In the post below, Victoria Kirst challenges the inevitable supremacy of AI and the assumptions embedded in its rise:
“So much of tech – generative AI included – has been built under the assumption that efficiency is king, and as a technologist, I feel exhilarated by the opportunities that await us if we reexamine all of tech with a radically different hypothesis: What if efficient is not always best? What if speed sometimes deprives us of experiences rather than saves us time? What if we prioritized just about anything else?”
I love this perspective. I am not an artist, but I feel much the same way about AI writing. I refuse to use LLMs to write for me, even though many people I know rave about how “efficient” it makes their “content production”.
Writing is not about content production for me – it’s about discovering what I think. The “aliveness” that Kirst describes comes from me struggling to decide how to communicate an idea, choosing which words best represent my intent. While I can’t always tell when writing is produced by AI, more and more of the “content” I see feels soulless.
Efficiency is not the goal I choose for my life. I want to feel alive. I want to express my own experience. And AI is a shallow simulacrum of human expression, much like social media is a shallow simulacrum of actual human connection, and fast food is a shallow simulacrum of nutritious, filling food. It’s more efficient and convenient, perhaps, but it does not have the depth of experience, and I choose depth over efficiency.
Hat tip to Ei-Nyung Choi for sharing Victoria Kirst’s post on AI art.