Resistance

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In the last few months I’ve gone from deep but curious ambivalence about generative AI to dread and a sense of resistance that gets more dug in by the day. Largely this is because I don’t trust capitalist mechanisms—and certainly not as realized in the reigning technology companies, which do and will control AI, at least until something obviously bad enough happens that governments get even faintly involved—to act with the greater interests of humanity in mind.

Sam Altman’s ouster from OpenAI, apparently at least partly on the grounds that colleagues believed he had faltered in his supposed commitment to a safety-first approach, and the “but … money!“ reversal thereof, concretized a sense for me that the future, like the past, will belong to the greatest hoarders of resources—just fewer of them.

But I’m realizing that there’s a less pragmatic, maybe more spiritual dimension to this for me, and that comes out of the fear that we’ve already lost a lot of collective and individual capacity for imagination in the last century, and are poised to lose much more. The only possible result of being able to write a short text prompt and generate Hollywood-quality cinematic footage is that we’ll get the cinema without the vast, social gathering of imagination, and its skillful expression, that used to go into it, and to me it seems more likely than not that the result will be the atrophy of human minds, even human spirits, not to mention the loss of many thousands of human livelihoods. I would say this will be directly in proportion to the amount of vacuous junk that is produced, but it won’t: There will be a lot more vacuous junk than livelihoods lost, because the vacuous junk is infinite.

I leave ample room for the possibility that I’m wrong, that this technology will only extend our capacities, relieve us of drudgery, and allow the generative spark that is at the heart of human being to reach depths and distances far greater than we ever dreamed. That would be great! I just don’t think it’s going to happen, or I don’t think it’s going to be prevalent. Artistic capacity in human beings will be replaced and devalued and made obsolete or trivial. Why summon a world in your mind from the pages of a book when a machine can render it real(ish) in the cone of reality projected by your electric headset? Why have the book to begin with? Why be Bach if a computer can be Bach, only better? In the age of abundance the tech titans promise us, maybe we are to be vaguely mediocre hobbyists, plugging away in our paltry attempts at creative achievement like kindergartners with popsicle sticks and glitter until it’s time for the video. I never even mastered glue.

Here’s a prediction, for what it’s worth: This issue is going to be divisive and destructive on a level we haven’t even begun to glimpse. Our friendships will be tested, we’ll lose our own jobs (if you think you’re exempt, double-check that) and watch coworkers lose theirs, and—most significantly—we’re going to find yet another way to fracture along lines of ideology. People across the existing political spectrum will find reasons to object to the digital replacement of the most essential human capacity, imagination, and its economic and social effects; and other people across the existing political spectrum will continue to defend it as the only defensible future, the only way to progress, that unimpeachable aim. How can we grow, this latter group will ask, if we don’t advance our technology, if we don’t derive new engines of profit, if we don’t keep saying yes to this particular course of evolution—even if its only and obvious destination is the replacement of embodied human being? The stakes here are much higher, and the impact much less absorbable, than in prior waves of technological revolution.

When the resistance to this tide forms in earnest, you’ll find me there. In the meantime, I’m making a conscious effort to disable and withdraw from generative AI platforms and their outputs in my own life, to the limited extent that’s possible. I’ve archived some Instagram posts I made with Midjourney and canceled my subscription to that platform, and as the fruits of generative AI become further woven into our society I will be adjusting my patterns of movement and consumption to match, as well as I can. I don’t yet know the most effective course of action here, but I know that if we do not find it, we’ll be swept right into a future that profoundly doesn’t belong to us, and to which we do not belong. And by we I mean all humans. I stand in solidarity with my former employer, The New York Times, as it goes to legal battle against the appropriation and plagiarism of human work to power large-language models. There are other resisters, of course, and we will become only louder and more organized. I’m calling myself out as one here, as a matter of record and so that others who feel some of this but maybe haven’t given words to it yet have a few new words that might be useful. This isn’t the kind of fight you get into because you expect to win; but it’s the alternative to surrender.

As a species, we do have a long series of choices to make, and none, in our history, has ever been more important. Now is the time to pay attention.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.