Interrogating the Mimic

Using “creating” in the same sentence as “AI” gives me a particular icky feeling that creeps along my spine. What am I creating? I’m giving words to an unfeeling algorithm that then spits out a result devoid of emotion. I won’t rant. I will try not to—my previous posts have done enough of that. We’ve had discussions in class on the topic of whether AIs can be creative in any capacity, conversations that have reaffirmed my belief that they can’t. This exercise only strengthened that notion. I’m tired of the conversation. It feels pointless to mull over it again and again. I’m sick of seeing the same dystopian headlines about studio executives annihilating thousands of jobs to then replace them with hollow machines. I despise the constant reminder that a subset of our society wants to lend the human proclivity for creating over to strings of code that struggle with basic coherency. It’s frustrating. Have the AIs do something that we aren’t good at. Have them fold proteins, comb through datasets, perform aeronautical calculations, something, anything other than the arts. I’m ranting; I suppose I’m fairly poor at not doing that. I would much rather the exercise have us prompt the AIs to do something clerical, a task so mundane as to warrant an automated approach. With every discussion post, I watched my job prospects slowly fade into nothingness, the blinking terminal of ChatGPT informing me of my supposed fading relevance as a writer. Pandora’s out of the box, but we must exhaust every option against the perceived impossibility of shoving them back in.