AI in the Sky
Ah, laundry. The great equalizer of adulthood. A task as old as time, yet somehow always managing to surprise us with its endless capacity for chaos and comedy. Let us embark on a whimsical journey through the fantastical world of laundry, where the mundane meets the absurd and socks hold the secrets of the universe.
I did not write the above paragraph. AI did. I was thinking about writing this column about laundry, which for some reason has been a huge issue around here this month and feels, somehow, like a Harbinger of Doom.
But I’ve been having a lot of discussions about AI this week, particularly as it applies to writing and the visual arts, so I decided to see what happened if I asked a popular AI writing program to write my column for me. “Write an 800-word essay about laundry in the style of Michael Thomas Ford” was the prompt.
The result was not great. But it was also not completely terrible. With some reworking, I could have used it. I predict that within a year, AI will be able to write more-than-passable short pieces. Already, one journalist friend has lost her job writing articles for a popular website after the owners decided it was easier to have AI do it and then have an editor clean it up. And trust me, the book publishing world is in a panic about AI too. Editors, agents, and publishers see what’s on the horizon and are scrambling to figure out what to do about it.
But no one is panicking—or arguing—about AI more than authors and artists. AI-generated art is everywhere now, and while it isn’t perfect, it’s getting close. What used to take months or weeks to do by hand can now be done in minutes, and by people with no artistic ability beyond knowing the right prompts to give. Similarly, stories that once took writers many hours to get on the page now take an artificial intelligence a couple of minutes.
The whole point of machines is to make our lives easier. Automation has replaced humans in a multitude of areas, mostly for the better. But when it comes to the creation of art, it hits differently, at least for those of us whose lives are centered around being those creators. The idea that a machine might be able to do in minutes (or seconds) what it takes us far longer to do makes us question whether what we can do is all that special.
Artists who create handmade items have felt this struggle for a long time. Ask anyone who knits or makes pottery. They regularly hear things like, “But I can buy one just like it for $15! Why is yours so expensive?” While many of us value the fact that something handmade has inherent value that something machine-made does not, that distinction is not shared by everyone. More and more, the making of art—already a shaky way to earn a living—is becoming something sustainable only as a hobby.
And that’s a problem.
When it comes to the writing of words, the irony is that it has never been easier to get your work out into the world. Self-publishing is a simple matter of learning how to use readily available tools. Anyone can create a book. Anyone can be a published author. The upside of this is that voices that might never have been heard due to the gatekeeping of traditional publishing can now be heard.
The downside is that there are so many voices clamoring for attention that virtually none of them will succeed, at least not at a level of making a living. There are simply too many books and not enough readers willing to pay money for them. (The fact that people want their art to be cheap, if not outright free, is a whole other issue.)
The introduction of AI into the equation adds even more uncertainty. Already, stories are successful mostly because they entertain, not for their greater artistic value. (There are, obviously, exceptions to this, and the world of literary publishing, like the world of art films, is another thing altogether.) If AI can be trained to write in the style of today’s most successful commercial authors, what further need do we have for those authors?
The argument I hear most frequently is that we still need people to feed ideas into the machines. But for how long? Eventually, will we all just become the machines’ caretakers, ensuring their ongoing functionality while simultaneously being replaced by them?
Again, I know this is how technology works. Tailors were mostly replaced by rows of machines that cut and sew garments. Cobblers were mostly replaced by machines that churn out thousands of shoes a day. Many of us long for the day when we can ask a replicator to whip up dinner instead of having to do it ourselves or head to a restaurant that may not be affordable or even exist where we live. And if it tastes exactly like the fare Thomas Keller serves up at his French Laundry, does it matter that it wasn’t touched by human hands?
Progress is inevitable. But right now, it’s disheartening. I don’t like thinking that something that makes us inherently human—the creation of art—can be so easily done by something with no ability to feel, only to mimic feeling. I already know that we’re small and insignificant. I don’t need further evidence of it. And yet, here it is, staring me in the face.
I also have no answers, which is unhelpful. All I can do is continue to value the handmade, with all its imperfections that make it valuable to me. I just hope others will do the same. ▼
Michael Thomas Ford is a much-published Lambda Literary award-winning author. Visit Michael at michaelthomasford.com.