The release of Google’s Gemini A.I. image-generator a few weeks ago raised quite a bit of both amusement and disgust. Among other things, in obedience to its woke creators, it dutifully remade Western history as the creation of non-white people. While it’s tempting to go down the rabbit trail of remaking George Washington as a black man — while simultaneously excoriating him as an evil, patriarchal slave-oppressor — plenty of other people have already had fun along those lines. My concern with this latest non-consensual experiment performed on humanity is different. I worry what it will do to us. I worry what it will leave for us to do.
I am, myself, an image generator. When I was young, I was an artist. I’m not sure what an artist is, frankly, so let’s leave that one alone. When I eventually grew up and got a real job, I found that I could make a decent living drawing machines. These drawings helped service technicians figure out what they needed to do without breaking things or giving themselves headaches. Apart from writing snarky articles, this has been my major contribution to society. It may not be much in the grand scheme of things, but it is something. No doubt, many of you have had similar unsung but useful occupations.
Current A.I. is not quite up to replacing a good technical illustrator, but the writing is on the wall. I would think that A.I. is extremely close to replacing the artist — especially those unfortunate artists who are skilled at unsophisticated things like capturing likenesses and other forms of realism. “Artists” who make sloppy art, or are artists by virtue of saying so (a sort of “trans” before there was “trans”), will probably be spared a little longer.
A.I. image-generators reliably crank out credible examples of realism. Their products often look more real than reality — insofar as they are often sharper than photographs.
Granted, A.I. still has a kind of toddler’s ineptitude regarding the nature of the world. I saw an A.I.-generated ad recently that depicted a woman’s legs backwards — heels in front and toes trailing behind. Despite this, the lighting and the proportions were perfect.
A.I. can do what people struggle with. It will figure out the rest with a little practice. And then it will replace not only advertising illustrators, but models and photographers as well. Why would anyone bother employing troublesome people when he could use an almost trouble-free machine?
We all know that automation has been displacing human beings for a long time — everything from fine textiles to tools to steel used to be made by craftsmen. I suppose I can now rightfully shed a tear for the demise of the carriage-maker’s trade. But this seems different somehow — and not just because it’s getting a little too close to home. The fantasy of futurists and other utopians has long been that the end game will be a world in which people divide their time between recreation and lofty, highbrow artistic endeavors — once they are free from the awful drudgery of work. We’ve known for quite a while that, freed from gainful employment, most people make a near approximation of members of the vegetable kingdom — or worse.
The dole, which is the new model for how the superfluous multitudes are to live, isn’t good at making people who really want to live. When there is no reason to get up in the morning, quite a lot of people don’t.
Now the ill considered fantasy that we can all unleash our inner Rembrandt is also being shot through the heart. Soon, the only way we may be able to tell that something was produced by a human is that it is clumsy and inferior. Even the hacks and con artists won’t be comfortable with that — not when they could molder comfortably on a sofa and be no worse at it than a machine.
Nor is the visual artist alone in line for the scrap heap. I am confident that pop music could easily be written by A.I. — if it isn’t being written by A.I. already. And not only written, but performed. You might need a succession of women who look sufficiently like Taylor Swift to cavort in rhinestone-decorated underwear while lip-syncing to an A.I.-generated voice — purely because holographic technology isn’t good enough yet — but a whole stable of such stand-ins would be cheaper than one Taylor Swift. Even better from a business perspective, computers never succumb to the damaging scandals and the drug overdoses real celebrities do. They do what they are asked. Digital creations never age. They don’t grow fat. They are infinitely modifiable at will — even by the “will” of some invisible, inhuman algorithm. Virtual pop stars could be restyled for different audiences — right down to the level of each and every individual bad taste.
The hordes of minor influencers that advertisers now pay could also be more profitably replaced with A.I.-generated characters. It’s likely that Anheuser-Busch wishes it could simply wink Dylan Mulvaney out of existence, and if he were an A.I. character…it could.
Politics will probably not lag far behind. We already have a president who is no more than a front man for the shadowy people who orchestrate his slow, irritably chaotic movements. Wouldn’t an A.I.-generated marionette serve their purposes much better? It could be as articulate or vague as necessary. It would not mumble, stumble, or wander off script. It wouldn’t have any personal foibles or embarrassing history to be revealed.
If the Democrat party made a gender-fluid version of SpongeBob SquarePants president, does anyone think the media would run an exposé on anything as petty as its mere lack of reality? That ship has sailed already. Anyone who criticized such an invention would be quickly branded a cartoonophobe. Alarming fractions of the younger generations aspire to be cartoon characters already. They’re already embracing A.I. as the quickest and most painless way to do their homework. Are they going to balk at being ruled by A.I.? Where’s the downside? Let the games begin!
Many years ago, in the dinosaur days of Windows 3.1, a game called “Minesweeper” came standard with the software. It consisted of a grid of tiles, under which were hidden a scattering of mines. If you selected a tile over a mine, you lost. If you selected a tile with nothing under it, numbers would appear on the surrounding tiles, indicating how many mines they were next to. With some modest reasoning and a bit of luck, you could eventually sweep away all the safe tiles and win the game.
But there was a cheat button. It would always tell you which tile you could safely go for next. I remember watching a teenager play this game one afternoon. He hit the cheat button — every time. When I asked him what the point of playing was if he cheated, without even thinking, he said, “Because I always win!” He looked at me as though I were some kind of idiot. The road to irrelevance is apparently not paved with any intentions whatsoever.
Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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