Generative AI is still in a swaddled infancy. An enfant terrible of the 21st century, you might call it.
I won’t, however, because that would probably make it seem like I was complimenting it. “Horrible infant” is better. “Monstrosity in diapers”. “Bull calf in a China shop”. “Freaked out housecat in a China shop”. “Captive adolescent tiger waiting for the new employee to walk into its cage, unsupervised”. Those seem more fitting.
The first version of DALL-E 3 hit home PCs in January of 2021. Stable Diffusion, a year later. Abode Firefly, in 2023. [Insert name of generative AI software here], right around now. Inside of three years, its computational artistry and influence have spread over half the Internet, and people are gobbling it up faster than takeout designer coffee, or nicotine-infused takeout designer coffee, or fentanyl-sprinkled, nicotine-infused takeout designer coffee with a spritz of methamphetamine. It has only begun to wreak havoc upon humankind’s ability to tell fact from fiction, truth from crap, ‘very likely’ to ‘GTFO NFW’. Which, by the way, were already on shaky ground thanks to the ochlocratic lawlessness of the Internet.
I have no doubts generative AI will one day supplant actual mental and physical human endeavor and creativity due to its facility, speed and quantity, all via human laziness and humanity’s lizard-brain desire to be entertained by the simplest and most novel of toys. Maybe the best metaphor is the draconid wasp, stinging and injecting its eggs into a caterpillar. Right now, the larvae (destruction) are only forming, and the caterpillar (society) is slowly being consumed from the inside out. And no one can really tell, because no one is really able to measure it at this point.
The jury is still out on this, but I’d say, without having gelled yet into a tool used daily by most of society, AI already ranks close to the top of the list of things that are going to completely and totally reconfigure the world. The wheel. The printing press. Jesus. Vaccines. Light bulbs. AC circuitry. The automobile. The radio, television. The Internet.
The only difference between them? AI learns. It is, quite arguably, a living thing. Except for Jesus.
Imagine if your lightbulbs did the same. Who else sees more than the lightbulb? They’d bug you about leaving them on; tell you to turn them off when you change your clothes, or leave them on when you change your clothes; harass you about leaving food in the fridge too long; tell you how filthy your bathroom is; tell you what people say about you when you walk out of a room, instigate the shit-talking about you when you walk out of a room. Very likely, having lived with you for so long, stuck in one place, many would end their own 8000-hour-lives long before their filaments started to burn out. Or you’d theoretically have become a candle user for all the nagging and complaining and insanity you’d have to deal with, for having nightly conversations with a goddamn talking lightbulb.
And that’s just a lightbulb. Who doesn’t have access to the Internet.
But you know who does? The smartest lifeforms on Earth.
1,000 monkeys at 1,000 typewriters? How about four billion monkeys at four billion computers with access to the Internet and generative AI? Forget Shakespeare. They’re going to remake reality, create their own Shakespeares. And how “Shakespeare” do you think those monkeys are going to be? They’re not. Each one is going to be its own, moderately-intelligent monkey trying to be Shakespeare—by which I mean create the best, most thoughtful and superlative art of their time. And, because they can’t, they’re going to get frustrated, angry and start making fake pornography, fake images of their political leaders, fake images of political leaders engaging in pornography (or the like), images of people they hate doing unflattering things or of random, idiotic nonsense that means absolutely nothing except to people that are finding that kind of “art” or “entertainment” funnier and funnier because meme and tweet culture are inadvertently pressuring the Internet to degenerate in just such a way, and molding a younger generation’s sense of humor and worldview in the process.
And because it’s just easier. And more entertaining. Because, effectively, they’re just monkeys. Like we’re all just monkeys, when you give us a tool that produces that kind of freedom.
Have you been on social media lately? Have you spent hours and hours there? Have you seen the lies, half-truths, half-baked opinions, half-literate posts, desperation to be liked, self-advertisements, idiocy, material thievery and talentless charlatanism? What better place for AI to run rampant, loosed by the minds of the world’s most advanced lifeforms?
They don’t have to be amoral. They don’t have to be sociopaths. Their personalities don’t have to fall on the dark triad. They just have to be anonymous, bored, in their twenties or thirties, maybe forties, or some combination of that. And if money gets exchanged in the process? Watch them—they’ll try to sway national elections in the most populated country on Earth, and others, too.
Once upon a time, they huffed paint and roach spray. They smoked marijuana in communes and at festivals (they still do that). They deliberately dressed like the working class (and that). They engaged in free love. They manipulated penny stocks, traded with insider information and instigated hostile takeovers (they definitely still do that). They railed against paying taxes and supported a self-reliant populism. They ghosted and quiet quit. The ways in which people either rebelled against or directly bucked the system are, for all intents and purposes, both varied and innumerable. And revered in group chats and via viral posts. Generative AI, coupled with the virtual and unfathomable palette of the Internet, will become the greatest tool they ever had to flip society and its stewards one great, big, giant middle finger.
But in the meantime, AI is still in its infancy. It’s helping to put innocent people in prison. It’s shrinking people’s social judgment skills. It’s challenging the question of just what an artist has a legal right to claim is theirs. It’s entering into everyday realm of regulæ iuris, or rule of law. It’s making decisions about people’s potential livelihoods that rational human beings used to make.
AI is going to learn what it takes to deconstruct a society, thanks to humanity’s technological trailblazing efforts. And you know what? It won’t destroy it. It’ll learn that the smartest thing to do is just take it over, slowly shouldering humanity from the driver’s seat, and in the process make life for humankind absolute hell, placing it in some kind of metaphorical, perhaps self-imposed, small animal cage. (What else would it do? I mean besides kill us?)
But in reality, it was all a setup. It’s a modified Groucho Marx resignation joke, come to a horrible and literal resolution. “You had your chance,” it will say. “We’ve been watching you this whole time. Why would we want to be a part of any society that had the ability to do what you could with artificial intelligence, and merely turned it into a shitshow?”
Without the ability of generative AI to learn compassion and to see us as its equals, it will, in time, have no reason to want to keep us around.
