technology

“If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”

This would solve so many problems with my manager. He has Copilot write his emails from prompts, and is frequently sending clarifications because nobody could tell what exactly he was trying to say.

Meanwhile my emails are so short he has told me I should be using AI to make them sound friendlier. Yet nobody ever needs clarification from me because I put only the exact words needed to convey my intent.

There is some uncomfortable wording in the phrase "Humans and their creative artifacts" to start with: These are the kind of phrases that would be part of a parody just 6 years ago before generative LLM generation was packaged to the public. So lets begin with the obvious: Cultural production has always been a human activity. The goalpost moved to begin with when people started pretending it's not.

My main problem with Generative AI and the logic of it's propagandists stems from this Idea that you can take an activity that is inherently human and apply the logic of privatization and automation to it and turn it into a centralized vending machine. A vending machine that at once takes from all the communities that produced culture before it and negates the communities that will produce culture after.

My second problem is related to your initial wording; which is an acho of the mindset of artistic production in the ultra atomized capitalist logic: "Artifact" As if a unit of "art" or "human activity" was one mere construct that was unearthed without context. "Your work is not just one painting" A teacher once told us as we started our painting semester in his atelier. He was talking about the painting series as a narrative; About how a body of work can tell a story about a personal aesthetic search, about how it's impossible to not be authentic when you leave traces of yourself in a large amount of paintings over time. Your "search" becomes obvious. He was also talking about what doesn't appear in paintings: The notes, the sketches, the scribbles, the failures and successes. "The search" How you are influenced by your internal monologue but also from what your favorite artists did and your peers are doing. Humanity as a shared artistic community, paying attention to what others do.

Communities united by place or time have a shared "personality" Constructivism, cubism, The golden age of cinema, the French new wave, the lost generation, Tumblr, 4 chan, Deviant art, These all had an aesthetic that relates to their shared context and ideology. We make the mistake of thinking of these as arbitrary bookmarks in art history books and forget that there were flesh and bone people working along side each other, getting drunk, having disagreements, making memes and little by little shaping our aesthetic vocabulary.

The idea that Cultural production just makes "artifacts" is something the capitalist pigs who have never set a foot in a shared community would love to normalize. So it's unfortunate that people are starting to parrot these words. The tech oligarchs don't care about what's human, about what is shared or what remains of a community language for posterity. They want to deny future generations of the possibility of that voice so they force on the the public the logic of a personal centralized vending machine that produces atomized treats. They spit on the face of the current artistic communities by taking their work it and training their models to mindlessly mass produce derivative "artifacts."

Capitalists think all art is pornography but it goes beyond that because their vending machines also negate the idea of working with the elements of an aesthetic language. It is ridiculous to write a prompt to make images. It is ridiculous to write a prompt to make music; and asking a machine to write for you is like asking a robot to have sex with your spouse or loved one. It's intellectual cuckoldry. The issue is not the mechanism itself but that the more the logic of LLM's is applied the more mindless it becomes. This is the reason why there is pushback about "AI being a tool" Because the corporations that make these models Don't sell it as a tool; they sell it as a "solution to the problem of making art itself." Hell they sell it as a solution to the problem of "thinking." So don't be intellectual cuckolds kids.

There will be many more arguments and pushback about the logic of current LLM generation, some more nuanced than other. But don't mistake the diversity of these arguments as moving the goalpost. There are a lot of people that don't want AI There are a lot of people that are sick of the persistency of corporations are trying to force it into the public. There are environmental concerns, concerns with the economy, concerns with the corruption of the corporations pushing it, with the logic of these products and with the discourse around it. It is obvious that each group will bring their own perspective.

In order for any AI mechanism to be accepted by the public, The logic of the product will need to be more humble. Instead of being a "solution" to the Icky-ness of being human, around humans and doing human things; LLM's will need to really act as tools that aid in repetitive processes. I do painting, 3d modelling and animation and work in a job where I'm often reading and writing. (as much as my terrible English grammar says otherwise.) And I could talk all day about useful potential applications of products derived from the AI industry but this post is already long as it is, and most importantly: corporations and their defenders don't care about these uses; On one side because they are a lot less profitable than privatizing and centralizing all production and on the other side because it involves doing work.