Imagine a world where people were only working hard enough to ensure that they and the others in their society had their survival needs met. Enough food and shelter to ensure that no one would die of starvation or exposure. A world where no one would be expected to put in overtime scurrying around the maze racing the other caffeine-enhanced rats to be the first to the cheese-flavoured pivot table. Rats sacrificing their time and energy to prove their rodent-y worth to the monocle, top hat, and spats wearing fat cats on a Saturday when they could have instead been on a picnic, serenading their family with a new song they composed for the hurdy-gurdy. As an alternative to putting in extra work, technology created the opportunity for jobs to be mostly automated, and humans would only be required for addressing mistakes that the automatons created either through a misinterpretation of commands, an unexpected request, or through poor judgement programmed into its circuitry.
This is of course, a pipe dream, and it’s one that should remain in the sewers. Using artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the amount of work humans do so that one may leisurely cook a meal as opposed to stopping to pick up a rotisserie chicken from a grocery store on the way home from work on a Wednesday night is absurd. For one, it’s important to be putting money back into the rotisserie chicken industry, and for two it’s important to remember that all of us need to earn the right to live, or more familiarly, earn a living, and if computers are doing all the work, how can any of us prove that we don’t deserve to die hungry in the streets? Just because a person exists today, doesn’t mean that they get to exist tomorrow. We all need to be prepared to show our paid fare to the conductor or rightfully expect to be kicked off the train at the next station.
Thankfully, the technocrats and venture capitalists of the world see this reality with far more clarity than the rest of us simpletons who look at the potential of AI and only focus on ways to use it to enrich ourselves with even more leisure time. They recognize that AI isn’t well suited to tasks like creating reports from a database full of, well, data. At least not reports that have alternating row colors and centered column names. There’s just no way for machines to learn which data is useful for decision-makers to prioritize, and it’s not like they could just create a number of different reports for decision-makers and let the decision-makers make decisions about which reports have value and should be created the next time reports are requested by the decision-maker and which reports should be treated like a broken coffeemaker that the decision-maker decided to hide in their neighbour’s trashcan to be taken to the dump, never to be seen again. To reiterate, there is literally no mechanism for a machine to learn in this way, and if there was, it would be given a cooler name than machine learning.
Now, if you aren’t a dumb-dumb like the rest of us and are instead drank from the fountains of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, or Business, you will see that the best use of AI is in the world of the arts. If there’s one thing that the logical and reasonable “reals over feels” crowd believes that humans spend too much time on without a guarantee that it will be objectively good, it’s art. For one, arts take time to learn, time that could be better spent learning Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, or Business. Even once you’ve learned how to draw, or write, or sing, or dance, or act, or sculpt, or what-have-you, it takes time to create. And when you’re taking the time to think about the things you’re creating, you aren’t thinking about ways to solve problems (both real and imagined) through the application of Science, Technology, Engineering, Math or Business, and if you aren’t doing that, then why oh why should you have a roof over your head, or a working coffeemaker?
However, if your artistic eye is astigmatic, you’ll see no reason to be creative when AI allows you to steal ideas that already exist and make something derivative instead.
The primary use of AI takes this slow, uncertain, distraction of a process and makes it a thing of the past. Just rub your brain on the Create-O-Matic 2000 and let it do the work for you. It will find the results that best represent your idea, that other people have already wasted time creating, and stitch them together into a horribly disfigured version of whatever it was that you had in mind. Much like Frankenstein’s Monster, parts of the AI’s creation will seem familiar, but a keenly artistic eye will recognize that it should probably be set on fire before letting it interact with children. However, if your artistic eye is astigmatic, you’ll see no reason to be creative when AI allows you to steal ideas that already exist and make something derivative instead. Business leaders looked at the current state of the entertainment industry and saw that there’s no money to be made in original thought. Sequels and remakes litter movie theatres, streaming services, and video games; audiences having made their message clear: If you want to make money with your art, be derivative.
If you’ve filled your brain with a bunch of artsy-fartsy poppycock instead of going to school for a marketable, in-demand skill like coffeemaker repair, you might be excused for not realizing that the best indicator of quality is how much money something makes. Everyone should be on board with the idea that all popular things are, without exception, objectively good.
Once an artist has learned that the only way forward artistically is to appease the masses and churn out the highest quality art they can (read: make as much money as possible) as quickly as possible, it’s clear that leveraging the work of others under the guise of AI is the best way to increase its artistic value. Their time spent artistically is now focused on editing either whatever the AI “created” or editing the query they need to feed into the Create-O-Matic 2000 to get a result that is more closely aligned to their artistic vision.
Now that we’re spending less time being creative, we can focus our brainpower on solving important societal problems. For example, monetizing AI generated art. Spit-balling, I suppose that I could ask people to pay for sole access to a URL that I currently control and then pinky promise that the highly derivative AI generated art that they like would be made available to them there, and that I’d never forget to pay for hosting or renew ownership of the domain name they paid for.
However, I wouldn’t even be liable if I changed what actually exists at that URL because I wouldn’t be actually selling the art, just access to a URL that purports to point to some jpeg. Did they pay me for the URL to access some AI generated art? Yes. Could the image file be replaced with a spreadsheet of coffeemakers and their warranty information just because I feel like it? Also, yes. Implementations like this are obvious once you get things like how to write music for the hurdy-gurdy out of your head and make room for important stuff, like creating well-styled pivot tables.
Clearly AI is here to stay, and it’s poised to make the world a more efficient place to live. Used properly, AI will maximize productivity, freeing up the time of the artistically inclined so they can help create more things that people love like subscription services, terrifyingly accurate personalized targeted marketing campaigns, and coffeemakers that don’t break down after only fourteen months of regular use. No longer will society be plagued by those who are bent on spending all their time producing things that no one cares about like books, plays, movies or video games. If we agree to not abuse AI to do the work that humans are required to do in order to have access to food and shelter, we will be one step closer to living in a technocratic utopia. I, for one, would be proud to edit the works of the Create-O-Matic 2000 and every iteration that it begets.