Generative Future

Hot damn does Generative AI suck.

Did you ever watch The Prisoner? Great show. It's got really strong anti-war and anti-technology themes. It's creator and star, the late and great Patrick McGoohan said when talking about it's themes that technological progress was destructive of our humanity and freedom. Incidentally Tolkien was quite technophobic as well. Sure it's fair that a lot of people spend more time on their phones now but I've never really understood Pat until generative AI started becoming a thing.

The hosting site I use to write this blog has an 'AI Generated Blog' function. That feels crazy to me. It actually suggested fully written posts based on topics it thought I would write. That just feels like it makes the whole thing both pointless and disingenuous. The idea that people want to automate creative pursuits just makes me honestly sad.

It just devalues human interaction as well. I was at a conference a few months back for my job and met people who said they stopped reading and writing their emails. They get a chatbot to read incoming emails and reply for them. Naturally I asked them what happens if everyone starts doing that? If their chatbots are just replying to other chatbots? They dismissed the notion as it was like we were talking about recycling or tax avoidance, 'it'll be fine if I'm cutting corners because everyone else will play a fair game'. I think I'd find it a real bummer if I found out that my friends were using AI to reply to my messages.

Quite recently it's been doing the rounds on the internet that someone manged to get AI to create an entire Studio Ghibli movie and I wonder how the people at Ghibli feel about that. Surely they find that insulting?

To prevent this post from getting too gloom and doom on a positive note I managed to get AI content banned from my work which is pretty awesome. It actually makes quite glad to hear that there is a growing pushback against the technology. I've seen some of the tabletop reddits and forums discuss using it to write their stories for them and was relived to see that the general consensus was to not touch it with a 10-foot quarterstaff. The players would just find it too disingenuous and impersonal to remove their DM's creativity. Ultimately that's nice and I hope it stays that way so yeah I won't be using the AI blog functions lol.