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January 23. Great piece by Cory Doctorow, AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage. The most important bit is about "centaurs". With a regular centaur, the human is in charge and makes use of AI tools. That's good. With a reverse centaur, the machine is in charge and makes use of humans. That's bad, and it's happening more and more often. Doctorow's example is a delivery driver who is completely regulated and monitored, a "squishy meat appendage" for stuff the big machine can't do. There are a lot more good insights and you should read the whole thing.
Of course I disagree with him about images:
Here's what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, a poem, a painting, a drawing, a dance, a book or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind.
That's just rarely what actually happens. When I feel that as a writer, and when my readers feel like that, it's about different stuff. My top 20 R.E.M. songs and R.E.M.'s top 40 R.E.M. songs have only two songs in common. In the 90s I bought a painting from a friend, I love it and I've had it on my walls ever since, but I would be very surprised if my own feelings about it were a facsimile of his. What he talked about was the process of making it, how it came out of him so fast.
In literature the reader is encouraged to find meanings that the author did not intend, and I think images are the same way, and it's best to consider the making and the viewing as two separate events. AI cannot have the experience of making art. But if a person is looking at an image, they can totally have a "numinous, irreducible feeling" regardless of where the image came from. Otherwise you could reliably tell where it came from by looking for that feeling, and you can't.
Here's a quiz to tell the difference between human-made and AI-made images. This is often framed as AI vs "real", and this makes sense if AI is trying to fake a photograph. But human imaginative images are already unreal, and then the only question that matters is: Do you like it? I suggest taking the quiz with that question, "Do I like it?" instead of "Can I tell if this is AI so I know I'm not supposed to like it?" The key to navigating media in the age of AI is not counting fingers, it's taste. Only by exercising taste can you avoid being drowned in the rising sea of low-quality stuff, wherever it comes from.
I know there are social reasons to prefer human-made images to machine-made images, but those reasons are all because of capitalism and not technology. Under capitalism, it's important for artists to make money because you need money to not starve and die on the streets. If human artists are replaced with AI, those humans no longer deserve to live. In a more just system, humans replaced by machines would still get the money, but that's pretty complicated, so let's just declare the entire population to have already been replaced. With a guaranteed basic standard of living, people who want to do art can just do art -- or anything cheap that they enjoy doing. Whether or not machines can do it too, you can do your own thing and not have to try to wedge it into the cracks of commerce.
Back around to centaurs, a lot of human-made images are already in reverse centaur territory, where a human in a dreary office is required to make images that meet bland standards for mass distribution. I make videos like a regular centaur, by applying my inscrutable subjective taste to images that I outsource. I've done it with both human-made and AI-made images, and the process of pulling gems out of slop, and putting them in order, is exactly the same, and very satisfying. But with AI I get the additional fun of feedback, tweaking prompts to get the machine to do something I like.
These are my two best AI videos: Wireheads - Sonic Spaces Blues and The Garbage and the Flowers - Carousel