The tech industry is in the middle of the biggest gamble in it’s history.  More money is being spent on the quest for artificial intelligence than has ever been spent on anything in human history.  Nobody can really rationally explain why this is a good idea or how this investment will be recouped.  It is irrational exuberance at it’s best.

The technologies that have been labeled “AI” to date are not intelligent.  They are nothing more than giant databases of mostly stolen intellectual property being fed into algorithms which remix all of that stolen content into words, video, images, and sounds.  These technologies have their uses, but are nowhere near the transformative, world changing, hopes and dreams of the people hyping them.

For my entire adult life I have made my income via software engineering and my meaning in life via writing, music, and art.  LLMs and Generative Media engines sit precisely at the intersection of language, art, music, and technology.  They promise to make it “easier” to make music, create art, build software, make movies, write books, and the like but, unlike previous tools, they go beyond empowering creators and instead do all of the work on the user’s behalf.  The “creator” is a spectator, a supplicant, a person who only needs to ask for what they want in the correct way, no skill or meaningful effort required.

The results are empty, vapid, soulless, and lacking in any human spark of creativity.  I’d rather see the crayon drawings of a five year old than the most advancd GenAI output. 

I think I’m not entirely alone here. Big tech companies need to push this technology on consumers in order to try to justify over-investing in it, but I think that most people will always prefer something that is real and human to something that is cheap and artificial.  What is the point of becoming a fan of a “songwriter”  who doesn’t exist, has nothing to say, will never play a gig, never wrote a song, has no biography or backstory, and is nothing more than a collection of fake images and fake sounds?  Who could ever count themselves a fan or admirer of a person who claims to be an “artist” but can’t draw, paint, or even take a photograph?  Yes, a prompt can lead to a piece of media, but it can’t make art, only a person can do that.  Can you imagine a biography being written about a person who generated millions of Midjourney images?  Can you envision somebody generating a novel via ChatGPT and winning a Nobel prize for literature and being taught in college classes?  Will they ever make a Springsteen-style biopic about somebody prompting Suno to make a bunch of songs to post to Spotify?

Uh… No.

And this is why I have hope.

We don’t create art because the world needs more “content”.  We create art to express ourselves, to understand ourselves, to understand the world and our place in it, to leave a message behind after we are gone.  It is a defining characteristic of being a human being.  Nothing in the morass of generative slop has any intrinsic or extrinsic value, no cultural or historical relevance, and it never can.  Generative “art” is less meaningful and just as bad for the environment as a cheap plastic grocery bag that provides a few minutes of convenience to a consumer before spending the rest of eternity polluting the environment.  Generated media is meaningless, valueless, and ephemeral, with a useful life measured in minutes and a negative impact that will last forever, whereas actual art, actual creativity, can inspire generations of people, can form and cement bonds of love and friendship, and improve the world just by existing.

Nobody is emotionally attached to their collection of cheap plastic bags.  Nobody wants to be inundated by slop.  Based on what I know about human nature, I predict that the reaction against this technology will be spectacular.  Given the choice between picking up a guitar and singing your teenage heart out and typing in some prompts to an app run by a tech bro who says that nobody really enjoys making music, I expect there will always be a kid with a guitar. 

Hell, I expect that authenticity, imperfection, trying to do things in real life, will be the natural reactions against this toxic slop.  You can already see it on YouTube where the cultural signifiers of cool are a return to intentionally LOWER production values, goofy and unprofessional touches like shooting on lower quality cameras, using pixelated graphics, holding a cheap microphone, and the like.  When anything can look “professional”, the only way to communicate that you are GENUINE is to intentionally lean into being slightly unpolished and unprofessional.  I predict that in the future, if you want to be taken seriously as being a genuine human being, you will need to avoid the use of generative slop tech to be taken seriously.  Generative tech will continue to be almost exclusively the hallmark of phishers, scammers, and other manipulative trash people.  Nothing screams “inauthentic” like having ChatGPT speak for you, Midjourney draw for you, or Suno sing for you.

So, when I look ahead I see only a mad rush to try to force this technology into every facet of our lives followed by a massive backlash against it, economic catastrophe, and a post-revolutionary state in which this technology still exists in a limited role where it’s useful, AI techno-utopianism will be scoffed at, and this era will mostly be remembered as one of those times when humanity lost it’s collective mind while actual intelligence in computers will not exist for another couple of decades, if not centuries.  We don’t even know what intelligence even really IS, artificial or natural, none of this current technology moves us any closer to that goal, no matter what the venture capital idiots are saying.  This tech will stick around but we won’t be getting Data or the Borg or HAL or The Matrix anytime soon.  The future is human.  

Indie, DIY, authenticity, FTW.