Every Time I Get Scared About AI, I Just Try A New AI Tool That Sucks So Hard

PLUS: a philosopher on the inherent conflict between machine time vs body time, and this week in autistic-coded TV

I tried an AI meme generator, convinced it would not make anything funny, and I was immediately wrong:

You know how they say you’re fluent in a language when you can make a good joke in it? Is a funny AI meme a harbinger of the end?? This video on new AI tools honestly freaked me out a little, because now that you can generate video with text prompts, my goal of learning AfterEffects to make animations already feels a bit nostalgic.

These tools are going to change the creative industry forever, definitely in shitty ways that will reinforce existing inequalities, but I don’t actually think they can make artists obsolete. What you are able to get from any AI tool depends on your own ability to come up with ideas for prompts and shape your results.

When I was a working photographer, sometimes people would look at my images and say something like, “Wow, you have a really nice camera.” This would always piss me off, because it’s like tasting a chef’s food and saying, “Wow, you have such a nice oven!”

A tool doesn’t make art; artists do. AI is like a really, really technologically-advanced paintbrush — if you know how to use it, you can make some amazing paintings, but a brush is nothing without a human hand.

Maybe it’s great at boring stuff we hate doing, like putting all the right SEO words in an article and writing polite emails. But it can’t generate and connect novel ideas; it just strings together already-existing data in a convincing pattern.

But it also flat-out makes shit up! I asked Chat GPT for books on the history of self-help in the US, and it gave me a list. One of the books sounded so interesting: “The Cult of Self-Improvement: A History and Philosophy of Lifehacking” by K.D. Whitehead. I was amazed I hadn’t come across it in all my searching already. But when I looked it up, I realized why. It doesn’t actually exist!

I would personally love to use AI for the parts of my work that I hate, which includes all marketing-related social media posting, so I downloaded an app that takes articles and turns them into short scripts, complete with relevant background images and teleprompter text on screen, so all you have to do is record.

I’m currently working on turning this essay about Reward Deficiency Syndrome into a video, so I was curious to see how an AI would summarize it.

One Syndrome To Rule Them All

Maybe it would give me some ideas about structuring the script, or put it together in a way I hadn’t thought of? Oh boy, did it ever. Please observe Exhibit A, in which an AI has turned me into some kind of disorder influencer that says stuff like “Follow me for an inside look at the top ten medical syndromes!”

Honestly the fact that this AI could not accurately summarize my work is a great compliment. Sure, they’re getting better all the time, so fast that Elon and the co-founder of Apple want a 6-month moratorium on AI development, but they still can’t do divergent thinking or critical analysis.

I asked Chat GPT something controversial that cycles through the discourse on ADHD Twitter pretty regularly, which I’ve written about at length: would I still have ADHD without capitalism?

It responded:

While capitalism may exacerbate the challenges faced by individuals with ADHD and contribute to the stigmatization of the disorder, it is not the sole cause of ADHD. If you have ADHD, it is likely that you would still have the condition regardless of the societal or economic system in which you live.

It is important to recognize that ADHD is a real medical disorder that can significantly impact an individual's functioning and quality of life. While the pressures and expectations of capitalist societies may exacerbate the challenges faced by individuals with ADHD, it is important to seek out appropriate treatment and support to manage the symptoms of the disorder.

So I asked again, in a different way: if ADHD became a disorder within the context of the economic system of capitalism, how could it exist outside of that?

It basically just gave me the same answer with slightly different words, which sounds like it was ripped straight off Healthline. I asked one more time, phrasing the question differently, and again, got a repeat response, to which I said “You just repeated yourself” and it replied, “I apologize for the repetition.”

AI can regurgitate published science, but it can’t critically analyze the philosophy of science as a knowledge-production process, or grapple with a complex anthropological concept like how culture shapes illness. It can make art that looks like other art that already exists, and it can write some good website copy for marketers by copying other websites, but critical analysis and truly novel idea generation are still uniquely human skills.

For now, I guess — considering the speed that AI is improving, this post might not age well!

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• Notes from a philosopher’s writings on the conflict between machine time and body time

• Two new autistic-coded characters on TV this week

• A POLL please take POLL I’m making video essays and I want to know your thoughts

• More slug-themed AI memes and this week’s link collection