weebdeluxe

Recently, I have written a toot that garnered a lot of attention. It merely concerned my views on human creativity and it’s power to resits the increasing threat of artificial intelligence to our creative and human well-being. It made numbers I deemed impossible on Mastodon up until then and garnered a couple of reactions.

Let me get a thing straight right away. My dislike for AI is not some kind of unreasonable stance that is purely based on emotion alone. It could easily be, but I fear that my concerns are valid beyond a mere facade of grifting on a pre-existing anti-AI-mood that is clearly present in certain online space like Mastodon. Yes, Mastodon ain’t exactly the most AI and tech positive space – unless it’s FOSS. Please note that the FOSS community has a lot of growing pains when it comes to AI as well. But that doesn’t mean that my standpoint only exists in order make numbers on a platform not big on numbers, rejecting them, even. It’s a self-defeating project, to be honest.

I will not tackle AI from a perspective of programming. I am not educated in these matters and even with some classes taken on JavaScript and some self-taught C++ I do not feel comfortable to talk about the worth of AI in programming. With this said, it worries me how easily some in that space embrace AI assistance as if there’s nothing or very little to worry about. This touches plenty of FOSS projects and most notably the work on the Linux-Kernel. I find it also very telling that “it’s just a tool” was exactly the kind of comment I got from programmers when my toot was specifically aimed at creative work.

Yes, programming is a creative work, but it is in a different league than capital A – art. I concede that programming can be an expression of your humanity, but I underline that the word “can” does heavy lifting here. Feel free to disagree with me on that, but please don’t replyguy me.

Art is an expression of your own limitations. While you read this text, you may notice that my English is unusual. I learned English when I was a teen and while I read and write quite a bit in it, I can’t claim that I ever mastered the language to a degree I feel happy with. To be honest, each text I produce in English is a monument to my frustrations with my skills or lack thereof in said language and it will remain as such, since it will never reach the level of other languages I use in my daily life.

However, this makes this text uniquely mine, a time capsule of my current skill to use it as a vehicle for my thoughts on matters I deem to important enough to write on.

There has been a long stretch of time where I didn’t write, mostly because the AI slopmachines are just going to gobble it up for their huge databases. Another cog in the machine is not something I wanted to be. But silence in this matter resembles consent, manufactured or not, so I have to write, hoping someone hears. Even listens.

Art is eternal, it resists as such the flow of time, an endless machinery wanting nothing but to devour our humanity. To produce art is to resist. Resistance can not be futile if it helps you express yourself.

Why would you use an AI to “assist” you in that? Does it not take away the “you” from the process of self-expression? I could use AI to strengthen my language. It would smooth away the edges, make it more natural sounding, maybe even help make the text flow better. But couldn’t the same be achieved by your comments, your feedback? By friends who read it before I posted it. Their feedback would help me to understand them better. They would better understand me. The improvement of the text is almost nothing but a side-effect.

You gain nothing in that regard when you feed your text to the AI. Not only that, but you’re making sure that a considerable amount of people take your art less seriously because it just is less “you”. All the criticism that get leveled at so called commercial art will be leveled at you at the very same moment. Funnily enough, the slopwaves upgrade commercial or corporate art just by the fact that meat and blood humans were involved in the process, no matter how little passion was present in the room when it was created.

Sometimes I feel that my point of view is inevitably the correct one and everyone with two working braincells will arrive there sooner or later. But just thinking that makes me an asshole, so this is the best way for me to handle this: write about it and resist. Maybe someone who held a different belief has read this and thought:

huh.

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