Defy AI
2023-07-11
Dear reader,
“AI can now make a perfect painting,” an artist friend told me.
“How can you make a living?” I asked. Justin puts bread on his family’s table by making paintings and sculptures. We share an affinity for starting our artistic work pre-dawn and stopping in the afternoon to grill something for dinner.
“Rust,” he replies, going on to explain how he’s making his current paintings.
Justin has a guy who makes him chainmail—the undergarment that knights wear. He lays it on a canvas to which he has glued thick etching paper. Unlike a knight who keeps his armor gleaming, Justin sprays his with water. The rust is transferred to the paper like a print. After letting it dry, he pulls the chainmail off the canvas. He paints blocks of colors, adding shellac for depth.
Justin will never have a copycat. He might have described his painting process, but all the magic remains in the details of how he responds to each material in the moment. How long does he leave the chainmail in one place? Does he let it dry before adding color?
No matter. Justin Kenney can put down his brush. AI is ready to shoulder the burden of this Brattleboro, Vermont artist and make more perfect paintings.
As Justin suggested, images generated by AI are a thrill. The newest Instagram filter, or a detailed alien landscape generated by AI, can be awe-inspiring. One wonders, “How did they do that?”
Some people believe we need to program limits into AI so that it doesn’t replace us. I believe we already have, but there’s a catch. We’ve built AI based on positive feedback, training it to give us a result we want. Also called “praise,” the same limit that dooms many human creators.
In the early 1980s my dad brought home a TRS-80 from work. I started playing with it, writing programs in BASIC language a few lines long.
It was fun. I learned how to use logical commands, and I got a kick out of multiplying two random numbers against each other over and over. As the sum grew and became hundreds of lines long, I’d watch the digits cascade across the 12-inch CRT screen. It was captivating, for a minute.
One of the first fundamentals I learned was that a computer does what you tell it. Nothing more, nothing less. If the program I wrote didn’t give the intended result, something was wrong with my coding, not the computer.
A second learning was that the appearance of randomness is a fake. A computer can’t “think” of a random number. They use a “pseudo-random” process to cover for it. For example, the program can grab a number from something that fluctuates a lot, like atmospheric noise, then run a few calculations designed to scramble it. The string of numerals appears random, but is predetermined based on the initial value.
There’s been no fundamental change to AI since. What makes AI experts hopeful today is size and scale. Paired with today’s sensors and robotics, today’s AI has so much processing power that it can perform impressive feats.
But improving computer technology is only one side of how we are closing the gap between artificial and human intelligence. We’re also closing the gap by dumbing-down how we understand ourselves.
In the dumbed-down version, free will is an illusion. If the artist’s code hasn’t been cracked yet, it will be soon. Art that appears borne of unique genius was only ever a number picked out of a hat, with some calculations run on it.
We will make this true if we believe it. If we allow ourselves to be shaped only by what we are given, and respond only to praise, AI will have no trouble matching or even exceeding our output.
If that’s not the future you want, practice defiance.
“Finding beauty in what is considered a flaw” is how Justin describes his art.
Chainmail doesn’t belong in water, and rusted chainmail doesn’t belong on a canvas. No painting instructor or instructions to an AI would prescribe these steps. Why does Justin do it? And why does he make art to feed his family, instead of using his carpentry skills for a more reliable paycheck?
We’ll never know. All we can say is that Justin feels compelled to paint, like I feel compelled to write. What do you feel compelled to do that a microchip can’t? There you will find both art and grace, neither of which need to justify their existence with reasons.
AI “art” is full of symmetrical human faces and bodies, crafted with detail and color. I can feel my pupils dilate as I view it. But my heart senses that it has none. It exists only because of an algorithm. No one felt compelled to create it, and I don’t feel compelled by viewing it.
Titillated, perhaps. AI personas will take on a digital appearance, probably one with sex appeal, and be your personal information servant.
But an AI instructor or librarian has knows what it knows. How will it inspire students to explore beyond its dataset? The best teachers I’ve had asked questions they didn’t know the answer to, and found books for me that I didn’t know to ask for.
A friend had to write a letter to turn down a job he had accepted but not started yet. Feeling a little awkward and wanting to breeze through it, he outsource it to ChatGPT. The letter needed only a few human edits before he could press “send,” he said.
As we continue to orient our society around the types of digital tools that AI does well at, and we tolerate doing them without connectedness, watch out for more of our experiences being forgettable.
What if we instead make more space for grace, vulnerability, defiance, randomness, wildness, and even occasional awkwardness? Don’t let the tech companies make you think that your whole-body human cognition and your emotional, moral, sensory, and social nuances can ever be digitized.
Let the AI rust.
Warmly,
Tristan Roberts
Quill Nook Farm