“Uh, yes, exactly! Why would I spend my time any other way?”
The next day I went to the museum with an artist friend. I told him about this conversation. “He’s not an artist,” my friend said. More profoundly, he said, “Look, if we’re going to use AI to replace the creative process, we need to talk about what it means to be human.”
There’s a lot of reporting about how AI isn’t directly responsible for the job loss that’s hit so many of us, but the CEO of Microsoft’s AI, Mustafa Suleyman, said that AI will be able to perform “…most, if not all, professional tasks. So white-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” It seems like he sees this as a good thing; he’s stating this as a goal, not a warning.
I hope it’s obvious that I’m not a Luddite. I’m also, to the detriment of my mental health, a systems thinker — also known as an overthinker. I don’t look at AI in a vaccuum. AI boosters seem willing to breeze past environmental impact, intellectual property ethics, and worker morale — not to mention the shocking enablement of school shootings and suicide attempts — in order to… what, exactly? Artificially inflate tech stocks and please the board that their staffing costs are so low? What are they making that people need? Or even want?
Machines are good at patterns, that’s cool. AI has good use cases. When I talked with Anil Dash for CANNED, we talked about machine learning and how scientists have used flavors of AI for years now. We’ve been dealing with lower stakes AI intervention; anyone who’s used a chatbot to get customer service is dealing with an AI agent. All this automation can be annoying, but we’ve come to a level of frustrated acceptance that this is what we must navigate. And sometimes it’s enough, not often, but it happens.
I’ve been in online content for coming on 20 years now and I’ve consistently railed against content made to please the algorithim. Winning at Google meant that you won at capitalism, but it did not mean you made anything good, anything valuable. It’s logical that in a system where winning at capitalism is the goal, we end up with content generating machines designed to win at Google, to win at capitalism first, before considering if we provide anything useful or interesting.
That casual conversation about AI adoption and my apparently confusing hesitancy got in my head. I thought about how if someone creates content that’s 70 percent artificial, I should only give it 30 percent of my attention. I imagined a tool that strikes out seven words for every ten, and what the results would look like. I also pondered the religious conversion aspect of AI, how AI boosters are are those people on your doorstep assuring you that eternal life is yours if only you’ll believe — but I am sorry, my tech evangelical friend, I am Jewish and come from 5000 years of conversion resistance.
I’m also a dyed in the wool creative. I went to art school and while I’m not a wildly succesful visual artist, I have sold work and I still make paintings with my own hand. I get deeply nostalgic when I get a whiff of linseed oil and turpentine, it reminds me of long days in the studio making a glorious mess. Some of that work is on the walls in my home. It’s full of meaning, every work is a story.
I learned how to play an instrument and for seven years I played live music with a band. I was not a great musician, not by a long shot, but it was wildly fun. We were on TV a few times and we played I don’t know how many shows. I still miss it. We played a handful of big stages and in our last lineup, before we called it quits, we had a killer bass player, top notch. To feel the bass vibrate the stage under my feet was know exactly where I was supposed to be. A machine can not have that feeling, cannot thrive in it.
And I’m a writer, here we are. My work is based in my lived experience in the world, not the aggregation of others chewed up and spit on to the page in a facsimile of humanity. I was swimming laps recently, backstroke, and I could hear the muffled sound of the radio on the pool deck as I reached, reached, reached. One of the lifeguards is always tuned to the classic rock station, so I am pulling through the water as I hear the dulled sound of Bob Segar’s Against the Wind, for example. AI will not tell you what that feels like. We may share common experiences, we may have been to the same places, but my memoir is about me, it’s not a remix of what happened to 400 other gap year travelers, thrown in the blender and repaginated to make narrative sense. My gloriously surreal screenplay and short film — made and acted out by humans — is based on a completely true story. The feeling of surprise and satisfaction at the end is so clear. I feel it every time I rewatch the film, and I want you to feel it when you see it. It’s a human reaction, after all.
I’ve been underemployed for a year now. I’ve seen what little work I’ve had made worse by the insertion of AI. I had hoped to work for another five years or so, but as AI has stolen the onramp for new workers, it’s built a bunch of exit ramps for older workers. My occupation — technical writer — shows up on all the lists as “at risk” for elimination under AI. All this talk about how AI isn’t the cause of job loss doesn’t land well at my house.
There is an active live storytelling scene here in Seattle, a bunch of events where some random person will get up and tell a story, no notes, about that time they blew up their life and threw everything in the car and moved across country or got catfished on a dating app or fell in love with a cat even though they were a dog person. It’s not unusual to see a story teller stop in the middle and say, “Hold on, wait, I got the order wrong, let me back up.” People go on too long for my liking, my internal editor wants them to stop at a particular gem of a moment. People insist on telling you the moral of their story — “… that’s when I realized…” — when I want to come to it on my own. I’ve been at the mic a handful of times, it’s scary, my voice shakes when I start out and then, as I get going — it’s my story, I know it — I calm down.
These are human choices, human stories, told to exist in this moment, in this room, and then they’re gone. They’re live, people are fallible, even if you hear the story again in another venue, it will not be the same.
“Look, if we’re going to use AI to replace the creative process, we need to talk about what it means to be human,” my friend said. We wandered through the museum. It was mostly empty and the guards wanted to talk about the work.