What if...AInxiety

Art, humanity, and the ghostwriter in the machine

Wow, look up there! It’s a recording of me reading this piece, mostly to show my partner that he is incorrect in his insistence that I should start a podcast. I realize an audio version of a newsletter is not a podcast, but close enough to prove that no one wants to hear my literal voice. Also please note that I did not edit it or play it back, and I also forgot to do that thing where you say “quote” before reading a quote. You’ll have to use your imagination and remember that I am neither Virgil Abloh nor someone who re-reads Moby-Dick.

Hello!

Greetings from hell where the AI writing bots are getting smarter! I refuse to do the whole bit where I have ChatGPT write a five-paragraph essay about itself. If that’s something you need or want, you can absolutely find it over and over again by googling “AI writing.”

I’m more interested in attempting to write myself out of a thick, brothy, anxiety swirl, mostly about my own imminent obsolescence. It might be long, but I promise the following is 100% robot-writing free. Like forreal. No gotchas. 

Because at least for now, AI writing is an absolute snooze. Referring to the flurry of “let’s test ChatGPT” tweets, Kate Lindsay writes in Embedded, “I ain’t reading all that for the same reason I don’t read Lorem ipsum placeholder text: It’s not real, and for the most part, it does not say anything interesting.” 

I feel the same way — I can’t make it past the first sentence or two before my brain turns to mashed potatoes, activated in that numb way I can only compare to “reviewing” the urgent and important forms my accountant sends me once a year. It’s like those sponsored prank videos that show up in Facebook Marketplace or that “name one thing in this photo” meme. If nothing else, writing from ChatGPT reminds me of the stark differences between looking at something for raw information, and reading in hopes of feeling something, anything, but most likely alive.

Just as with apps like Lensa (quick aside that you can just ask an artist to show you how hot you’d be as a video game character instead of supporting a thievery-fueled business model and contributing to face-recognition tech that makes surveillance capitalism better at being awful!), corniness alone doesn’t negate real implications. As you would expect, they are not great. It’s easy to anxiety-leap to envisioning a future where no one learns to write, much in the same way no one learns cursive now. 

Daniel Herman, an English teacher, writes in The Atlantic about how ChatGPT will fundamentally change teaching. He explains how already, “the majority of students do not see writing as a worthwhile skill to cultivate—just like I, sitting with my coffee and book, rereading Moby-Dick, do not consider it worthwhile to learn, say, video editing.” Herman’s central question on writing as a whole isn’t “how will we get around this?” but rather “is this still worth doing?” Bleak! 

It’s not like writing is exactly valued as is, though. I have a big shocker for everyone who isn’t a writer: writing (the fun kind!) pays absolute dog shit. Even a prestigious byline can cover like, maybe two months’ worth of Comcast bills. If this is news to you, I suggest tooling around whopayswriters.com and standing with those attempting to unionize their newsrooms. Also, consider paying for the writing you would be devastated to lose. (This is where I should probably pitch you on a paid subscription option, but I don’t have my shit nor my self-confidence together enough to make that happen today.)

All that being said, I’ve paid my bills for the last decade by working at various creative agencies, ghostwriting for brands. Are the robots coming for this job? I don’t know (yet). But I am willing to bet that as we speak, there are marketing teams plotting to stretch their shrinking budgets by using AI to churn out brand copy. Since I’m not a wannabe LinkedIn influencer, I will not be going long here about why “asking something not human to make word salad sound more human” is a stupid idea. I don’t have an MBA, but that is some cuckoo bananas foolishness.

Regardless, it might happen. The soul-crushing darkness goes beyond “how will I survive in this garbage world when my most marketable skill is deemed worthless?” Call it the scrappiness that comes with spending years in every flavor of service industry job, the safety net of community, privilege, or just raw delusion, but my brain’s answer to “need money now?!” is “we’ll figure it out.” 

AI may come for my job, but my survival requires protecting my sense of meaning. Writing is how I process reality, how I relate to others, how I stay sane and sober. It makes sense then that instead of imagining myself meeting a new market, grasping for relevance by being a good little worker, and conforming to a new flavor of capitalistic worth, I imagine myself instead going full freak mode. Maybe I can’t out-write AI, but I can absolutely out-weird it.

In 2017, Virgil Abloh gave this talk at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. It’s full of tangents and a lengthy nonlinear show-and-tell session, but that’s kind of the point. Abloh notes that “if I’m trying to be a perfectionist, I’m not even thinking anymore.” He goes on to explain how certain pristine products feel like they “came out of a microwave because they were so perfectly put together.” Perfectionism doesn’t advance anything — it’s imperfection, not raw talent or skill, that defines art as art. And maybe more importantly (especially for the rest of us), as human.

Getting back to the bots, I think humanity remains the last nubbin of hope. Not necessarily in a “humanity wins every time” sense. History is not fair, and humanity is not a monolith. I’m not betting on us. But in terms of raw coping, I’m not sure we’ll ever lose the human need to convene with other humans — in person and in art.

As the dusty-ass quote goes, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The “we” here is doing the heavy lifting. It’s us, people, doing the storytelling. The ghost in the machine may be getting smarter by the second, but all the intelligence in the universe won’t make it human.

This newsletter brought to you by:

• A four-hour-long deep dive into the Virgil Abloh archives in search of this one quote where he suggests that the iPhone is so perfectly designed it feels inhuman (pejorative). I may have been a victim of the Mandela Effect on this one? If you know what I’m talking about, please send the link so I can finally rest.

• Asking myself “am I an artist?” with the growing hunch that to prove non-obsolescence, the answer needs to become “yes.” 

• Verve nitro cold brew and a box of Raisinettes