From the information it regurgitates to the art is churns out, GenAI is a giant snooze fest.
This is a rant.
The threat of AI looms heavy. Humans will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence. Our unique human creativity is at risk of becoming insignificant. Our genius pales in comparison to what AI can dream up in mere seconds. The machines have become better, faster, and more articulate than us. We now write elegies for our human condition, and we acknowledge the twilight of the Anthropocene.
Then why the f$%& is everything about Generative AI so goddamn boring? Is this perhaps the whimper T.S. Eliot wrote about in The Hollow Men?
Maybe it’s just me but, my God, everything involving AI has all the excitement of unloading the dishwasher. I’ve written extensively about AI–including this here article!–and every time I do I feel the same way I did when writing summaries of Punnett square outcomes in my 9th grade science class: what am I doing here? why is this necessary? dear God this is a dull torture.
No doubt some of you will strongly disagree with me, because GenAI is super fun at first. All the ideas that we can visualize so quickly! It can write a pretty good poem! I ask it for 5 SEO trends for the year and it gives me exactly 5 things! But this delight wears off as the novelty of the power to create anything dissipates. We realize everyone else can do it with AI, and that AI-produced things are already everywhere. That’s the AI-generated Marvel opening credits? It’s okay at best.
I’m not saying GenAI is not useful. As a thought starter, or as a means to an end for supportive imagery (ahem), GenAI has a real purpose. But nothing it creates is very interesting or important outside of its utility to the human who prompted it. GenAI should be used to supplement, but not direct, our thoughts. It should be used to flesh out, but not attempt to bring to life, our vision.
The naysayers around GenAI usually harp on the fact that it’s a shortcut to creative output. And Effort In, Importance Out: the harder something is, the longer it takes, and the more skill sets involved, the more wondrous a creative output can be. Our bodies and our minds yearn for passion, and hard work is passion. GenAI doesn’t work hard. Its output is an empty facsimile of what humans can create because it does not have any passion, struggle, or desire within its creative process. The human act of creating is just as, if not more, important to our world as is the existence of a creation itself.
This notion of Effort In, Importance Out is a truth widely accepted, but it doesn’t fully explain the unique dullness of GenAI content. Here are my theories on why GenAI will never be great, unless we drastically lower our standards for humanity.
Why AI is Underwhelming
Here are 5 reasons why the rise of GenAI is tantamount to The Onion’s latest Taco Bell taco:
#1. AI has no limitations, yet AI has no depth. I don’t just mean that AI has no soul, though it certainly doesn’t. I mean Generative AI is all only iceberg tips. By its nature, it produces lowest common denominator creative output. GenAI is #basic.
Now, lowest common denominator content has an important role to play in our artistic world–it can act as a palatable introduction to ideas that are a little bit out of reach of our scope. Lowest common denominator content should act as input into our thoughtful and calculating brains where we then interpret and create our own unique output from it–our own ideas, points of view, and innovations. Right now, GenAI is creating input that is masquerading as output.
Furthermore, what is so provocative and exciting about human beings is that we can never truly know each other, right? There is a deep well of thought and emotion within each soul that is exciting to explore. Whether we do this exploration through dialogue, or writing, or art, or performance, or social media posts, or even a business launch, it is intoxicating to learn someone else’s perspective. AI elicits zero of this curiosity from me. It has no depth, and I do not want to get to know it, or its output, better.
You might argue, “But GenAI is someone’s creative output! It’s an extension of a person’s idea! A person had to do the work of thinking up the thing that the AI is helping to create.” You’re right that it is someone’s idea, but the use of GenAI as a method and medium to interpret that idea renders the output uninteresting. GenAI is doing a poor job of servicing that person’s vision. Which brings me to my second point.
#2 Prompt writing is the only real skill set involved
“Amazing fashion week show runway walking a female humanoid figure with the elegant body of a woman and the intricate head of a grand, cascading broccoli crown. She wears a Balenciaga-inspired dress designed entirely from voluminous, flowing broccoli florets, with layers of organic textures forming dramatic, billowing shapes that evoke the lush abundance of a broccoli field. The broccoli crown head is oversized and majestic, with intricate fractal-like patterns and tendrils resembling broccoli stems that flow like delicate waves. The dress extends in sweeping waves of broccoli, creating a surreal and extravagant silhouette. In one hand, she holds a leash leading a large, entirely broccoli-inspired creature composed of interconnected florets and a regal stalk, styled as an elegant and fantastical pet. The setting is a broccoli garden environment, with natural surroundings dominated by broccoli crowns and stalks, enhancing the surreal and high-fashion atmosphere. High-quality, detailed, and mesmerizing.” – rosi2222, Midjourney
Whereas one abstract artist might use a specific brush stroke in oil paint to evoke emotion and another might rely extensively on color to do so, everyone involved in GenAI is using the same medium and method: language prompts.
Prompt writing is absolutely a skill to be learned, and there are some people who are much better, and creative, or unique with prompts than others. A prompt is a true connection to the artistic vision. But, for the most part, after maybe some re-prompts and tweaks, the output of the AI is either what the creator wanted it to be, or it’s what the creator will settle for. What the computer spits out is what the artist gets, not what the artist envisioned, and if something is slightly off from the artist’s intent, so be it. Laissez l’ordinateur faire.
And perhaps the output may seem interesting to the viewer, until they realize it is rife with incongruities, deviations from the prompt, and poor artistry.
You might then argue, “AI is a form of communication! It is not an object or itself an artform, but a method, a tool for the creator, akin to a printing press or illustrator app!” Oh, hello and welcome to the Klatch. But also, I hear you and you’re wrong. Because I just don’t care about a robot printer that is getting better at printing books which, increasingly, were written by a robot. Which leads me to #3.
#3. Because AI is not human, it has no vibration.
Get out your drugs and your singing bowls, we’re talking about vibes.
Imagine walking into a library only to realize none of the books are written by humans. Do you have any enthusiasm to explore the shelves? All the information and poems and stories are still there, but do you care to read them?
As it turns out, a book’s author is just as important as the book’s existence. To sit with a writer, an artist, a thinker, whether you’re sitting in the presence of their physical body or with just their words, is an act of communion. It doesn’t matter if it’s E.L. James or J.R.R Tolkein, to spend time with another person’s work is an act of intimacy. I feel as close to Tolstoy and Banksy as I do some of my actual friends. There is no intimacy with the AI, because it, and its output, is dead.
GenAI output is like a Hallmark Christmas movie. It offers pleasantries and verisimilitude, but even with its prettiness, nothing truly resonates. Looking through the Midjourney library, are you moved by anything you see? AI elicits no emotion. It’s a strictly utilitarian output that serves no other purpose than to be made in the first place.
And, there is something else that is missing from AI creation. Just like aspen trees can communicate with each other through the ground, or mushrooms transmit language through the forest, there is an intangible, but still physical, connective thread between human beings. When someone creates something, it emits a vibration that gets carried over yet unnamed frequencies and resonates across our communal ether. This unified field is only available via consciousness. AI cannot access these frequencies.
#4. AI’s work is transitory
Human life is brief. Our existence is but a second on the clock of history. I think this causes us to yearn for a slower tempo to things, especially as we age and our perception of time accelerates. GenAI is antithetical to this yearning.
With AI, anybody can make anything rather quickly. We’ve already acknowledged Effort In, Importance Out, but what’s more is that our use of GenAI, to date, has been rather transactional. Part of AI’s utility is its speed, and we are focused on the immediate gratification of getting to the output. So then, as creators, we are not changed by the work because it takes shape so quickly. As an audience, the work does not change us because, without resonance or meaning, we are not likely meditate on it for any prolonged period of time.
With AI, the romance of discovery is missing. When AI provides us the answer to a question that has been bugging us, there is no resulting a-ha moment. I posit that even with non-AI Google search results we can get that Eureka! feeling, because somewhere a person took the time create and publish the answer to our question, Google just found their content for us. With GenAI search results, the information is relayed to us with no real exploration. Even when the AI tries to convey humor, opinion, or bias in its content, there is no personality there, because there is no intention behind its words. Which segues to…
#5: There can be no unexpected interpretation of the work.
Where are all my post-structuralists at?!
A novel was written with a specific intention from the author. But as that author incorporates narrative aspects like characterization, events, and emotions that connect the story to the audience, the work is opened up to interpretation by the readers who have their own unique perception of those aspects.
Consider an AI like ChatGPT. What intent does it have? With no intention, there is no perspective, there is no literary structure to consider or reject, there is nothing to deconstruct, rebuild, and interpret new again. It is output that is not deserving of our consideration.
I have seen some really amazing, human-centric outputs from content creators using a visual GenAI. I want to acknowledge the effort those friends put into exploring AI as a new tool in the artistic toolkit. The stories they want to tell are worthy of our consideration.
However, the use of AI–to animate, to seemingly create set pieces or move a camera, or to generate a realistic-looking human, to write a script–negates any connection I might seek to have with the story. I am interested in this work only for the creator’s sake, and even then it’s usually in a meta “why did you decide to make this in AI?” kinda way. Otherwise, no offense, but it’s boring, and waste of a really great artistic vision. In the specific cases where GenAI has created lifelike human beings in place of actors, I can’t help but experience the uncanny valley. I would rather read about an imaginary person than see one brought to life on the screen without a soul.
As a humanist I can’t help but inherently reject GenAI work. It’s an abomination of our human condition; it neuters our meaningful inputs and its output is straight up boring. Of course, life-saving breakthroughs in health and science, like AlphaFold’s mapping of 200 million protein folds, are true masterpieces of artificial intelligence, and net positives for our society. There are amazing things yet to be created by GenAI that will revolutionize our human existence for the better. Will AI be able to give us the next Theory of Relativity? Perhaps.
Still, I demand Einstein.