AI slop everywhere
I guess I might be an AI Ludditte and I am still pondering deeply what I want to say in my next job interview when the question about my stance about AI comes up.
For now its a big feeling of distress. Just today the swedish music site I abuse was presenting me another Band called Feuerhammer which is swedish, new and released already five albums or so. It did sound a lot less AI than the rest of the slop the green music site usually presents. It was a bit more fine tuned, but there was still this specific tone of the voice that I tend to recognise. A quick research yielded that its apparently a real band of three people which is a lot more than the usual throw-away metal music of something. And it does sound better, but still insanely generic. I blocked the "artist" out of pure disdain for their bloodline and stopped the urge for violence.
I can safely say about myself that I am radical. I hate all the AI stuff with passion, more with every instance I see. At this point I want to note that I am kinda aware that LLMs are not even remotely AI and nothing more than sophisticated pattern matching but sufficient technology and magic...
The earliest instance of this hate started with a friend who is really into creating songs with Suno. By now my phone has around 10 of those songs, received but never listened to. I despise them, and they sound always the same, generic, without surprise. Coincidentally, just today I read a Substack about exact that topic: No Surprise. I refuse to listen to a single one of them, especially because he hasn't even wrote the lyrics himself but tasked ChatGPT with writing a text about topic Y. There is exactly zero human in that music.
I know this friend since centuries. When the moon and we were young he was pitching ideas for browser games, board games or anything between. What he did not had was the ability to make anything of that happen. No programming skills, no artistic ambition. Just the ideas guys. And those are also important. You need good ideas, mechanics that are thought through and a solid writing for the story that ties this all together and hooks the people. But all this is a lot of work and the fruit of your labour might never or very late come to fruition. I don't wont to dig to hard onto this unnamed friend who would recognise himself immediately if he ever were to read this. In his actual day job he is hard working, more successful than me without a doubt and an accomplished servant of his employer. But he is such a good example because he send me a song just yesterday and that kicked this all off.
The main characteristic and takeaway for me is, there is someone that wants results now but lacks the ability, patience or skill to achieve something in a normal time frame. And just like the biggest parasite in history there is the constant need for a short cut. AI provides that. There are a lot of artists that use AI as a tool, a quick Dall-E drawing to get the base structure for a scene. Maybe to fill a boring background and I find it hard to gauge the point where I want to start judging and condemning (its a quick road from judgement to damnation in my court).
And it is not like I cannot emphasise. Sometimes I dream of music and songs, but I lack the voice, the instrument skills and the theoretical foundation to make my dreams reality (and it would probably not good even if I could transcribe it). I often envision drawings, sketches or paintings I would like to create, sometimes its actually quite detailed. There is an urge to create. And there is a lot of laziness, I could probably never be a genius at the guitar and my voice is probably not able to be ever awesome. Same for my drawing ability. But, it can be trained, I might be even slower than someone younger and more talented. But that is what talent is for you, the coefficient of your learning speed. Or at least so did RimWorld tell me.
I am not so sure if the urge to create is innate in all humans, but I certainly have it, take a quick look at my graveyard of abandoned code projects on GitHub. What I obviously lack is the will to actually finish something or keep on doing it. I don't feel to bad about it, its apparently a common affliction and I already meditate about it thoroughly. One day I will come back to that project, for sure.
But this is where those handy AI tools come in, they just create something from your spur of the moment idea and then you are done. No sketching an outline of a drawing, multiple drafts and then one final painting. Instead straight to the finish line. Not just a singular tune in your ear that grows to a composition, instead instant gratification. And its so tempting. I quite like the tales from the christian religious movement of the devil. Not as the plain incarnated evil that is a singular person but as a ghost of temptation. Like a lingering force that is part of everything that tries to seep away your humanity. In that case, generative AI is quite the literal devil. It constantly tempts with quick results.
You don't need to learn this language, I am here to translate for you.
No, no need to pick up the guitar, I will just write a song for you.
No, you don't need to read this, here, a summary master, trust me, rely on me.
The whispers are getting louder. And paradoxical, for the last whisper I am inclined to listen. The internet was already full of "white papers" and random texts for SEO reasons that something that can summarise written content was already in high demand before the current wave of LLM incarnations. But at the same time its getting even worse now. Some moons ago there was the "Sub-Reddit" simulator where people where playing bots against each other, harmless fun. Until the experiments broke free and now they are everywhere. And I don't trust myself to be able to identify them. Every time I see a comment in the wrong language in a Fediverse instance I start to question: Did the person just quote an English meme, or is it a bot that answered in its default language?
Getting to my first point about being a Ludditte. I seriously question the use of any AI tool. The facial recognition in Immich is quite handy but every advancement results in better suppression of any opposition in any country around the globe. Being able to search for concepts is certainly interesting. But that is really it. Even OCR is kinda wonky and not reliable, even less than the classical kind. Translations seemed to work okay for me and transcribing audio came in somewhat useful upon occasion. But theses are things pattern recognition is explicitly made for. But how much does this make our lives better? If calculated against the cost? Is this a deal worth taking?
Remember when we were promised a future were machines would do all the menial work and we humans could concentrate on culture, writing and art? Turns out building a robot hand that can handle things is hard and expensive, creating acceptable audio books, icons, stock images or jingles not so much. There is probably a tin foil component here, about how the aforementioned parasite and his friends envision a world where they don't have to rely on those stupid free thinkers and educated people.
To come to a finish, one last thought. AI kills hobbyist. If we would live in a true Meritocracy there would be a lot of people that would just fall off the cliff. I would be probably one of them. And this group is pretty large. Even in the non merit based society the fascist have to invent pretty harsh and obvious measures to get their buddies in positions of power because the people that were there are so much more skilled. Staggeringly more skilled. Turns out, if you want only white, male people from a certain sub group and social background, you are scraping the barrel of skill pretty quickly.
My coding ability is better than the average Joe, but overall, there would be no position for me in the world of utopia tomorrow. I am not a good writer, so no career as author either. And my blog posts are all quite jumbled, so no columnist section either. But I can still do all those things. I can write code for tiny silly programs that reinvent the wheel my way, I can write my thoughts in a public place and I certainly can come back to my epic fantasy novel that surely will be done someday. And maybe be read by someone. Especially with writing it is already hard to get any audience because it needs investment and basically everyone with time can do it. But this gets worse if every kind of creative expression is flooded with people that have neither the skill nor the time to actually create. How to I find the promising new indie band if they are drowned out by slop. How does anyone find them? How do they keep on going? Same for pictures, photographs or even more writing.
Generative AI destroys a natural barrier and now we are getting swept away in the flood. And I hate that.
On a side note, as a non-native speaker I only recently started to capitalise the "I", which I should have learned in the 3rd grade. But this makes me also hyper aware how often I use "I" in this blog. Like it feels like I am super egocentric. Its a blog about my thoughts so there might be something to it, but still...