bad. i haven't done much in the way of research on the current meta of "AI" upscaling technology so maybe there's some magical new trick that's suddenly made it work good, but i doubt it. what i can speak to is practical use cases i've found in the wild.
on the amateur/consumer end, upscaling gets used to transform low resolution media into high resolution media. you see this a lot with documentary footage from the turn of the 20th century, where horsedrawn carriages are romping down the dirt roads of new york city in 4k60fps and colorized from black and white. like most things "AI"-related, this has a window of genuinely impressive novelty that lasts for about twenty seconds, maybe up to a minute if the result is decent. wow, it's like i'm looking through a window into the past! pretty quickly though you start noticing the smear frames, the interpolated faces, the hallucinated artifacts. watching these upscales for any real length of time, for me at least, rapidly approaches nausea-inducing. most information present in these videos is artificial, which is basically fine except that they're sold as "more realistic" or "more immersive," preferable to the inferior original footage. but the only true information is that which was present in the "inferior" original. with the amount of work it takes to manually correct these errors to maximize verisimilitude to the original, you might as well just do a 4k scan of an original print and go through the traditional remaster process.
you see this as well on torrent sites, where almost any sufficiently popular new anime or tv show will have an upscaled ultra-high framerate version that looks like ass and is really easy to get confused for the genuine article if you don't know what to look for. those files USUALLY get buried by real-quality torrents and don't seem to be particularly popular (most people usually just feel tricked). which is in itself a pretty common theme among mainstream deployments of "AI": its ubiquity is equaled only by its unpopularity. nobody asked for it, it's not solving many problems better than the solutions that already existed, the output is deceitful crap, and yet it is being foisted upon us from every direction with astonishing confidence that the technology is something it just emphatically is not.
then there are the more professional implementations. the biggest one for me, long before the "AI" moment we're in now, was Peter Jackson's 2018 WWI documentary "They Shall Not Grow Old." this film takes digitized war reels and upscales/colorizes them through various machine learning technologies to make the footage "feel more present" and help modern viewers connect with the past in a way they hadn't been able to before. i saw that one in theaters and mostly felt that it was awkward and disrespectful, featuring many of the telltale signs of "AI" video output that we've come to know and love today. the outgrowth of this technology has been its use in 4k "remasters" of films like Terminator 2 and Aliens, which forego the costly process of an all-new scan using state-of-the-art hardware and instead seem to just upscale the original blu-ray transfers. the results look like ass, oversharpened edges turning every face into tanned leather, background characters gaining phantom details not present in the original, film grain being traded for a thick gloss of vaseline.
that seems to be a big priority, actually, the removal of film grain. of anything, really, that differentiates celluloid from digital. there's a nasty and pervasive attitude among top brass losers that there is an Objectively Good way for movies to look and an Objectively Bad way for movies to look, and what makes the difference has basically nothing to do with the contents of the media itself and everything to do with raw numbers and marketable buzzwords. they want crisp clean 4k 10bit rec.2100 HDR footage, and they want it as quickly and cheaply as possible. it's the exact same kind of surface-level tech fetishism that gave us motion smoothing and frame interpolation as auto-on settings in consumer televisions. they want something that looks good on a shelf or in a catalog, something flashy and new with big numbers that sells units or subscriptions. they want automated processes to "clean up" messy footage without the hassle of having to hire a studio of (unionized) people to spend hundreds of hours doing the same job by hand. which, again, could be fine, and indeed plenty of professional film restoration outfits DO use machine learning tools to simplify the process, have even innovated them in some cases-- but their outputs are highly limited and extensively reviewed by human beings, something that just does not seem to be the case with James Cameron's sloppy "AI" "remasters."
and it just doesn't take very long at all to dig up James Cameron and Peter Jackson openly discussing their desire and even NEED to build these automated processes, not because of what it brings to the art of cinema but because of the money it saves by cutting out (unionized) labor. i know there's a contingent of brave warriors on this site insisting that automation is automation and we all just have to get with the program, but there IS a difference between a machine that effectively automates a tedious task with no apparent loss in quality, and a machine that exists to cut corners without any regard for quality whatsoever. there's machine-learning-driven automations in cinema that are generally good, like the blue eye replacement tech in Dune 2 or even the mob population & behavior tech built for Jackson's own Lord of the Rings movies. there are certainly arguments to be made in some of the particulars of how those technologies originated, but i don't think there are any vfx workers banging down the doors pissed off that they don't have to manually add a blue filter on the pupil of every single background extra or individually animate the arm movements of a thousand hunky orcs in a 3 hour effects heavy blockbuster anymore.
and that's just it, the (few and far between) good tools are being drowned out and even permanently stained by the bad ones. i put "AI" in scarequotes because it's a marketing gimmick meant to lump dozens of unique, often totally unrelated technologies into a single basket to trick people into thinking it's all the same thing. it takes a tool with a specific function and transforms it into magic. all algorithms are grimoires now. the prevalence of "AI" as a buzzword is a result of how thoroughly controlled all the pillars of our economy are by professional money-havers that don't use the products they own and have nothing but resentment for the customers who do. the top-down flood of "AI" integration has done about as much to harm the public view of the technology as the shit output of the technology itself. like, for instance, video editing software Davinci Resolve recently introduced a bunch of "AI" tools... most of which are just further polished versions of machine-learning effects already present in prior versions or other more expensive software suites. there IS generative "AI" stuff in there, but that's maybe three of the dozens of features they added. but because "AI" is the buzzword that marketers want to see, all of these effects have been dubbed "AI"-- which really only accomplishes the obfuscation of how these effects actually work. it takes a relatively simple or at least straight-forward algorithmic process and arbitrarily encloses it in a black box until it's impossible to tell which ones are generative and which ones aren't without citing outside sources. which sucks! i like resolve! its "AI" dialog separator is actually quite good for if you're recording in a relatively noisy environment, and that's just the latest iteration of a machine learning application that's been the bread and butter of this kind of program for decades. there's nothing "AI" about it!
the confusion is intentional. our rhetorical inability to distinguish between generative video/text and basic programmatic task automation gives cover for all the crap that doesn't do what it's supposed to. it lets them point to successful use cases of "AI" as an indication of the tech's broader revolutionary potential, even though they're just plain not the same tech. it's like advertising a hammer to sell a screwdriver, which also happens to be made of recycled plastic and has a nonstandard head that doesn't fit any known screw type.
put another way: it's a lie. they're lying. because they're liars.
"AI" upscaling fits right in here. it offers the apparent ability to qualitatively improve lossy footage at remarkably small cost (money, time, effort), but a survey of the results proves that actually there IS a cost: the cost of laziness. when you cut corners, half-ass the process, make fewer people do more work and rush them to meet an insane deadline, "AI" or no "AI" the end result is gonna be crap. the simple reality is, if you want a good job done well, you will need people who know what they're doing to do it. a good job done well takes time, effort, and money. it doesn't matter how much machine learning you throw at it, how many aspects of the task are automated; at the end of the day, the work of film restoration is going frame by frame to remove imperfections without altering the character or original intentions of the work. it is impossible to automate any sizeable portion of that task without the use of a machine that also has a theory of mind, a concept of historicity, an extensive comprehension of restoration best practices, a deep knowledge of film history and the reference materials required to confirm the processes of deceased filmmakers/deprecated technologies, and of course an understanding of why restoration is important and why it is done the way it is done and why doing it other ways is worse and often actively harmful.
that's the goal that "AI" CEOs insist they're working towards, but i simply do not believe that we're anywhere close to cracking the AGI problem. i don't think it's possible with existing technology, and quantum computing has so far proven to be vaporware. the thing i've found myself thinking a lot these days is: just because we can imagine a thing, that doesn't mean it can actually be built. fiction (from which so many big tech ideas are drawn) is not bound by the laws of physics. by the same token, i think we're being really naive about the social gullibility of even well-educated people. a stochastic parrot doesn't become a multidimensional humanlike intelligence just because it tells you what you want to hear, but a lot of the richest folks on earth sure do act that way! there is an astonishing refusal to acknowledge how easily people, in general, are fooled by chatbots, something we've known about since the invention of chatbots, instead acting like being successfully deceived proves that it was never a deception in the first place. these are the tactics of a con artist. it's magical thinking, and unfortunately for these guys magic doesn't exist. the tasks that CAN be effectively automated by machine learning aren't worth even the remotest fraction of the tech's valuation. everything else is laziness marketed as efficiency. the difference is self-evident in the results.
so yeah, in short i'm not a fan of "AI" upscaling, at least when it's being applied carelessly and cynically.
EDIT: if you like this y'all should check out my other "AI"-critical writings on here
imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!
like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.
but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!
so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.
consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.
but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that isn't wishcasting money into existence through sheer Steve Jobs-ian moxy. fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!
see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???
so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.
i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.
Hi! I just read your post about your opinion on "AI" and I really liked it. If it's no bother, what's your opinion on people who use it for studying? Like writing essays, solving problems and stuff like that?
I haven't been a fan of AI from the beginning and I've heard that you shouldn't ask it for anything because then you help it develop. But I don't know how to explain that to friends and classmates or even if it's true anymore. Because I've seen some of the prompts it can come up with and they're not bad and I've heard people say that the summaries AI makes are really good and I just... I dunno. I'm at a loss
Sorry if this is a lot or something you simply don't want to reply to. You made really good points when talking about AI and I really liked it and this has been weighing on me for a while :)
on a base level, i don't really have a strongly articulated opinion on the subject because i don't use AI, and i'm 35 so i'm not in school anymore and i don't have a ton of college-aged friends either. i have little exposure to the people who use AI in this way nor to the people who have to deal with AI being used in this way, so my perspective here is totally hypothetical and unscientific.
what i was getting at in my original AI post was a general macroeconomic point about how all of the supposed efficiency gains of AI are an extension of the tech CEO's dislike of paying and/or giving credit to anyone they deem less skilled or intelligent than them. that it's conspicuous how AI conveniently falls into place after many decades of devaluing and deskilling creative/artistic labor industries. historically, for a lot of artists the most frequently available & highest paying gigs were in advertising. i can't speak to the specifics when it comes to visual art or written copy, but i *can* say that when i worked in the oklahoma film industry, the most coveted jobs were always the commercials. great pay for relatively less work, with none of the complications that often arise working on amateur productions. not to mention they were union gigs, a rare enough thing in a right to work state, so anyone trying to make a career out of film work wanting to bank their union hours to qualify for IATSE membership always had their ears to the ground for an opening. which didn't come often because, as you might expect, anyone who *got* one of those jobs aimed to keep it as long as possible. who could blame em, either? one person i met who managed to get consistent ad work said they could afford to work all of two or three months a year, so they could spend the rest of their time doing low-budget productions and (occasionally) student films.
there was a time when this was the standard for the film industry, even in LA; you expected to work 3 to 5 shows a year (exact number's hard to estimate because production schedules vary wildly between ads, films, and tv shows) for six to eight months if not less, so you'd have your bills well covered through the lean periods and be able to recover from what is an enormously taxing job both physically and emotionally. this was never true for EVERYONE, film work's always been a hustle and making a career of it is often a luck-based crapshoot, but generally that was the model and for a lot of folks it worked. it meant more time to practice their skills on the job, sustainably building expertise and domain knowledge that they could then pass down to future newcomers. anything that removes such opportunities decreases the amount of practice workers get, and any increased demand on their time makes them significantly more likely to burn out of the industry early. lower pay, shorter shoots, busier schedules, these aren't just bad for individual workers but for the entire industry, and that includes the robust and well-funded advertising industry.
well, anyway, this year's coca-cola christmas ad was made with AI. they had maybe one person on quality control using an adobe aftereffects mask to add in the coke branding. this is the ultimate intended use-case for AI. it required the expertise of zero unionized labor, and worst of all the end result is largely indistinguishable from the alternative. you'll often see folks despair at this verisimilitude, particularly when a study comes out that shows (for instance) people can't tell the difference between real poetry and chat gpt generated poetry. i despair as well, but for different reasons. i despair that production of ads is a better source of income and experience for film workers than traditional movies or television. i despair that this technology is fulfilling an age-old promise about the disposability of artistic labor. poetry is not particularly valued by our society, is rarely taught to people beyond a beginner's gloss on meter and rhyme. "my name is sarah zedig and i'm here to say, i'm sick of this AI in a major way" type shit. end a post with the line "i so just wish that it would go away and never come back again!" and then the haiku bot swoops in and says, oh, 5/7/5 you say? that is technically a haiku! and then you put a haiku-making minigame in your crowd-pleasing japanese nationalist open world chanbara simulator, because making a haiku is basically a matter of selecting one from 27 possible phrase combinations. wait, what do you mean the actual rules of haiku are more elastic and subjective than that? that's not what my english teacher said in sixth grade!
AI is able to slip in and surprise us with its ability to mimic human-produced art because we already treat most human-produced art like mechanical surplus of little to no value. ours is a culture of wikipedia-level knowledge, where you have every incentive to learn a lot of facts about something so that you can sufficiently pretend to have actually experienced it. but this is not to say that humans would be better able to tell the difference between human produced and AI produced poetry if they were more educated about poetry! the primary disconnect here is economic. Poets already couldn't make a fucking living making poetry, and now any old schmuck can plug a prompt into chatgpt and say they wrote a sonnet. even though they always had the ability to sit down and write a sonnet!
boosters love to make hay about "deskilling" and "democratizing" and "making accessible" these supposedly gatekept realms of supposedly bourgeois expression, but what they're really saying (whether they know it or not) is that skill and training have no value anymore. and they have been saying this since long before AI as we know it now existed! creative labor is the backbone of so much of our world, and yet it is commonly accepted as a poverty profession. i grew up reading books and watching movies based on books and hearing endless conversation about books and yet when i told my family "i want to be a writer" they said "that's a great way to die homeless." like, this is where the conversation about AI's impact starts. we already have a culture that simultaneously NEEDS the products of artistic labor, yet vilifies and denigrates the workers who perform that labor. folks see a comic panel or a corporate logo or a modern art piece and say "my kid could do that," because they don't perceive the decades of training, practice, networking, and experimentation that resulted in the finished product. these folks do not understand that just because the labor of art is often invisible doesn't mean it isn't work.
i think this entire conversation is backwards. in an ideal world, none of this matters. human labor should not be valued over machine labor because it inherently possesses an aura of human-ness. art made by humans isn't better than AI generated art on qualitative grounds. art is subjective. you're not wrong to find beauty in an AI image if the image is beautiful. to my mind, the value of human artistic labor comes down to the simple fact that the world is better when human beings make art. the world is better when we have the time and freedom to experiment, to play, to practice, to develop and refine our skills to no particular end except whatever arbitrary goal we set for ourselves. the world is better when people collaborate on a film set to solve problems that arise organically out of the conditions of shooting on a live location. what i see AI being used for is removing as many opportunities for human creativity as possible and replacing them with statistical averages of prior human creativity. this passes muster because art is a product that exists to turn a profit. because publicly traded companies have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to take every opportunity to turn a profit regardless of how obviously bad for people those opportunities might be.
that common sense says writing poetry, writing prose, writing anything is primarily about reaching the end of the line, about having written something, IS the problem. i've been going through the many unfinished novels i wrote in high school lately, literally hundreds of thousands of words that i shared with maybe a dozen people and probably never will again. what value do those words have? was writing them a waste of time since i never posted them, never finished them, never turned a profit off them? no! what i've learned going back through those old drafts is that i'm only the writer i am today BECAUSE i put so many hours into writing generic grimdark fantasy stories and bizarrely complicated werewolf mythologies.
you know i used to do open mics? we had a poetry group that met once a month at a local cafe in college. each night we'd start by asking five words from the audience, then inviting everyone to compose a poem using those words in 10 to 15 minutes. whoever wanted to could read their poem, and whoever got the most applause won a free drink from the cafe. then we'd spend the rest of the night having folks sign up to come and read whatever. sometimes you'd get heartfelt poems about personal experiences, sometimes you'd get ambitious soundcloud rappers, sometimes you'd get a frat guy taking the piss, sometimes you'd get a mousy autist just doing their best. i don't know that any of the poetry i wrote back then has particular value today, but i don't really care. the point of it was the experience in that moment. the experience of composing something on the fly, or having something you wrote a couple days ago, then standing up and reading it. the value was in the performance itself, in the momentary synthesis between me and the audience. i found out then that i was pretty good at making people cry, and i could not have had that experience in any other venue. i could not have felt it so viscerally had i just posted it online. and i cannot wrap up that experience and give it to you, because it only existed then.
i think more people would write poetry if they had more hours in a day to spare for frivolities, if there existed more spaces where small groups could organize open mics, if transit made those spaces more widely accessible, if everyone made enough money that they weren't burned the fuck out and not in the mood to go to an open mic tonight, if we saw poetry as a mode of personal reflection which was as much about the experience of having written it as anything else. this is the case for all the arts. right now, the only people who can afford to make a living doing art are already wealthy, because art doesn't pay well. this leads to brain drain and overall lowering quality standards, because the suburban petty bouge middle class largely do not experience the world as it materially exists for the rest of us. i often feel that many tech CEOs want to be remembered the way andy warhol is remembered. they want to be loved and worshipped not just for business acumen but for aesthetic value, they want to get the kind of credit that artists get-- because despite the fact that artists don't get paid shit, they also frequently get told by people "your work changed my life." how is it that a working class person with little to no education can write a story that isn't just liked but celebrated, that hundreds or thousands of people imprint on, that leaves a mark on culture you can't quantify or predict or recreate? this is AI's primary use-case, to "democratize" art in such a way that hacks no longer have to work as hard to pretend to be good at what they do. i mean, hell, i have to imagine every rich person with an autobiography in the works is absolutely THRILLED that they no longer have to pay a ghost writer!
so, circling back around to the meat of your question. as far as telling people not to use AI because "you're just helping to train it," that ship has long since sailed. getting mad at individuals for using AI right now is about as futile as getting mad at individuals for not masking-- yes, obviously they should wear a mask and write their own essays, but to say this is simply a matter of millions of individuals making the same bad but unrelated choice over and over is neoliberal hogwash. people stopped masking because they were told to stop masking by a government in league with corporate interests which had every incentive to break every avenue of solidarity that emerged in 2020. they politicized masks, calling them "the scarlet letter of [the] pandemic". biden himself insisted this was "a pandemic of the unvaccinated", helpfully communicating to the public that if you're vaccinated, you don't need to mask. all those high case numbers and death counts? those only happen to the bad people.
now you have CEOs and politicians and credulous media outlets and droves of grift-hungry influencers hard selling the benefits of AI in everything everywhere all the time. companies have bent over backwards to incorporate AI despite ethics and security worries because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and everyone with money is calling this the next big thing. in short, companies are following the money, because that's what companies do. they, in turn, are telling their customers what tools to use and how. so of course lots of people are using AI for things they probably shouldn't. why wouldn't they? "the high school/college essay" as such has been quantized and stripmined by an education system dominated by test scores over comprehension. it is SUPPOSED to be an exercise in articulating ideas, to teach the student how to argue persuasively. the final work has little to no value, because the point is the process. but when you've got a system that lives and dies by its grades, within which teachers are given increasingly more work to do, less time to do it in, and a much worse paycheck for their trouble, the essay increasingly becomes a simple pass/fail gauntlet to match the expected pace set by the simple, clean, readily gradable multiple choice quiz. in an education system where the stakes for students are higher than they've ever been, within which you are increasingly expected to do more work in less time with lower-quality guidance from your overworked teachers, there is every incentive to get chatgpt to write your essay for you.
do you see what i'm saying? we can argue all day about the shoulds here. of course i think it's better when people write their own essays, do their own research, personally read the assigned readings. but cheating has always been a problem. a lot of these same fears were aired over the rising popularity of cliffs notes in the 90s and 2000s! the real problem here is systemic. it's economic. i would have very little issue with the output of AI if existing conditions were not already so precarious. but then, if the conditions were different, AI as we know it likely would not exist. it emerges today as the last gasp of a tech industry that has been floundering for a reason to exist ever since the smart phone dominated the market. they tried crypto. they tried the metaverse. now they're going all-in on AI because it's a perfect storm of shareholder-friendly buzzwords and the unscientific technomythology that's been sold to laymen by credulous press sycophants for decades. It slots right into this niche where the last of our vestigial respect for "the artist" once existed. it is the ultimate expression of capitalist realism, finally at long last doing away with the notion that the suits at disney could never in their wildest dreams come up with something half as cool as the average queer fanfic writer. now they've got a program that can plagiarize that fanfic (along with a dozen others) for them, laundering the theft through a layer of transformation which perhaps mirrors how the tech industry often exploits open source software to the detriment of the open source community. the catastrophe of AI is that it's the fulfillment of a promise that certainly predates computers at the very least.
so, i don't really know what to tell someone who uses AI for their work. if i was talking to a student, i'd say that relying chatgpt is really gonna screw you over when it comes time take the SAT or ACT, and you have to write an essay from scratch by hand in a monitored environment-- but like, i also think the ACT and SAT and probably all the other standardized tests shouldn't exist? or at the very least ought to be severely devalued, since prep for those tests often sabotages the integrity of actual classroom education. although, i guess at this point the only way forward for education (that isn't getting on both knees and deep-throating big tech) is more real-time in-class monitored essay writing, which honestly might be better for all parties anyway. of course that does nothing to address research essays you can't write in a single class session. to someone who uses AI for research, i'd probably say the same thing as i would to someone who uses wikipedia: it's a fine enough place to start, but don't cite it. click through links, find sources, make sure what you're reading is real, don't rely on someone else's generalization. know that chatgpt is likely not pulling information from a discrete database of individual files that it compartmentalizes the way you might expect, but rather is a statistical average of a broad dataset about which it cannot have an opinion or interpretation. sometimes it will link you to real information, but just as often it will invent information from whole cloth. honestly, the more i talk it out, the more i realize all this advice is basically identical to the advice adults were giving me in the early 2000s.
which really does cement for me that the crisis AI is causing in education isn't new and did not come from nowhere. before chatgpt, students were hiring freelancers on fiverr. i already mentioned cliffs notes. i never used any of these in college, but i'll also freely admit that i rarely did all my assigned reading. i was the "always raises her hand" bitch, and every once in a while i'd get other students who were always dead silent in class asking me how i found the time to get the reading done. i'd tell them, i don't. i read the beginning, i read the ending, and then i skim the middle. whenever a word or phrase jumps out at me, i make a note of it. that way, when the professor asks a question in class, i have exactly enough specific pieces of information at hand to give the impression of having done the reading. and then i told them that i learned how to do this from the very same professor that was teaching that class. the thing is, it's not like i learned nothing from this process. i retained quite a lot of information from those readings! this is, broadly, a skill that emerges from years of writing and reading essays. but then you take a step back and remember that for most college students (who are not pursuing any kind of arts degree), this skillset is relevant to an astonishingly minimal proportion of their overall course load. college as it exists right now is treated as a jobs training program, within which "the essay" is a relic of an outdated institution that highly valued a generalist liberal education where today absolute specialization seems more the norm. so AI comes in as the coup de gras to that old institution. artists like myself may not have the constitution for the kind of work that colleges now exist to funnel you into, but those folks who've never put a day's thought into the work of making art can now have a computer generate something at least as good at a glance as basically anything i could make. as far as the market is concerned, that's all that matters. the contents of an artwork, what it means to its creator, the historic currents it emerges out of, these are all technicalities that the broad public has been well trained not to give a shit about most of the time. what matters is the commodity and the economic activity it exists to generate.
but i think at the end of the day, folks largely want to pay for art made by human beings. that it's so hard for a human being to make a living creating and selling art is a question far older than AI, and whose answer hasn't changed. pay workers more. drastically lower rents. build more affordable housing. make healthcare free. make education free. massively expand public transit. it is simply impossible to overstate how much these things alone would change the conversation about AI, because it would change the conversation about everything. SO MUCH of the dominance of capital in our lives comes down to our reliance on cars for transit (time to get a loan and pay for insurance), our reliance on jobs for health insurance (can't quit for moral reasons if it's paying for your insulin), etc etc etc. many of AI's uses are borne out of economic precarity and a ruling class desperate to vacuum up every loose penny they can find. all those billionaires running around making awful choices for the rest of us? they stole those billions. that is where our security went. that is why everything is falling apart, because the only option remaining to *every* institutional element of society is to go all-in on the profit motive. tax these motherfuckers and re-institute public arts funding. hey, did you know the us government used to give out grants to artists? did you know we used to have public broadcast networks where you could make programs that were shown to your local community? why the hell aren't there public youtube clones? why aren't there public transit apps? why aren't we CONSTANTLY talking about nationalizing these abusive fucking industries that are falling over themselves to integrate AI because their entire modus operandi is increasing profits regardless of product quality?
these are the questions i ask myself when i think about solutions to the AI problem. tech needs to be regulated, the monopolies need breaking up, but that's not enough. AI is a symptom of a much deeper illness whose treatment requires systemic solutions. and while i'm frustrated when i see people rely on AI for their work, or otherwise denigrate artists who feel AI has devalued their field, on some level i can't blame them. they are only doing what they've been told to do. all of which merely strengthens my belief in the necessity of an equitable socialist future (itself barely step zero in the long path towards a communist future, and even that would only be a few steps on the even longer path to a properly anarchist future). improve the material conditions and you weaken the dominance of capitalist realism, however minutely. and while there are plenty of reasons to despair at the likelihood of such a future given a second trump presidency, i always try to remember that socialist policies are very popular and a *lot* of that popularity emerged during the first trump administration. the only wrong answer here is to assume that losing an election is the same thing as losing a war, that our inability to put the genie back in its bottle means we can't see our own wishes granted.
i dunno if i answered your question but i sure did say a lot of stuff, didn't i?
your last answer was very good, its really great to see someone actually talking about "AI" as a labour issue instead of complaining about "plagiarism" and saying we need to make copyright stronger lol. my question is completely tangential to that, but i'm really curious what you mean by making a distinction between a communist future and an anarchist future- what in your mind would be true about a communist future that would be undesirable and not true about an anarchist future? in my experience theyve always been largely equated, albeit generally with some differences mostly stemming from the differences in socialist and anarchist perspectives on the whole issue
i'm so glad you asked this question!
i tend to focus a lot on democratic socialist policies in my writing, your public option and affordable housing etc etc. i do this because they are tangible, relatable necessities whose impacts would be of incalculable benefit to the working class. but i don't see them as the end goal. for me, getting those programs in place and future proofed is step zero. barring a full scale organized revolution, this seems the most likely path forward.
step one from there is to build communism. this means more than unions, more than socialized healthcare, more than high taxes. this means seizing corporate firms and nationalizing them. this means worker ownership of and democratic participation in those firms. and it means a million other things.
if you asked me the right way to build communism, i'd have a few shrugged suggestions and then say "i don't know." the question of how to build communism will be answered in the doing. mistakes will be made. people will get hurt. but people are always already getting hurt, and we must remember that our task here is not to build a perfect society, but a better one.
yet this pipe dream itself is not the end goal. i think state communism is perfectly capable of falling to rot in its own ways, even in a world where there are no capitalist superpowers waging economic warfare against them. to my mind, the ultimate goal of state communism should be to make itself redundant. this is almost certainly beyond our lifetime in even the rosiest of scenarios. we're talking generations of very deliberate work. but let's say we've arrived at the equitable future. a truly classless, borderless world of the proletariat may yet have little need for states. i struggle to imagine such a world without the abolition of hierarchical organizations as we know them, because hierarchies manufacture class dynamics.
what i imagine then is a form of anarchism in which governing bodies emerge out of necessity or ingenuity, serve their function, then dissolve as a matter of course to avoid the re-entrenchment of imbalanced power dynamics. don't ask me to elaborate further on the practicalities of that future, because i honestly haven't got an answer for you. anarchism is a beautiful hypothesis which cannot be proved in a lab.
i see socialism, communism, and anarchism not as competing ideologies but stages along a spectrum of societal development. the conflict between these schools of thought seems to emerge out of disagreements over which one we should build first, which one we should never build, and the order in which one may then build up to another. you don't have to agree with me on that assessment, but from where i'm sitting in the 21st century united states, socialism -> communism -> anarchism makes the most sense. you can't dismantle the state without controlling the state, and you don't truly control the state until you control the means of production, and seizing the means would probably be a hell of a lot easier under a democratic socialist state.
that's the theory, anyway! i am not particularly dogmatic about this stuff because i can imagine plenty of scenarios where we hopskip socialism or jump a curb somewhere into anarchism. and of course it's not gonna be the same order, the same process, the same logic in every country, nor will it happen all at once. we're most likely talking about a project of centuries, even as i believe in the transformative immediacy of revolution. hence my focus on democratic socialist policies, whose necessity are paramount regardless of your political disposition or prescribed solution to the problems of the world today. i'm sick of debating the hypotheticals of a system we are not even remotely close to activating in the real world, i want to put my energy towards a project that feels genuinely achievable and that would immediately change a lot of lives for the better overnight. beyond that, i simply try to emphasize that this is one step to take on a long path, because i think it's healthier to take the long view. shrug!
in this episode, i'm talking generational warfare, gen z attitudes about higher education, and the real problems of AI, all while restringing and tuning my guitar. go listen!
