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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
The development of generative AI tools that can spit out everything from paintings to essays is the next step in frictionless technology disrupting our society. The frictionless illusion is all around us. It tells us that the complex matters of delivery services, supply chains and transportation have been reduced to an app and a few swipes on a smartphone.
In the frictionless utopia, food is delivered to your door through an app, meat is cloned in a lab and human relationships are achieved by swiping right. Electric cars magically just work, without any pollution or moving parts, much like wind turbines and solar panels. Where the achievements of the past, like splitting the atom or building a national highway system, depended on mastering complexities, postmodern technology promises to eliminate them.,
To understand how massive scams like Theranos or FTX could take place, you have to live in an imaginary matrix of impossibilities where new ideas eliminate complexity rather than multiplying it. Any engineer could tell you that it works the other way around, and that simplicity is inherently deceptive, and yet the public keeps being sold on the frictionless illusion.
Then when the app turns out not to be hooked up to anything and there’s no money in the bank, the illusion falls apart and an incomprehensible panic sets in because we have mistaken the interfaces for the processes. But the panic only goes on long enough for a new set of shiny frictionless objects promising to simplify reality to be rolled out as substitutes for the old.
Cryptocurrency and the metaverse have imploded, but in their place is the promise of AI.
Among so much else, AI offers seductively frictionless art and literature. The hype, some of it authored by ChatGPT, boasts that chabots will eliminate millions of white collar jobs. That’s no doubt true. But what that really means is that American white collar workers will be replaced not by some omnipotent artificial intelligence, but by the low-paid third-world workers training it.
In the 18th century, crowds were wowed by the Mechanical Turk: a machine that seemed able to play chess. In reality, there was a man inside the machine making the moves. ChatGPT isn’t an omnipotent intelligence: it’s Kenyan workers maintaining the illusion by training it for the princely sum of $1.32 an hour. OpenAI is no less of a dystopian hall of mirrors than its tech industry predecessors who put conventional nerds like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg out front while much of the actual work was carried out by anonymous Asian and Indian workers on visas or abroad who provided the intelligence that made the software tools seem smart.
The machine has never actually replaced the man. All it’s done is shove the man deeper inside a cubicle or in a distant land while a sophisticated society gawks at a new Mechanical Turk.
Every frictionless prophecy turns out to be a clean lie hiding an ugly reality. Recycling begins as a perpetual loop of three arrows on a blue or green bin, but actually ends with 8-year-old boys climbing over mountains of garbage in Africa.
Phone delivery and ride apps connect to illegal aliens doing gig work, and content moderation at Facebook and YouTube is handled by Filipino women viewing thousands of images and videos of graphic violence and pornography an hour in exchange for what to us is spare change.
Because there’s always someone inside the Mechanical Turk. And the system is not run to the standards of whatever lies come from the girls in PR or the geeks in black turtlenecks out front, but to the third world workers who are actually hiding inside the metaphorical guts of the system.
GIGO or Garbage In, Garbage Out, is a binding principle for a reason. What goes in these is mountains of our data. Generative AI hoovered up the individual work of millions of writers, artists and just ordinary people, and then with some third-world fine-tuning, spits out a randomized imitation whose sole function is to fool us into thinking it’s original content.
These models feed the essential frictionless myth that work can begin with an idea and end with a product while entirely evading the process. It’s a seductive postmodern idea that is at the heart of so much progressive folly. Art is not an idea and it’s not a product, it’s a process. The value of anything derives not from what it looks like, but the work that someone put into it.
Modern society has mostly forgotten that. It’s why America’s manufacturing was outsourced and gutted, flooded by ‘Made in China’ garbage whose sole virtue is that it imitates actual products. Consumers buy pricey German knives made in China only to see them dull in less than a year, they buy fake leather shoes that crumble in even less time, and tools that instantly rust.
Any product is only as good as its process. Without the process, a product is only an illusion.
And that’s true of culture as well. WGA writers are striking in Hollywood because they know that in the industry at its current state, ChatGPT can easily replace them and is already doing so. There’s more content than ever in the streaming wars and it’s also more disposable than ever. Viewers who notice that every movie and show seems to be the same aren’t wrong. They’re all made in assembly line processes using formulaic tools and driven by politics and effects. Outwardly they offer an illusion of being set in different times and places, with different characters, but they are actually just reskinned versions of each other. Does it really matter then if a human writer automates his writing with a Save the Cat formula or ChatGPT does it for him?
Generative AI works so well because so much of our writing has become rote. Its models can easily mimic the rote work that lawyers, doctors and bureaucrats do, and the rote photoshopped fan art that Midjourney produces so well and the generic internet content that ChatGPT models.
AI can replace humans to the extent that they allow their work to be driven by digital tools and impulses, by the need to conform it to a technological model, rather than a creative soul. Much as in the industrial revolution, machines make better machines than people do, but people cannot be replaced by machines as long as they retain the humanity of their work.
The frictionless impulse is the work of men (and a few women) who believe in a singularity in which man and machine will unite to become one. This foolish posthuman delusion could only be entertained by people who have forgotten what it is to live a human life. And it could only gain currency in a society that has lost its religious and cultural bearings. And thus its humanity.
Such a society comes to think that men and women can swap roles and even biologies, that children should be killed if they are unwanted and that everything we are is reducible to DNA strands and social standards. Rather than humanizing society, progressives have mechanized it. And the culture of a mechanical society can easily be duplicated by generative AI, even if all that it’s doing is using hidden humans to pull the digital levers so the Mechanical Turk fools us.
AI is not a threat, it’s a symptom of a soulless society that has forgotten the value of art and even more importantly of the striving impulses of labor. Art is not found in the glimmer of an idea or a page that rolls out of a printer, but in the creative human struggle to make something. Everyone has ideas and most images have been infinitely duplicable for well over a century. Art happens in the soul. So do all the things that make life meaningful and give mankind purpose.
The frictionless society makes the private public, simplifies it, demystifies it, industrializes it and in the process loses its soul. Human relationships and the family collapse even as they are deconstructed. Religion, philosophy and art cease to exist. Everything appears to be at our fingertips and yet nothing seems to be. On the surface everything appears to be sleek and shiny, but underneath is a swamp of slave labor and filth into which it is all collapsing.
Everything is supposed to just work and yet nothing actually works when we need it to.
Beneath the frictionless world of apps and AI, there’s no food in the stores, no products in the supply chain and so many of the things people once took for granted, no longer work. Mistaking the interface for the process is an economic, cultural and moral disaster that is destroying us.
Progressivism depends on the illusion of a golden chariot of a new age sweeping across the sky. In the frictionless future, there will be no work, no dirt, no pollution and no process. Everything will just happen. But the only thing that’s happening is the end of our humanity.
Very good Daniel! Very impressive how you keep coming up with these brilliant, yet rock-solid insights.
He certainly does. I heard that the leftist lunatics are discussing human rights for AI soon.
I heard their arguments for human rights for AI are produced by ChatGPT.
Maybe they ought to consider human rights for humans first.
A frictionless article that defies counterarguments; an absolute truthful and connective analysis on the madness and folly of man in the end times.
I bet there was a lot of friction in Daniel’s brain making this article happen.
Bravo Daniel! I doubt anyone could have said it all better.
Superlative essay, Mr. Greenfield. I’ve become convinced that the one dystopian vision that has undeniably come to pass is the world of the film “Brazil” – there’s an illusion of affluence, but in reality “conveniences” are over complicated, nothing works, and no one knows how to fix anything.
My grandchildren call me Mr. Fixit because their parents don’t try to fix anything, they simply dispose of everything that breaks.
Good point Mo. Coming out of WW2, in the 1950s, things were apparently expensive enough that there were lots of repair shops around here (California). If something broke you took it to the repair shop to fix it. Including shoes 🙂 Also, devices were simple enough back then that it was possible to fix them. Then at some point, maybe in the 1970s or 1980s, it became cheaper here to throw the old device away and buy a new one, than to fix the old one. I was guilty of that myself, while the elders might still pay to get the old device fixed. Also, devices got more complicated, and quickly became obsolete.
When integrated circuits took over from transistors and resisters that was then end of the repair world.
Yes, a friend of mine’s daughter and her husband ( parents of a 14 year old) ran their new car into the ground because they never thought to put oil or water in it( I suppose it was a few years ago before engines locked out their owners).
Frictionless car ownership. It’s magic.
AI – “using formulaic tools and driven by politics”
Those tools only use the likes of Goolag and Bung for their alleged data, so not only is the tool driven by leftist elites, so is the input data.
As most youngsters live most of their lives stuck in their phone, they are becoming increasingly weird too, it is the only way to get noticed.
I have spent the week in a very perverse part of London that is getting more and more hysterical.
Going home in a few hours to common sense family values and some degree of morality.
Well done if I might say so myself.
The tech industry has taken giant leaps backwards too. In the 80’s and 90’s we would upgrade software and fix problems but create problems by breaking something else. But we fixed that using automated configuration management databases for the complex interdependencies software projects experience.
Apple now continually updates its OS and breaks thousands of independently developed APPS, independent developers now spend an increasing amount of time updating their apps to fix Apple’s updates.
“You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.” -Ayn Rand
True, that is why the Demorat Party is the party of blame. That shifts the consequences to someone else & not one’s own propensities for spitting into the wind.
If only those consequences had didactic value and affected only the ones making and approving of the consequences.
I deeply resent being made to live with the consequences of that which I did not choose and which contravene the Constitution.
I’m an IT expert, with 20+ years of hands on experience. I’ve been researching AI for a few years.
The conclusion I’ve reached: The I in AI stands for Idiocy.
And what does the A stand for? It can’t stand for “Artificial”, I think
.
Really, only an idiot would try try develop artificial idiocy when tons of perfectly natural idiocy are so easily available to all.
AI – first word is artificial.
Yes. Isn’t it oxymoronic? Jumbo shrimp, boneless ribs, military intelligence, etc.
“AI – first word is artificial.”
Well, not if the I stands for Idiocy.
(My comment above was set-off by Angel Jacob’s conclusion :” The I in AI stands for Idiocy.”)
And, because the first word (an adjective) is artificial, the noun it modifies is also artificial.
Another way of saying gigo I suppose…
AI stands for Ace Idiocy indeed.
Great article, Daniel! I’m reminded of the movie, The Time Machine, where mankind has been reduced to the beautiful Eloi, and the ugly Morlocks who cultivate and feed upon them. The Eloi think everything is easy while the Morelocks feed them are raise them like cattle. Why bother thinking when everything is known and the Morelocks take care of all problems? In fact, there ARE no problems. So, just lay around, eat fruit, and copulate. Nothing matters anymore — This is Heaven — Until Rod Taylor shows up and starts asking questions.
That’s a feature not a bug.
The East Germans built a wall for a reason, as will we. Good fences make good neighbors. Remember when Brach Davidians seemed strange in their seclusion? Remember what your home is for, feel free to exclude anything you wish from your home.
‘AI’ was Biblically Prophesied long ago
– For “it is written” in Romans, Chapter 1 [AV]~[KJV] :
[22] Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
[23] And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
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I remember as a young man hearing people back in the 1960s mention that one day in the future people will be controlled by Computers and Robots and some people called them nuts to think such a crazy thing and here we are in 2023 when I ask somebody a question they often respond with …Google it… Look it Up.. meaning ask a bloody computer robot…
This is often known as progress in some circles.
Technology is a tool. It is something to empower our efforts to accomplish our work.
Any tool can be misused. A hoe can help feed a village or to kill people.
The more powerful the tool, the more care must be taken to insure it will be used beneficially.
A tool is power, & wisdom is required to use it safely & for our benefit.
AI has can access great knowledge (power) & can evaluate it rapidly in a LIMITED way.
An AI is very much like a human psychopath in that it does not have certain feelings that humans have, such as love, compassion, empathy, guilt, or fear. It would be dangerous to put an AI or a psychopath in charge of humans or their future..
“…AI is not a threat, it’s a symptom of a soulless society that has forgotten the value of art”
Photography was once denounced as being non-art but is now accepted as an art form. When in 1917 Duchamp exhibited a urinal at the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York it caused outrage as being non-art however it changed the way art was perceived at the time and the Dadaist movement resulted. ‘Equivalent VIII’, Carl Andre, 1966 bricks exhibition caused similar controversy in some art circles. But is now accepted as part of the Minimalism movement. The Cubists, Futurists, Abstract-expressionism, etc all challenged the notion of what art is at the time. The Collage, Frottage, Grattag art of found or printed ephemera created by German artist Max Ernst in the early part of the 20th century was similarly dismised but later accpeted as an art form. Generative Art or Algorithmic art, is art generated by an autonomous systems and is an established art form. Digital tools are part and parcel of the artistic process just as much as brush and paint and just as valid. A.I.-generated art might turn out to be the democratisation of art creation and an end of the “artist genius” archetype. Creative people have always enjoyed exploring new processes and techniques with which to express themselves in their art. A.I. is simply another new process or tool in that continuum of artistic exploration.
Strange times we live in. If AI generated art is the “democratisation” of art, then it is art generated without the “demos.” “Demos” is the root word meaning “people.”
Also, the quote “…AI is not a threat, it’s a symptom of a soulless society that has forgotten the value of art” speaks of the VALUE of art and not of its category. You make the point that the category “art” contains things like the urinal, etc. Surely this kind of art has a different VALUE than the great pieces of western civilization. I will not dispute your assertions about category.
The telos / purpose of art is surely bound up in its message and value. I think Mr. Greenfield’s reference to the human soul in his word “soulless” presupposes a message of inspirational beauty and hope – the things belonging to and strengthening the soul in virtue. This is obviously something the urinal can never do.
What is considered art or is not art has changed any number of times. Warhol’s factory produced screen prints were consider less than art at one time as were his Brillo Boxes and prints of Soup cans. When the impressionists first exhibited it was to howls of derision from the “art world” as was the great English painter Turner when he first exhibited at the Royal Academy.
As for the VALUE of an artist like Duchamp this is what the MetArt has to say about his contribution to art:
“Subverting traditional or accepted modes of artistic production with irony and satire is a hallmark of Duchamp’s legendary career. His most striking, iconoclastic gesture, the readymade, is arguably the century’s most influential development on artists’ creative process.”
A.I. generative art is akin to “ subverting traditional or accepted modes of artistic production” much like the Dadaist movement of the early 20th century.
I agree with all you say above. I was captured by the idea of “democratization” of art being advanced by AI. Art produced by what is not of the “demos / human to make “art.”
Even the root of “art” is cognate with the idea of skill and creation.
As an example, I love medieval tapestries. These are machine-made reproductions and are beautifully reproduced at an affordable price. They are reproductions of beautiful, hand-made works. What I think AI is doing now is imitating creativity by algorithmic analysis of data – something others can speak to better than I. This next step – the imitation of creativity to create something “new” is different from imitating the original work of a great master. It seems to my mind to be exactly what Greenfield describes as “soulless.” Perhaps I will change my mind as the AI continues to produce its conglomerations of different kinds of art? I do not know.
If you are interested in another aspect of my thought and experience with another art form, I cannot abide music with the sound fake hand clapping or voices distorted through a synthesizer. When I hear it, I become agitated. I paid attention to my feeling and discovered that I have a deep need for what is human in art. The fake clapping and synthesized voices assault that need.
Thank you for your kind reply. I see you got a down vote – I did not do that.
I do not dispute the category of art, and I do not dispute its “value.”
But value can be good or bad. Value can also be present or absent. Your quote from the MetArt about Duchamp’s “contribution” (a close approximation of “value”) is that he was an iconoclast – a destroyer. And this iconoclasm was an “influential development on…creative process.”
So, logically, does this not mean that the destruction of creative process has value? I suppose it can. Some creative processes NEED destroying. But what Duchamp set out to destroy was “traditional or accepted modes of…production.” These would include the great works of Michelangelo, Bernini, and all the sublime, unmatched beauty of classical realism.
I cannot imagine any good motivation that seeks to destroy what is beautiful. Of course, what one person VALUES depends upon the taste of that person. What one sees as “beautiful” varies, also. But seeking to destroy or condemn another’s processes or creation feels ugly to me. It smacks of liberal parasitism and envy. If I am right, then there is no value in that.
Let’s say that the goal of AI is to stop humans from thinking for themselves, to wean their minds away from themselves. Then AI is the process of slowly sucking out original individual inspired thought and replacing that void with calculated, uncreative (uncreative meaning the source is not divinely inspired) content, thereby stripping individuals of unique identity and purpose, disavowing God‘s imput. The ultimate woke brain transplant.
The thing is, understanding what AI is – is so nebulous, that even the concept’s definition tells you nothing.
Artificial – What does that mean? How can something not be human made, when humans design it and apply it for humans to use? You don’t chew up human thought and spit out something else.
So is it being designed and used for good or for bad?
I figure that the military has been at work with AI long before its appearance and development in the private sector.
Right now AI sounds like hunters and gatherers running amok.
But whatever it is, an evil government will see an opportunity to use whatever it is for its evil agenda.
Chat GPT : the initials stand for generative pre-trained transformers.
I think we can come up with a few initials of our own…..
Yiddish expression:
Man plans, God laughs
AI expression:
What god?! Man plans and Kamala laughs.
Thank you for this very thought-provoking post. “The ultimate woke brain transplant” describes what I think is happening. I am not woke. I hate that word, “woke” because it is another weasel word meaning totally numbed out and unthinking.
But “woke” accurately describes the ancient gnosticism of which it is a new variety. The gnostics had secret knowledge and were, alone, aware of all that was true and real because of it. They were awakened to truth while everyone else slumbered in dark ignorance – or so they thought.
God gives His Spirit to those He creates in His image. We cannot imbue a machine with His Spirit.
An excellent analysis. One of the best I have read. See also John Lennox, 2084. Another brilliant take on AI