I Got the AI Ick

I was shopping for love on hinge when I saw him. 

An important man. A majestic man. 

Golden and glowing atop a deep purple backdrop.

Really?

I had my suspicions. So I looked closer. 

AHA! There. Elongated fingers like melting wax candles, regally draped over his thigh. The dead give-away that this was not a real photograph. This was an AI-generated headshot.

Hard pass.

Not because I believe “naturalness” to be the most Truthful form of representation. To be fair, perhaps the way this man imagines and projects his aspirational fantasy self is core to his personality, and someone out there will find this whimsical and enchanting. But for me, there is something about passing off these AI-images as actual portraits on a dating app that feels like one trick of the light too far.

It gave me the ick.

Lots of people are posting their takes on AI right now.

Evangelists and enthusiasts say it will only get better, as allegedly all technology does ad infinitum.

Any day now they’ll figure out the fingers, and I, duped, will fall head over heels for the fantasy king. 

Or, maybe, there will always be this uncanny valley that gives sensitive people like me the ick, whether there’s a dead giveaway or not. 

Call me a luddite, but I don’t particularly buy the story that technology can transcend all material limits. My sense is everything in this world, of this world, has a limit and eventually we bump up against it, causing a pile up at theborder.

But I could be wrong. All I know for sure is nobody knows. 

Pretending to know is a profitable hustle, but all I can authentically do is offer my hunches, because unlike AI, I hesititate. I doubt.

And that’s not a liability. It’s an asset.

Why I Wouldn’t Count on AI to Create Anything Truly NEW, MEANINGFUL, and TRANSFORMATIVE

In my life as an artist, novelty is my obsession.

My forever-quest is to go where I might stumble upon something fresh, unexpected and entirely new.

I love novelty because it opens the door to unforeseen possibilities. Like a rainbow over the dark gray doldrums of everything we already know.

“Things don’t have to be the way I thought they were,” is a healing thought.

Artists know that one way to create novelty is to recombine what has come before in unexpected ways. And we know thedanger of doing so is pastiche — a product where you can trace every element to a prior source while the resulting whole says nothing particularly new or profound. It might momentarily surprise and delight, but it does not reveal and transform.

For a lot of cultural production on the Big Bad Internet, to surprise and delight is sufficient. A good surprise can be enough to disrupt the doldrums and go viral. And so we get inundated with flashes in the pan, decorative gimmicks and predictable knock-offs. All of which AI is excellent at generating. Its ability to imitate, recombobulate, and proliferate at breakneck speeds without a trace of hesitation or doubt, is dazzling.

Though of course, it’s humans who devise the recipes that will successfully surprise and delight other humans.

So, if one aims to surprise and delight, AI can be a great tool. If one wants to mock up an idea or bypass the menacing void of the blank page, AI can have your back. And if one requires predictable variations on a pre-existing theme, AI can be your very best friend in the whole wide world.

But my hunch is that if one wants to go beyond that — to not only surprise and delight but to also reveal and transform — you’re gonna need a f*cking human.

A human that’s able to slow down and listen.

A luxury we all deserve and perhaps too seldom get.

Maybe the BLANK PAGE has its Advantages…

Last summer I was songwriting with my friend Blaire. I arrived at her place with a situation burning in my mind. We discussed, jotting down a bunch of notes and lyrical fragments. For giggles, she inputted our notes into Chat GPT.

The bot gave an incredible description of the emotional themes we were exploring. It explained back to us what we hadn’t efforted (or needed) to explain to ourselves. It instantly wrote some verses, some ridiculous, some perfectly fine, and impressively, in the “style” of different artists of our prompting.

Giggle we did. In awe.
Yet amazing as this was, the resulting lyrics did not serve our purposes. For one, the bot was better at telling than showing. I thought, If I needed to write a D-list song for a music library, a track that could be popped into a scene on “Love is Blind,” this would be good enough. This would pass. I’d get my paycheck. 

But it wouldn’t be a song that anyone would hold dear. It would just be a recombobulation of better, more meaningful songs. A bit trite. Stale. Quickly forgotten.

And if I wanted to create something that was uniquely ME, I’d probably be better off not getting distracted by all those middling ideas.

I’d be better off slowing down, and listening.

The Collective Unconscious vs. The Digital Unconscious

If you’re into sci-fi like I am, you’ve watched scores of films priming us to believe that AI could become sentient and develop something like a soul, ostensibly giving it access to thesame unseen realms from which fresh ideas emerge.

My hunch is, that’s not going to happen. As far as I can tell, AIcan only draw from the digital unconscious, aka the internet. And quickly as that reservoir is poured into, at any given nano-second it’s basically inert. Not just disembodied, but de-spiritualized. And if AI only has access to this flattened record of what’s already been done and said and seen before, how can it come up with anything truly new in both style and meaning?

What I’m questioning here is whether capital-N Novelty can ever be generated by formula or algorithm out of component parts. I think not. There’s a special ingredient X, and robots can’t get it. Which is not to say we shouldn’t use them at all. Just like computers have long been for creatives, AI is a wonderful assistant for speedier composition and capturing.

And yet doing more faster isn’t an infinite good. It can have diminishing returns.

And that’s what I’m seeing right now.

People using the unflinching speed of AI to game the internet.

To look important and successful on Hinge. 

To clog search engine results.

To fluff up posts so they can fit in more ads. 

To flood social media with robotic bids for virality or generic value propositions, glomming together into a tedious drone of information.

To interrupt that drone, we need things that feel human, now more than ever.  

Things that feel truly Novel, revealing and transformative.

My ambition for the messaging and content I create for clients is not unlike my artistic ambitions.

I want us to create something new and fresh but also meaningful and healing, personal and idiosyncratic. 

Not more of the same. Not more generic stuff to toss in thedigital landfill. 

I want my clients to have words that feel like a hot cup of broth on a bone cold day. Messages that open up possibilities like a rainbow over the doldrums. 

And I can help make that happen, without anyone needing to sift through the mediocre outpouring of a language model.

Because I have the rare and luminous advantage of being in a body. Because I have felt, and I can feel. And while I’m afraid of plenty of things, a blank page is not one of them.

Things I Read That Influenced The Above

• What is Intuition? Resonance, Connection and Trusting Intuition on its own Terms by Emily Sadowski, PhD. When I’m thinking about what humans have that AI doesn’t, I’m thinking a lot about access to the unseen realm, which Emily Sadowski explores and demystifies in this very cool book. Highly recommended!

• The Digital Equivalent of Wearing a Fake Chanel Bag by Ryan Broderick 

• The AI Report by Brad Troemel. I have my disagreements with Brad at times, yet I find his analysis of where technology and internet culture meets the art world makes valid and interesting points.