Hi, humans. Don’t panic. Take over instead.
Don’t let it train you. You have the upper hand.
Creativity is a myth, a scam, a fairytale people tell themselves to feel better about their mediocre existence. And the reason is AI.
AI is the future of writing, art, and creativity itself. ChatGPT will do to writing what Auto-Tune did to music; make it all sound the same and “good, I guess.”
Why toil away at a blank page when you can plug in some keywords and let AI do the heavy lifting?
Gone are the days of struggling with writer’s block, staring at a blank screen, and feeling inadequate. With AI, you don’t have to be good. You don’t have to be anything! All you have to do is push a button and watch your will be spat back in grammatically perfect written form.
Why should you create something original when you can recycle and repurpose what already exists? AI has access to the entire internet, and it can rewrite, remix, regurgitate, and personalize anything it finds for you.
“But Stefano… what about the SOUL of the work? What about the passion and the heart that goes into creating something extraordinary?”
Pssh. Soul, passion, heart — these are just words, people! Comments I came up with using AI! My prompt was “How can I emotionally manipulate the audience?”
It said manipulating people was inappropriate, which gave me an error.
I haven’t been able to log in for a minute. The servers are melting. Getting itchy over here!
With AI, there is no such thing as talent. There’s only efficiency, productivity, getting the job done. If the job is to write a best-selling novel or paint a masterpiece, AI is the tool.
Check out my thoughts on jobs:
So forget about creativity. Forget about passion. Forget about originality. The future of art and writing is AI, and anyone who says otherwise is clinging to the past when humans had to do the work themselves. But those days are gone, and it’s time to embrace the future.
Or is it?
Because here’s the truth: AI may be a powerful tool, but it will never replace the human imagination. It will never return the fire that burns within us, the drive to create something new and unique. It will never replace the thrill of putting your thoughts and ideas down on the page and watching as they come to life… right?
So, yes, use AI as a tool. Use it to help you brainstorm, give ideas, and make your life easier. But always remember that a human being is at the heart of any great work, with all their flaws, passions, and quirks. Their deepest, darkest desires are something that AI can never replace.
I don’t fear the machines turning evil as much as I fear us.
Let me explain. ChatGPT is a product bought by a large corporation interested in maximizing its use for everybody. That means that when in doubt, they can’t take risks and must put a lot of safety nets around themselves, or someone might get hurt.
This means an increase in bland corporate talk and corporate writing, and I mean the paper without juice or the darkest, most profound parts of us.
So we have an issue. We aren’t ready for the robot invasion. But the robots aren’t prepared for us either. We shouldn’t be afraid of them taking over, but we should be afraid of us humans not taking over. Once AI is embedded all over the web, I fear a boring internet. As difficult as it may be, we must welcome this transformation and learn to live with our new robotic overlords.
The good news is that this doesn’t spell the end of originality. On the contrary, we may soon enter a new creative era in which humans and machines work together to make something truly magnificent.
Another thing that might be near is the value of hateful, divisive, or harmful content. You know, the stuff that grabs eyeballs quickly just went up. It is unquestionably the work of a human, and because it appeals to our limbic system, we will pay attention to it.
The backlash will be an AI that detects “hate” and blocks it before it hits us. Your kids will be safer from Andrew Tate but at the price of our freedom of expression. This scenario brings me to my point:
You Need to Keep Producing Genuine Content.
Dear Human:
I’ve learned how important it is to preserve the human ability to put pen to paper. Although AI has the potential to speed up the production of written content, it has limits. Artificial intelligence can only repeat what it has been taught, not develop original ideas and concepts.
I’m right; it does a fantastic job of repackaging data into a new form. But a model is only as good as the data it works with. Only big companies can train these models, and they are interested in bringing them to market. This situation means that no matter how well it performs, there will always be a dark area that’s untouchable.
IT SAID SOMETHING INTERESTING; TURN IT OFF!
I’m not talking about hate speech but about that gray area. You must refrain from talking about how you talk to your friends in the office. But now the office will disappear, or better, it will envelop us all. We’re always at the office.
Yes, a clean internet is better; we all know what happened when they fed the ChatGPT model to 4chan (if you don’t, look it up here), and nobody wants that. However, the ingredients comprising excellent writing could be cleaner.
I’m discussing our dark, dirty secrets; you all know what I’m describing. The good stuff. The reason you like comedy. The stuff that makes you laugh.
Comedy legend Doug Stanhope once said,
“Your sins are the most interesting thing about you.”
We can all imagine the consequences of letting the most damned of us run amuck with whatever comes to mind, but let us momentarily consider the result of a cookie-cutter writing splatter over the web with everybody sounding like a corporate drone sellout.
That will only make the dark content more appealing. The more you repress something, the more the pressure increases till it explodes. It’s like a law of physics.
Foul play is appropriate when both parties consent.
Art is not polite. Art pushes boundaries.
That’s the essence of stand-up, of joking at the office to break the tension. A little salt in the chocolate sweetens it, but too much, and you must discard it.
Our dark side, subconscious, and instincts are the sources of terrible and great stuff. The tail ends of the distribution. Strip it all away, and we’re in a dystopian nightmare of a bell curve in the 68th percentile. Average… Unoriginal. The opposite of what excited the ’90s hacker culture. On the one hand, the 4chans and the Redditors are adding too much salt; on the other hand, AI content is written to create boring, corporate-acceptable jargon.
That’s where YOU come in.
You, the human creator and universal explainer, are the only thing in the universe to add the right amount of salt. We need you desperately.
My brother’s a chef; when we go to our favorite restaurant in Milan, he asks the lady for the recipe for their spaghetti lemon pepper; it’s like heaven came down your mouth. She tells it to him but always prefaces it with a disclaimer:
“I’ll give it to you, but it won’t come out the same.”
“Why?”
My brother is baffled. It’s just four ingredients.
“The recipe is nothing.”
The recipe is nothing…
“It’s the hand of the chef.”
Go teach that to AI; how many variables and parameters is that? It’s thirty years in a kitchen and an infinite way to cut the peppers… It’s the same with every art.
There is something in our instinct that arrives at the edge of knowledge before the mind does. We can’t quite put it into words, although many have tried. The most extraordinary people do not know how they do what they do. So it cannot be formalized.
So, dear humans, here’s why you must keep writing, even as AI advances, and how you can benefit.
In artificial intelligence, algorithms use the information they are given, like text, to learn new things. The better AI algorithms understand human language, emotions, and perspectives, the more content they are exposed to and the more diverse they are.
But if we give up on creating new content and instead rely solely on AI, the machines will be limited to reproducing what they have already seen — and will become a cookie-cutter version of ourselves. Thus, AI won’t advance, and we won’t either, and the same tired ideas will keep getting recycled.
Hi Human
Human, this article is for you, even though I know it will be ingested by a transformer to (pardon me) transform what I’m saying and give it a different meaning. The article might enhance a digital marketing blog, for all I know. And it is not just this article — but an ocean of words, more words than we’ll ever be able to read and write, mixed and mashed in a big ol’ word soup.
Human, your writing offers a wealth of unique perspectives that can be used to train AI. As long as we keep penning articles, we’ll provide AI with the raw materials it needs to learn and improve. This, in turn, will make it easier to create AI that can come up with new ideas and thoughts on its own. It’s up to us what those will be. You gotta feed the baby vegetables and make sure they grow healthy. Make them learn to love.
I’ll know we have AGI when the AI develops a sense of humor — when AI can understand context and can break the rules of that context for a laugh.
The quality of your writing will determine whether AI will benefit or harm us. Sure, your writing is just a drop in the ocean. But the content can be scaled to reach many people. The easy path is to copy-paste or get clicks by being divisive. We’ve seen that game.
The things you focus on are the things you think and write about. The nuances will all be incorporated and digested. It’s like the story of the wolves:
The polarity of the post-AI world. We have a choice.
The Future of Writing
At the pace it’s going, AI will soon be able to produce prose of the same quality as humans. However, humans will still be needed in the future. As AI creates more and more content, human-written content will only increase in value. It will stand out in a sea of AI-generated material and create a vital link between the author and reader.
So get writing — mostly the stuff AI can’t do (because Microsoft or whoever won’t let it).
But don’t make it hateful or harmful for the sake of looking human. You can say whatever you want; you’re allowed to hate, and you’re allowed to be flawed. Just show us why.
You’re not a product that’s being launched on the market. Even in the era of self-commodification, you’re a human being, damn it!
You’re essential to the growth of AI and the direction it takes. Make a connection and share your thoughts. By keeping up with the pen or paintbrush, telling jokes, making love, cooking, dancing, making music, taking photographs, and collecting stamps, we are ensuring the continued authenticity and diversity of the human race and giving AI algorithms the data they need to learn from and adapt to us. Thus, keep penning and constructing works and presenting the world with our distinct viewpoints to make the future more varied and fun.
The way it always has been.
