it's making me feel like everything is changing and that is... scary
it's making me feel like nothing ever changes... a thing that was supposed to shatter the very foundation of society was introduced a year ago, and we're all still here living ordinary lives, feeling ordinary feelings.
it's making me want to go touch grass and run as far away from LinkedIn and Twitter posts that starts with:
HUGE AI NEWS!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Second sentence goes here about some HUGE thing AI accomplished.
"All AI art can really do is add more voiceless noise to the world of relentlessly churning cheap content. If you're a part of that machine then yes AI will inevitably steamroll you, but if you're not it will accentuate your value as a singular voice a person who has something worth saying."
Because... "Art is what happens when a human feels feels a powerful emotion or experience and then translates it through an artistic medium to be felt and understood by another human"
AI does what I do. I had been a successful email-spam-from-elegant-hotel copywriter to pay my mortgage. I no longer get calls to write emails. The mortgage guy keeps calling, tho.
I don’t begrudge AI. I invested in it. (A bit too late to celebrate with caviar just yet.) But I turn to ChattyG (my pet name for ChatGPT) for all sorts of “hand-me-a-screwdriver” moments in my writing process. ChattyG is a beautiful tool like my paperback rhyming dictionary I once gifted to my junior copywriter as a going-away-present. She looked at its well worn pages and said “I use the internet.” For me, today I keep a ChattyG tab open next to RhymeZone.com, and TheFreeDictionary.com. These invaluable resources contain every (already-existing)word needed to write… but they don’t replace writers, the empower them. Same-same for ChattyG. I’ll be fine. I’m actually more concerned for Google.com. How will THEY pay their mortgage once people find out that ChattyG gives people answers to questions instead of wild-goose-chase-links… Links that never flippin’ answer how-to-cook-steak-on-a-cast-iron-pan-in-the-oven. (When you NEEEEEED the answer in less than 4 minutes.)
ChattyG stole (saved me from?) my email writing gigs, but it’s still my bestest friend helping me brainstorm bigger (rarer) gigs that require concepting (someday the spellcheck gods will recognize concepting as a word.) (that last aside would be funnier if you could see the red line under “concepting” like I do.)
ChattyGs can’t “concept,” though, on its own. But it can help jog my mind to ah-ha moments.
Alex, your tilt illustration is so chefs-kiss genius that AI is still scratching its head about it.
Great post! I've been thinking a lot about "leaning into the weird" and being "purposefully imperfect" as a potential response to AI. It strikes me that so much of what goes viral these days on TikTok is quite strange: people making out with Shrek filters, a man turning into a horse as he opens his refrigerator etc.
All of this is quite odd and would likely have felt at home in experimental art decades ago. It would have been fringe but now such media gets 50k+ likes. It feels like even leaning into the weird wouldn't be enough as the weird and the imperfect are becoming "normalized" on social media platforms. There has been a "tilt" rendering the absurd into yawn-inducing trends. I'm curious/terrified to see what springs up.
Love your thoughts on it…the tilting is the dangerous part
The fact that the AI founders have so much power is the dangerous part
The fact that the best AI products will only be accessible with a high price tag and it’s becoming big business is the dangerous part
The fact that there is absolutely no control is the dangerous part
The fact that it’s open to all people in our society are usually led like cattle is the dangerous part
The only good part is witnessing the amazing advancement of technology the same way people from the thirties experienced old cars, old typewriters, old phones and their unbelievable advances to this day…and we’re all still ok…so maybe there is hope for humanity…
I believe governments should protect art and culture the same way Europe did in the past centuries…
I'm... absolutely floored by the writing here, Alex. Pulled me in within 60 seconds.
It's not really a subject I intentionally explore much these days. It seems like every third article in any of my algorithmic *and* curated feeds/subscriptions is about AI this or that. But the hook for me with this piece was contemplating the artists and the golem of irrelevance.
I mean, I'm an artist. I make many types of art. Not very well, with most of them, mind you; but I still love to create as broad-spectrum and as often as I can.
I was out the gate with AI (beta tester on Midjourney from concept to about a year ago. ugh.), and once it started getting amazing, I got bored. I can't imagine where we're going to be in 5 years, but I'm entirely certain human art will remain the gloriously ingenious weirdness it forever has been. Art will survive and flourish, as always.
This was great Alex and I wish the conversation underneath was happening in a coffee shop somewhere near me because its exactly what I long for! I'd like to recommend a post by Ted Gioia to accompany yours entitled 'The State of Culture in 2024': https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024
One of the biggest dangers of AI "art" is simply that it will be difficult to escape so that even if you have an enquiring mind that seeks out the deviation you're gonna struggle to find it amongst the mass of algorithmically perfected pap - at least online. This will have an upside and a downside; the upside is that hopefully the likes of you and me and everyone else commenting below will leave our screens more often to congregate in coffee shops and venues and abandoned shopfronts to experience art unmediated by a f*cking algorithm that thinks it knows me because of data gathered from a device that I share with my Chinese wife and 8 year old daughter! The downside is that we will be in a minority and the common ground between the "deviants" and the mainstream will widen further. Scenesters will be fine with this, the more outcast they are the more validated they feel but segregation in any form is bad news for society as a whole. My advice? Don't believe the media and tech gurus kids, get outside and talk to people - they're okay.
4. I’m guessing my ChattyOuija ‘writing friend’ - who spouts overly wordy, semi-obvious, tone-free prose - she will never sing her heart out daily for the ocean, the sky, seabirds, seals, cedar trees, seaweed, salt, bioluminescent bugs, rocks, etc. Not spontaneously and unabashedly weird AF songs with no words. Not like a human in full-TILT, defiant love with Mama Earth. (To be fair, her videos may excel at mimicry and obviousness and run on sentences, though. Thank you, Cleveland!)
I love this reframing and I am entirely on board with it.
The existential threat from A.I., at least in the short term, is the one that has nothing to do with artificial intelligences and everything to do with artificial humans - the ones with workplace power that value profit and ease of scalability (ease of greater profits) at the expense of all the humans that depend on them.
I'm sure a lot will go down re. protective legislation. I'm sure it'll be an unholy mess, out of which something humane will painfully struggle to its feet. But in the short term, as you say - the artists.
Back when I started writing for a living (just 15 years ago, I'm such a fraud as an Experienced Veteran) I was one of the many desperate noobs who would take any job going, including those utterly grim 500 words for ten bucks SEO keyword-stuffing pieces. I wrote ten pieces for American Express via a third party, that were designed to never be read by humans, which I learned far far far too late, and after I'd poured my soul into them for months, and then that third party delayed paying me for a year until I threatened to contact American Express directly. If it paid, I would write it. And in this way, I never made any real money.
This stuff still goes on, and still traps new writers into making no money. But A.I. is going to make all of it go away. Humans will not do this anymore, and the machines will start writing for the machines, creating a huge ouroboros of garbage that will fuel chum-boxes (looking at you, Taboola and Outbrain) and advertising-infested websites and all the horrors that have made a lot of the internet ugly and dumb for the last decade. And maybe, just maybe, writers can finally be liberated from all of that nonsense. At last. And they can recognise, at last, that their job is to write for other humans, and cut out the idiotic artificial humans in the middle, because the time for "apprenticing" ourselves to these fools is over (and maybe now we can see what a fool's game that always was).
I think that there will always be an audience for live jazz music, which was met at first with shock but its inherent genius was quickly realized and appreciated. I wonder if performance art or live painting or a combination of them will be the analogous version of visual art. I’m excited to see what it will be, but it will be something like a NFT, where the enjoyment of the experience IS the art.
what a banger first post from Alex!
how's all this AI stuff making me feel?
it's making me feel like everyone needs to go read on bullshit: https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf
it's making me feel like everything is changing and that is... scary
it's making me feel like nothing ever changes... a thing that was supposed to shatter the very foundation of society was introduced a year ago, and we're all still here living ordinary lives, feeling ordinary feelings.
it's making me want to go touch grass and run as far away from LinkedIn and Twitter posts that starts with:
HUGE AI NEWS!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Second sentence goes here about some HUGE thing AI accomplished.
Link to post or video.
Loved this.
Highly recommend watching Mango Street's "You're Wrong about AI Art" (https://youtu.be/LuPGkgHODgM)
"All AI art can really do is add more voiceless noise to the world of relentlessly churning cheap content. If you're a part of that machine then yes AI will inevitably steamroll you, but if you're not it will accentuate your value as a singular voice a person who has something worth saying."
Because... "Art is what happens when a human feels feels a powerful emotion or experience and then translates it through an artistic medium to be felt and understood by another human"
Love to see Alex on the Sublime newsletter - love his work.
And great perspective on both the inevitability and realities of AI.
I agree that culture will definitely shift with it and Art will continue.
Many artists will suffer financially and be forced to pivot/expand/find new ways to commercialize their work and talents.
It will also be an opportunity - though few artists or professionals currently see it that way:
If AI can do X thing that I have built my life around, what am I now to do?
Well, find something else. Reinvent yourself. Opportunity.
Scary perhaps, difficult, life-threatening - but it's an opportunity to expand your experience of life as you know it. Cool.
As an actor I ponder the importance of bringing my humanity to the fore in my work.
The importance of leaning into what makes me ME more than ever.
The importance of human individuality.
I especially loved the final video. Pure gold.
It's making me feel like I need to go outside and touch some grass. Everything seems to be staged, nothing looks real anymore.
AI does what I do. I had been a successful email-spam-from-elegant-hotel copywriter to pay my mortgage. I no longer get calls to write emails. The mortgage guy keeps calling, tho.
I don’t begrudge AI. I invested in it. (A bit too late to celebrate with caviar just yet.) But I turn to ChattyG (my pet name for ChatGPT) for all sorts of “hand-me-a-screwdriver” moments in my writing process. ChattyG is a beautiful tool like my paperback rhyming dictionary I once gifted to my junior copywriter as a going-away-present. She looked at its well worn pages and said “I use the internet.” For me, today I keep a ChattyG tab open next to RhymeZone.com, and TheFreeDictionary.com. These invaluable resources contain every (already-existing)word needed to write… but they don’t replace writers, the empower them. Same-same for ChattyG. I’ll be fine. I’m actually more concerned for Google.com. How will THEY pay their mortgage once people find out that ChattyG gives people answers to questions instead of wild-goose-chase-links… Links that never flippin’ answer how-to-cook-steak-on-a-cast-iron-pan-in-the-oven. (When you NEEEEEED the answer in less than 4 minutes.)
ChattyG stole (saved me from?) my email writing gigs, but it’s still my bestest friend helping me brainstorm bigger (rarer) gigs that require concepting (someday the spellcheck gods will recognize concepting as a word.) (that last aside would be funnier if you could see the red line under “concepting” like I do.)
ChattyGs can’t “concept,” though, on its own. But it can help jog my mind to ah-ha moments.
Alex, your tilt illustration is so chefs-kiss genius that AI is still scratching its head about it.
Great post! I've been thinking a lot about "leaning into the weird" and being "purposefully imperfect" as a potential response to AI. It strikes me that so much of what goes viral these days on TikTok is quite strange: people making out with Shrek filters, a man turning into a horse as he opens his refrigerator etc.
All of this is quite odd and would likely have felt at home in experimental art decades ago. It would have been fringe but now such media gets 50k+ likes. It feels like even leaning into the weird wouldn't be enough as the weird and the imperfect are becoming "normalized" on social media platforms. There has been a "tilt" rendering the absurd into yawn-inducing trends. I'm curious/terrified to see what springs up.
Hey Alex killer post. Beautifully done. TY for that.
Where is the text to humor AI at?
The very not AI video made me laugh out loud. How did you make it if not AI?
Love your thoughts on it…the tilting is the dangerous part
The fact that the AI founders have so much power is the dangerous part
The fact that the best AI products will only be accessible with a high price tag and it’s becoming big business is the dangerous part
The fact that there is absolutely no control is the dangerous part
The fact that it’s open to all people in our society are usually led like cattle is the dangerous part
The only good part is witnessing the amazing advancement of technology the same way people from the thirties experienced old cars, old typewriters, old phones and their unbelievable advances to this day…and we’re all still ok…so maybe there is hope for humanity…
I believe governments should protect art and culture the same way Europe did in the past centuries…
I'm... absolutely floored by the writing here, Alex. Pulled me in within 60 seconds.
It's not really a subject I intentionally explore much these days. It seems like every third article in any of my algorithmic *and* curated feeds/subscriptions is about AI this or that. But the hook for me with this piece was contemplating the artists and the golem of irrelevance.
I mean, I'm an artist. I make many types of art. Not very well, with most of them, mind you; but I still love to create as broad-spectrum and as often as I can.
I was out the gate with AI (beta tester on Midjourney from concept to about a year ago. ugh.), and once it started getting amazing, I got bored. I can't imagine where we're going to be in 5 years, but I'm entirely certain human art will remain the gloriously ingenious weirdness it forever has been. Art will survive and flourish, as always.
Thanks for the hope, friend. 🫂
This was great Alex and I wish the conversation underneath was happening in a coffee shop somewhere near me because its exactly what I long for! I'd like to recommend a post by Ted Gioia to accompany yours entitled 'The State of Culture in 2024': https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-state-of-the-culture-2024
One of the biggest dangers of AI "art" is simply that it will be difficult to escape so that even if you have an enquiring mind that seeks out the deviation you're gonna struggle to find it amongst the mass of algorithmically perfected pap - at least online. This will have an upside and a downside; the upside is that hopefully the likes of you and me and everyone else commenting below will leave our screens more often to congregate in coffee shops and venues and abandoned shopfronts to experience art unmediated by a f*cking algorithm that thinks it knows me because of data gathered from a device that I share with my Chinese wife and 8 year old daughter! The downside is that we will be in a minority and the common ground between the "deviants" and the mainstream will widen further. Scenesters will be fine with this, the more outcast they are the more validated they feel but segregation in any form is bad news for society as a whole. My advice? Don't believe the media and tech gurus kids, get outside and talk to people - they're okay.
4. I’m guessing my ChattyOuija ‘writing friend’ - who spouts overly wordy, semi-obvious, tone-free prose - she will never sing her heart out daily for the ocean, the sky, seabirds, seals, cedar trees, seaweed, salt, bioluminescent bugs, rocks, etc. Not spontaneously and unabashedly weird AF songs with no words. Not like a human in full-TILT, defiant love with Mama Earth. (To be fair, her videos may excel at mimicry and obviousness and run on sentences, though. Thank you, Cleveland!)
I love this reframing and I am entirely on board with it.
The existential threat from A.I., at least in the short term, is the one that has nothing to do with artificial intelligences and everything to do with artificial humans - the ones with workplace power that value profit and ease of scalability (ease of greater profits) at the expense of all the humans that depend on them.
I'm sure a lot will go down re. protective legislation. I'm sure it'll be an unholy mess, out of which something humane will painfully struggle to its feet. But in the short term, as you say - the artists.
Back when I started writing for a living (just 15 years ago, I'm such a fraud as an Experienced Veteran) I was one of the many desperate noobs who would take any job going, including those utterly grim 500 words for ten bucks SEO keyword-stuffing pieces. I wrote ten pieces for American Express via a third party, that were designed to never be read by humans, which I learned far far far too late, and after I'd poured my soul into them for months, and then that third party delayed paying me for a year until I threatened to contact American Express directly. If it paid, I would write it. And in this way, I never made any real money.
This stuff still goes on, and still traps new writers into making no money. But A.I. is going to make all of it go away. Humans will not do this anymore, and the machines will start writing for the machines, creating a huge ouroboros of garbage that will fuel chum-boxes (looking at you, Taboola and Outbrain) and advertising-infested websites and all the horrors that have made a lot of the internet ugly and dumb for the last decade. And maybe, just maybe, writers can finally be liberated from all of that nonsense. At last. And they can recognise, at last, that their job is to write for other humans, and cut out the idiotic artificial humans in the middle, because the time for "apprenticing" ourselves to these fools is over (and maybe now we can see what a fool's game that always was).
That's my hope.
And yet more bullshit from a man, whose acting like an expert in art, who can't even figure out that his title looks like shit.
Titlecase your titles, noob.
I think that there will always be an audience for live jazz music, which was met at first with shock but its inherent genius was quickly realized and appreciated. I wonder if performance art or live painting or a combination of them will be the analogous version of visual art. I’m excited to see what it will be, but it will be something like a NFT, where the enjoyment of the experience IS the art.