Thinking about GenAI and the "putting artists out of work" thing... It certainly will put some "artists" out of work — those unfortunate enough to be working in places where some visual/auditory/written material is part of a product — ads, marketing prospectuses, elevator music and all other forms of "pretty looking bullshit"... But real art? No worries. Because as soon as an AI becomes capable of the impulse to art — probably about the same moment it crosses the line into becoming self-aware/sentient and thus a Real Intelligence (albeit running on a manufactured substrate) is the moment it, too, becomes an Artist. As such it is bound to have the same needs and wants as any artist — appreciation, criticism, and... money (because everybody gotta pay the rent one way or another absent some sort of UBI scheme).
Forced to use Notion the other day for work, and, given how much effort I have to put into ignoring their constant attempts to ram their "AI" down my throat, it dawns on me:
Pointing LLMs at writing words is precisely the wrong place to be using that software.
We have a variety of reasons for writing:
- as a ToolsForThinking: writing to clarify our own thoughts and feelings, whether with creative intent or just as a way of rinsing toxic thoughts and feelings out of ourselves. This is writing for ourselves; no external audience needed or wanted.
- as a way of talking with other people: the typical use of memos in any collective enterprise — to ask our colleagues questions, answer their queries, assert territorial/status claims, provide information... it's just asynchronous conversation
- to record stuff that happened, how stuff got/gets done, what actually happened on the day, who owes what to whom, to explain how a thing works... i.e. as an adjunct memory function: whether the stuff actually happened in reality, or whether it's a fiction is entirely a separate question, irrelevant to this reason for writing. In other words I include storytelling as this "recording" use-case: The recording of "stuff the might have happened in some or other other universe".
In each case the thing that matters about the writing is the content of our own mind (with a small cutout for the case where we're recording stuff that actually happened, in which case there's an external context to the writing that matters, called Reality or The Universe.)
In every case a software model operates completely in ignorance of the generative context — the thoughts that are going on in a person's mind, the thread of conversation, the world of the story being told. This is context it can not know and can only very minimally and inaccurately be conveyed in a prompt to the model.
So what's the utility in using a generative model to write for us? If the writing is not from us (individuals) then it's not serving to
- help us think better, in the first case
- convey our curiosity, interest or knowledge, in the case of the second (with the one exception that I'll come back to in a moment), nor
- record either real-world events or the subjunctive events of a fictional world.
It's no fucking use at all.
(The single exception is where we're using written communication to establish/reinforce/claim status or intellectual territory: engaging in social network pissing contests. But that amounts to communication for purposes other than communication, and I suspect that this is the one place that GenAI writing is very useful, especially for people who find writing difficult or a chore.)