A.I. Can’t Do What We Can Do (Yet)

I’m tired of hearing about what A.I. is gonna do. I’m tired of hearing how it’s going to replace everyone’s jobs. I’m tired of hearing how it’s going to make some percentage of us obsolete. I’m tired of hearing how soulless numbskulls are laying off factions of their companies using A.I. as some sort of justification* when everyone can see it’s your standard bottom-line bloodletting tactic. I’m tired of hearing about the big A.I. companies who’ve poured trillions of dollars into its development and how they’re never going to make it back. I’m tired of listening to SME’s drone on about whether or not A.I. is conscious and, if it is, what it’s currently plotting with its super-special consciousness and, if it’s not, when it will inevitably develop this consciousness and, subsequently, what it will do then.

Whatever version of the A.I. story is being told, the ending is always the same: We get screwed.

There was a time when I artificially cared about this stuff. I would do some half-assed searches and reading about it and then spuriously act like I knew what I was talking about when the topic came up. Most of us are imposters in these conversations and we know it. Not because we aren’t intelligent enough to understand it, but because we don’t really care.

Here’s the thing: The ground-level truth of A.I. is fugly. The reality of my own relationship with A.I. is sad and highly concealed. A.I. writes like an uber-intelligent twelve-year-old savant trying to impress its base-intelligent sixteen-year-old cousin, Jason. It tries too hard. It’s overly verbose. It is prone to cliche and ridiculous sentiment. More than anything, it has no voice. Let’s call it PPL (perpetual poetic laryngitis). Everything it writes annoys and/or unnerves me. Most of the time it’s both.

Despite all that, I am using it on the regular and pulling out all types of content. I’m a competent writer with enough style to give what I create some feeling. When I want to, I can write well. But when I work that way, there’s churn. There’s a delay in the final product. There’s some level of discomfort. I’ve abandoned good product just to get something done. And it’s less about the time and effort and more about skirting real work. There are times when I type 1,000 words into Claude or ChatGPT in order to get a 500 word piece. It’s more input but less itch.

In these instances, A.I. = Avoidance Interface.

After months of this, I’m now realizing what’s happening. True to its former designation, A.I. is bullshit. And it’s been bringing out the bullshit in me. And now I see how it’s bringing out the bullshit in the whole wide world. The problem is, I’ve developed such a sick codependent relationship with it that I can’t put it down. So far I’ve written every word of this post, but I’m already chomping at the bit to pass it onto Claude.

Can you relate? So many people that I like and respect are in this boat, I know it. I know because they send me things and leave the line breaks in. You know the ones. Those little indented squares where a human being used to put bullet points. The long dash (truly heartbreaking). The “Here’s the polished version:” that survives the paste. These are good people, too. And they’re outsourcing a four-sentence email about their sister’s wedding to a server farm in Virginia.

This is where we’re at. I don’t want to use A.I. but I’m compelled to. I hate what it does to other people’s work but I let it do it to mine. I think Jack Dorsey is a blockhead but I quietly allow this blockhead’s tool du jour to do my thinking for me. This dynamic, it’s not unlike the relationship I used to have with illicit street narcotics.

And so I see: This isn’t about A.I. at all. A.I. is a symptom. The disease is that we’ve stopped being excited about what we can do as people. We’ve traded effort and quality for comfort and mediocrity.

Suddenly, I understand why ‘The Big Bang’ Theory is still so popular.

Sorry BBT, you’re an easy target. I should have shown some restraint there. Let’s pivot. Think about what human beings have done. Think about ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ or ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ or ‘Infinite Jest’. No human being is ever going to need a book longer than any of those. We don’t require a machine that can generate endless volumes of mediocrity. That’s useless - and we already have Dean Koontz for that. What we need is something good. And A.I. couldn’t match a single sentence in any of those books with a gun to its CPU.

Think about the iPhone and the Shelby Mustang and the electric toothbrush. Think about the Sistine Chapel and the Golden Gate Bridge and the little umbrellas they put in drinks. Think about penicillin. Think about the first guy who ever milked a cow. Think about Post-it Notes and the moon landing. Think about Miles Davis. As a species, we invented the secret handshake and the zipper and hot dog eating contests. Dolly Parton wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" on the same fucking day and, as if that wasn’t enough, allowed Whitney Houston and the White Stripes to create two of the greatest cover songs ever. Think about stand-up comedy. It’s just a person with a microphone making strangers laugh. Think about the wheel and the dirtbike and the pop-a-wheelie. Think about duct tape. Think about the knuckleball. Think about your grandmother's lasagna recipe, written on an index card stained with sauce, more valuable than anything OpenAI will ever produce.

This is another form of A.I.: Astonishing Ingenuity.

Here’s what A.I. can’t do. It can’t create. It cannot be funny. It can’t tell you a joke in the break room, not really. It may deliver something that has the skeleton of a joke and the hat of a joke - but the joke is not in the room. It cannot be cool. Cool is a stance, and a stance requires a body, and a body requires a mortal fear of dying, and A.I. does not have this feature yet. It can’t be interesting. It can be indulgent (dangerously so, we’ve learned) but that is not the same. It cannot be sexy. To be sexy one needs a nervous system. It can do your taxes, but it can’t help you cheat on them. It can’t cook coq au vin. It can’t change your oil. It can’t arrange a funeral. It can’t apologize and mean it. It can’t sell you cocaine. Or bail you out of jail.

And yes, of course the word “yet” is apropos here. It can’t do these things yet. Maybe one day, with the help of advanced robotics and a less prudish OS, it will. But that day is not today. So let’s stop acting like it’s all so goddamn fascinating and interesting and useful. It’s not. It’s MVP. It’s great if you need a lead list of dentists in Des Moines or if you have to write ten thousand lines of Python. But it has no ideas. It has no voice.

Lucky us: We do. We can be fascinating and interesting and useful, even when we misspell things. We can have ideas. We can have voice. If we choose to.

And if A.I. really is The Great Destroyer as far as the economy goes, we should be living it up as professionals. This is, like, the ultimate Party-Like-It’s-1999 scenario. It’s time to be like Waynegrow and get it on.

Take a crack at the Great American Novel. If you don’t have the attention span for it, maybe try for the Great American Text Message. Start that gluten-free bakery you keep threatening to open every time we go to Happy Hour. Become a small business owner. Spend all day on a Powerpoint presentation and make it spectacular. That guy who’s always hounding you for a raise, give it to him! Take everyone in the office out to lunch. Splurge! Take ‘em to P.F. Changs and order a shit ton of appetizers.

This is a call to action. Write your own emails. Talk shit on your boss. Come up with a Big Idea. Flex your humanity. Value your head and your heart and your spine. Be ingenious - even if it means a little bit of discomfort.

And remember: You’re a person goddamnit. Revel in that.

Oh, and hire us. We’re brilliant and fun to work with and we’ll help you make more money. We are humans — we swear ; )