a pleasantly lit and cluttered artist studio

Ghost in the Machine

How are you, darlings? Looking fabulous, as always.

You’ve no doubt noticed the proliferation of the letters “A” and “I” in all sorts of contexts—warranted and otherwise. These two little letters have become de rigueur for techbro edgelords, flailing politicians, and corporate types. And this goon squad is taking us all along for the ride, willing or not.

Confession time: if you hadn’t already guessed, I’m a bit unimpressed with the current wave of what many are calling artificial intelligence and the way it’s been smeared over everything like creme cheese on a bagel. Darlings, we’re the bagels here and this creme cheese is perhaps a bit off.

If you’re up for a short, but dense, intro to what’s going on right now, check out this ​primer on large language models​—a more accurate description of what ChatGPT and its ilk really are. There’s a particularly juicy quote towards the end that I would like to draw your attention to:

Our first instinct when interacting with a Large Language Model should not be “wow these things must be really smart or really creative or really understanding”. Our first instinct should be “I’ve probably asked it to do something that it has seen bits and pieces of before”. That might mean it is still really useful, even if it isn’t “thinking really hard” or “doing some really sophisticated reasoning”.

These so-called intelligences are not creating, not reasoning, not really doing anything new—at least doing in the sense of taking an action with intention. Without the raw material of pre-existing data, it can do nothing. It’s wholly derivative of what’s come before. It doesn’t generate from scratch or create anew but recycle available material (which could be considered stolen, in many cases).

It’s quick, utterly self assured, sounds really really fancy but ultimately it knows nothing and produces some pretty wild bullshit. It’s literally a bullshit machine. Or, the digitization of bro energy given a search interface. Yes, our next great technological leap is the same old patriarchy given a new, even more talkative and more uninformed form to con us even more.

Now, that’s the talkative kind of AI. What about the picture kinds like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. This being an art crowd, you might have come across those and wonder where they fit into this brave new world of techbro bullshit machines. Basically the same. They assemble composite images based on processing of enormous numbers of pre-existing images—again many of which have been used without consent or consideration of copyright or an author’s moral rights. For example, consider ​this artist’s fight for her rights.

And this is not the only form of extraction happening. In addition to the ethical questions of the training data, there are also ​significant environmental considerations​. These things take a lot of electricity (think a whole city’s worth) and then enormous amounts of water to cool the machines down after consuming all that power.

With all of these concerns running through my mind, you might understand my ambivalence. Maybe even come to share it, if you don’t already.

Many enthusiasts cite AI’s marvelous potential for efficiency, the shortcuts it can offer and what proponents are dubiously calling empowerment. Yes, anyone can use it to create large volumes of work, verbal and visual, very quickly. A casual observer once noted to me that I could feed a script into ChatGPT and let it draw my ​entire graphic novel​ for me.

Well, I could…

Even if I were willing to set aside concerns about the theft and boiling everyone on the planet alive, what would that get me? Cheap thrills and some likely derivative and lifeless work. My temporary pleasure at such quick “creation” probably wouldn’t carry you through the drudgery of reading such a book.

Maybe I could use it here and there as an aid to imagination and design. But even that is short changing my growth. Artists build a visual vocabulary over a lifetime of absorbing the culture around them. Yes, it’s much the same process, but infinitely more subtle and generative when it’s a person and their connection to the greater energies that bind us all. I firmly believe there are mysteries at work here and those mysteries, the ghost in the machine, feels curiously lacking in the current AI schmear smothering us.

When it comes to the art, I’m not particularly interested in automating or outsourcing or becoming more “efficient”. Why should my art—perhaps any art—be efficient? No, it’s not always fun or easy, but is absolutely rewarding—especially stepping out of the dark forest of doubt and despair into the light of an idea fully realized.

Just as important as that finished work is what you learn on the way. You can blip to the finish line in a few seconds, but I chose the slow route with its twists and turns, its unexpected insights and challenges, its magical discoveries and all the glorious beauty that I would never see otherwise. I like to think all this infuses the work with intangible things that resonate with you, on some level, that a quickly produced and facile digital artifact could never do.

From the ghost in my machine to the ghost in yours, darling!

Cover image by Gabriella Clare Marino. (a real human with a camera!)