I might be a luddite. Fine. I’m a luddite. But also, I’m going to try to hold out on rejecting AI as a fundamental belief. Am I like my dad who would not get rid of his flip phone no matter what? Maybe. But I’m not looking at this as a matter of convenience or fear (okay, maybe it is fear).
It’s kind of survival. Because I know that AI can do some of the things I rely on dice for better. But, before long, it’s going to be able to generate characters better. And then fix my game. And then write my game for me. And at some point, my very existence makes this whole process go a little slower. This game would be great except for that messy human being who keeps doing it not as well or as efficiently as it could be done if we’d just let the AI do it.
I know, I’m being an alarmist. I’m also the one who told my classroom four years ago we would not finish the school year together because we’d be quarantined due to COVID. After they asked me what a COVID was, they chuckled at me. Three months later, we were all at home. I was the only person I knew who wasn’t shocked. I had read a handful of articles by smart people about what was happening and how it was spreading, and I saw the writing on the wall.
There is writing all over this wall.
I had a very smart colleague who went to a workshop where they looked at AI generated work, and talked about how they can tell organic student work from the stilted style of AI. The teachers breathed a collective sigh of relief that they could stay ahead of the AI.
I didn’t want to piss in her Cheerios. She was looking at Kindergarten crayon scrawling of AI, and it’s going to be zipping out really good forgeries of Sistine Chapel Ceilings in short order. There are very smart people investing all of their time and energy into making sure that we cannot tell the difference between AI and organic writing. They’ll be there very soon. We don’t stand a chance.
Yeah. I’ll keep working slowly and painstakingly and sometimes disappointingly down wrong paths that lead me to dead ends and sometimes cause me to give up on projects that I’ve invested lots of time in. I like my creative life. I’m not going to start delegating parts of it to a bot. Even the hard or boring or messy parts.
As a teacher, I look at it in this way – learning to write well was hard work. It was messy. It took a long time. There was no other way. If I’m a fourteen-year-old today, why on God’s green earth am I going to actually invest YEARS in learning to write well when I can just get an idea and monkey around with an online toolkit and write a novel this weekend that it might have taken me decades to get to?
And human nature doesn’t help. When CGI first appeared, it was wonky and clunky and awkward. Silly CGI. But then I saw Jurassic Park, and there was a dinosaur eating from a tree. It was there. Holy mother f-ing heck. The James Cameron made Avatar, and I believed this was it. We were entering a new world.
And then, decades later, Quantumania cannot even be bothered to finish the CGI to make it look passable. The technology makes it possible. Human nature makes us churn out mediocre work and shrug our shoulders that it’s probably good enough.
We’re rapidly becoming a culture of folks who want to ‘work two hours a week and earn as if I’d worked forty!’. Great. But what are you going to do with that other 38 if you get it? My best guess is that we’ll be scrolling social media and watching people get hurt in embarrassing ways on youtube a lot more. We’re going to be generating and selling novels that we haven’t even read through once. Some people already are. Because we won’t know what good writing even looks like anymore. We’ll assume that the AI will tell us if it’s not good.
At that point, we deserve Armageddon.
I literally don’t know what happens to the craft of storytelling. My students this year (sorry kids, but it’s true) have set a new bar for low expectations. It’s been a grueling ten months of setting ever lower expectations, and continually watching students fail to meet even those. On my final exam, students had to annotate the texts they were reading (underline key passages, circle important ideas, make notes in the margins… basic stuff), and many outright refused to do it. It was 40% of the grade. They couldn’t be bothered. These are some nice kids. They are not going to exert effort unless it’s vitally important. Maybe not even then.
If you’ve decided to offload some of your workload to AI, you’re probably smarter than I am. Definitely cooler. More efficient no doubt. I’m not judging you. You’re probably going to be more successful than I am. If I was so smart, wouldn’t I be rich?
But I’ll stay here in my little corner, rolling dice to see
where they take my imagination. Keep stopping by if you want to watch a messy
human makes lots of mistakes.
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