Chat GPT.

…And other AI things, but watching Chat GPT create a country song in real time was trippy. And kind of a downer. AI art too, and writing… I felt this inner deflation while watching it go. Like, what’s the point anymore? Nothing matters. My skills don’t matter. My pride in doing things myself without cutting corners is not worth anything in this new world. Raw human effort is basically obsolete.

Of course that only applies (so far) in the realm of work-y things. I still get to do and get better at forming relationships, interacting with humans, playing, thinking, experiencing.

And I can keep ignoring AI developments (as I mostly have been) for a little while longer. Live in this soon-to-be-bygone blissful state of imagined self-determination and potential productive power.

As for the discussion around AI-related ethics, I have some sense that it too just doesn’t matter. Some artist goes to court to defend their imagined “rights”? Some entitled Hollywood writers going on strike? Who cares? THE usefulness of AI is not in working within systems; it’s in generating work-arounds. If my computer is writing better stories than some kid whose dream was to work in the television landscape of yesteryear, what do I care? I (the consumer) will sit in front of my screen and be entertained in the most efficient way available to me. If millions of healthy males are already trading in the messy business of real-life sexual intercourse for an ever-expanding world of online pornography (as they are), then who is going to get them to care about artists’ “rights”?

The genie’s out of the bottle. Hold on to your jobs for a few more years, people, but don’t imagine you’re doing anything other than ever-so-slightly delaying the inevitable. You’re rearranging the deck chairs, sure—more power to you!—but the ship’s going down.

OK, so I asked Chat GPT to rewrite the above text (my own) better. And what it came up with was worse. I continued giving it prompts like “it’s for a personal blog,” “too wordy,” “less formal,” “try again,” “ok, just a tad less goofy,” and “one more time,” but still, it was…just not as good.

So for now I’m still better (at being me) than the robots. Of course, I haven’t tried version 4 of Chat, which could be way better. But let’s not go there. Maybe ever?