I was recently scrolling LinkedIn (because for some reason, I continue to be delusional enough to think that there is value in that particular platform) and came across what might be the saddest post I’ve ever read.
Someone had grabbed a screenshot of something that Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT) had written on X.
Or, and hear me out, you could just talk to your kids?
Now look, I understand that sometimes, getting your kids to open up and share about their days can be tough. There are times that we sit around the dinner table as a family at night and it feels like we have to beg our teenagers to tell us just one single thing that happened to them that day.
But having to outsource your parenting to AI is a level of dystopia that I was not, and am not, and refuse to be, emotionally prepared for.
Which got me thinking about the role of AI in my life, and the role of AI in the lives of my children, and what their future might look like because of the place I am allowing, or not allowing, AI to have in my life right now.
AI At Work: A Necessary Evil?
I work for a small, non-profit, labor focused, pro-union organization here in Portland.
Because of our pro-labor, pro-union stance, we’ve been slower than a lot of places to adopt a robust implementation of AI into our environment (much to the delight of a lot of us.)
But, it is present, I will admit.
We do use it to do things like synthesize pages of meeting notes into something coherent and digestible, or generate the occasional image for a training module that we are developing. Not because we are trying to eliminate the work of instructional designers like myself, but because there aren’t a ton of us, and we don’t have the budget to rework an e-learning an unlimited number of times.
I recently had a discussion with some colleagues about our private feelings about AI, and we all felt pretty much the same way. We had essentially drawn lines in the sand, decided that it wasn’t going to have any place in our personal lives, but that if we had to, we would hold our noses and use it at work if we had to.
Can We Really Escape It?
“But Stephen, you’re probably using auto-correct as you type! And I bet you stream music and let Apple tell you what songs you might like! Isn’t that AI?”
And you’re right, those things do rely on AI, but predictive AI and generative AI are two different things, and for the purposes of this discussion, what I’m talking about is generative AI. The AI that requires massive data centers to be built, generations of people to be forced off of their lands, and even public lands to be demolished, all in the name of generating videos of the President flying planes filled with feces over crowds of protestors.
But What Are We Sacrificing?
If you open up any AI agent right now and give it the right prompt, it can (eventually) spit you back out an image. But the problem is the idea that AI is “creating” that image.
In reality, AI isn’t “creating” anything. All those agents are doing is scraping the internet and taking bits and pieces from thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of other pieces of art, smashing them together, and presenting them to you as an image.
Which is sort of the problem, isn’t it?
AI can’t feel, and isn’t that what all art is centered on? Isn’t that what all art is based on?
ChatGPT can write you a poem, but it will never be able to feel what I imagine Mary Oliver felt when she penned “Wild Geese.”
Claude can compile an image for you, but it will never feel the pain that Van Gogh felt while he was painting “Starry Night,” painting to stay alive.
Suno can make a song for you, but it will never come close to the emotion and feeling you can hear in Jeff Buckley’s voice as he makes his way through “Grace.”
And Copilot might be able to write you an essay, but it will never understand the desperation and need that Thoreau felt as he escaped to the woods to write “Walden.”
Ultimately, I believe the genie is out of the bottle, and there’s no getting it back in at this point. The proverbial toothpaste is out of the tube. While I would have loved a Jetsons-like helper to fold my laundry for me so that I could have had more time to be creative and do things that brought me joy, we’ve gone the other way.
We’ve given AI our most creative endeavors while we slave away at the things that we should have had it doing in the first place.
AI will never feel pain, or joy, or heartbreak, or crushing loneliness, or immense happiness, or existential dread, or mind-numbing boredom.
And those are the states from which all of the best things arise.
But hey, at least I can create a video of Donald Trump kickboxing Chuck Schumer in a jungle.
That’s the same thing, right?