Some thoughts on AI “art”

A couple years ago, when ChatGPT first came out, most of the news about it I saw was just that it was terrible.  I think it took a few months for the main story I saw about it being that it was stealing work.  Anyway, I was hearing about how AI “stories” were terrible, and I had the idea of a writer who took an AI “story” as a first draft and edited it into a real story.  (Like all your story ideas are groundbreaking.)  But a few seconds after I had the idea, I wondered if life should imitate art and I should edit whatever the AI gave me.  So I found a site that let you get a sample of AI writing, and made a prompt along the lines of “Make a short story with aliens.” It started spitting out words, but after a paragraph or so I stopped it because it was basically gibberish.  Polishing this turd into something halfway decent would take longer than just writing a halfway decent story.  I know some will say I needed a better prompt along the lines of, “Make a short story about aliens in the style of Hemingway,” or whatever, but in the time it would take me to learn how best to use AI, I could just learn better time management skills so I could spend more time writing.  That is the only time I’ve ever tried to use AI for anything, and I never got around to writing that story.

Now you probably expect the standard screed against any and all things AI.  But I know that “AI” seems to just be a term applied to any fancy computer program.  Some of these may have merit, especially in regards to number crunching and pattern recognition.  I imagine someone having an “AI” look at tens of thousands of medical records and finding possible connections.  Like, maybe it would find evidence that having a banana a day cuts your chance of dying from a heart attack by 2%, but increases your chance of getting colon cancer by 1%.  This evidence, like all evidence, would need to be studied further in tests to see if there is an actual link or if it is all coincidence.  That type of AI I don’t mind.  As long as the medical records are used ethically and the results aren’t blindly taken as fact. 

The AI I do mind is what is used for “art,” and especially for writing.  There is a crafting-side to writing, which on my best days I’d still rank myself as below average, and there’s a business-side to writing, which I’ve largely failed.  My … disgust I guess at AI “art” is that they’ve cranked the business-side dial to 11 while also cranking the crafting-side dial to 0, or even -11.  In the time it takes me to craft a story that will make $X, an AI can “write” a billion stories that are all worthless, but each one only needs to make a penny or two for them to add up to $100X.  And in a world run by “More money is more gooder,” people, there will just be more and more well-crafted stories buried in a sea of AI slop. 

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I had an idea for this post, but it didn’t go in that direction.  So there may be future installments where I give my thoughts on other aspects of AI.  I’m sure you’re really looking forward to that.