I'm Worried that AI Will Create Virtual Writers Who Are Even More Fucked Up Than Myself
While The Terminator franchise makes AI seem cuddly and fun it’s actually a terrifying threat to our future. Artificial Intelligence is finally becoming powerful enough to scare the holy living shit out of us human beings.
I have watched with mild amusement and no small amount of existential terror as people have shared online playful little experiments where they plug in a request for, I dunno, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper but with minor Muppets replacing Jesus and his Apostles.
EVERYBODY want to see that. Who wouldn’t want to see a version of Da Vinci’s religious masterpiece prominently featuring Frazzle, Crazy Harry, Dr. Strangepork and Beans Bunny?
Ah, but we will pay a steep price for this modest amusement. Every time I look at one of these oddly impressive AI abominations I can’t help but think about the copyright being violated and real, flesh and blood human beings missing out on gigs to digital collections of zeroes and ones.
When you make as little as I do after twenty-six years of hard, joyful labor you become very sensitive to threats to your exceedingly modest, fragile livelihood.
Just as painters are afraid of being replaced by AI that makes no demands and is endlessly malleable I can’t help but worry that Artificial Intelligence will drive me out of business as well. Hell, I’m halfway there already!
Here’s the thing: I’m not worried about AI being more knowledgable, professional and polished than me. You can plug a series of reference books into an algorithm and come up with something that feels almost, if not quite, fully human.
I’m not worried about AI being more knowledgable, professional and polished than me because, let’s face it, everybody in pop culture media is more knowledgable, professional and polished than me. That’s why I’m just barely holding on to my modest place in the business after twenty-six years.
My big concern with the unstoppable, fundamentally immoral rise of Artificial Intelligence is that it will create virtual writers who are even more fucked up than I am.
Being Depressed, Anxious, deeply introverted and terrified of human interaction is my extremely erratic, non-lucrative brand. It’s who I am on a creative and personal level. It’s my whole deal so I am very protective of my neuroses.
I am worried that Artificial Intelligence will create virtual writers with the kind of deep-seated psychological damage I can’t even imagine having.
I was abandoned twice by a mentally ill mother, first when I was a baby and later when I tried to have a relationship with her as an adult and I realized, to my sadness if not surprise, that she was not emotionally capable of having any kind of bond with me or of being a mother.
This evil robot, sadly, would be a better mother than my own.
What if there’s an AI that has fourteen different troubled mothers, each with their own set of issues AND a dozen robot dads who abandoned them as well? Can you even imagine the kind of fascinating problems that would produce?
What if there’s an AI that perfectly mimics my writing, right down to the copious typos and factual errors?
We’ve already seen how desperately, hilariously wrong AI can be through a series of viral chats between journalists and new AI that almost inevitably went to some weird, dark, uncomfortable places.
That makes me uncomfortable because I’M the one who is supposed to be making people uncomfortable with my myriad personal flaws and raging, only partially treated mental illness.
When those chats between curious writers and AI eager to please went haywire it was widely seen as a glitch in the system, something that needed to be ironed out before the technology could advance.
But from my perspective when AI gets weird and wrong and creepy it’s not screwing up but rather capturing the messiness and brokenness of the human condition all too vividly.
As a profoundly flawed writer and even more profoundly flawed human being, THAT scares the shit out of me. It should scare you too.
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