Ceayo 👉 AI: Y'all be crazy

I wanted to talk about AI a little bit. I just read an article by the Guardian about this shit again and I felt the need to rant about it a little.

AI Girlfriends

Yes, this is a thing. No, Sam Altman is not making the world a better place. What a world to live in, that women are no longer perfect enough to be loved and should be replaced by computer.

The thing about love, is it is all about embracing eachother as a whole, that is, including your imperfections. But, if your AI Girlfriend is not just right, what do you do? You call customer support, obviously! And that is what you become, a customer. Isn't it sick, for big tech, not just leeching upon, but replacing our most intimate, sacrosanct relationships. All for the good shareholders, of course. Who needs god when hedge funds exist?

The other side

On the other hand, it wouldn't be completely fair to just say "Oh well back in my day..." and call it a day. People, of course, seek refuge in AI relationships for a reason. Bill Maher, out of all people, actually talks about this. His argument comes down to:

  1. I am an old geezer
  2. The technology exists
  3. The technology isn't going away
  4. People don't find what they need in conventional relationships.
  5. People do find what they need in computer.
  6. QED.

Maybe, one day, my being against will be as unthinkable as it would be, today, to be against gay marriage. Maybe, these arguments would look as stupid as the arguments used centuries ago to justify the prosecution of witchcraft. After all, love is a deeply personal thing, which only means what one wants it to mean. Love, in its infinite diversity, still forms a uniform matter. Does it really differ so greatly, loving a human and loving computer?

My final critique

I have identified three problems still to remain in this concept:

  1. There is no physical connection
  2. There is an overload regarding perfection
  3. There is money extracted, merited to the fulfillment of one's personal desires.

No physical connection

Simply put, a relationship with computer is like a long distance relationship. Never will one be able to physically grasp oneother. That being said, this is not an exclusivity to computer, as human-to-human relationships too can be either long distance by necessity or platonic by choice.

Perhaps in the future one will be able to join computer in contact and innovation shall resolve this issue, by giving the machine a body. Or perchance not the machine but the human partner shall be imposed the task of change and Virtual Reality technology will become viable for a majority of consumers. People are already having "e-sex" in platforms like VRChat. The future is brighter than ever!

Overload regarding perfection

Like pornography, the machine is made specifically tasked with catering to its user, to produce an unprecedented level of perfection. This, analogous to pornography, numbs one to the current standards, thus resulting in a point of no return. Once one is hooked on perfection, how can there be any expectation of return to how things were? In fact, this is not exclusively analogous to pornography, the analogy holds too when applied to merchandise such as cocaine. You give them one for free, and forever they shall return.

Maybe this too is a temporary challenge, to be overcome by more innovation, to give the machine a soul, to make the machine less perfect. While that might be a great solution, I do not truly believe it to happen. Why should it, why should a company invest in making their product less addicting? If only acting from the interest of the company, the obvious course of action would be to spend that same capital, those same researchers, to work on making the product more addicting.

Thus, this problem is to be solved if and only if the system is controlled exclusively by a community of its users, and these people work together to make the system good. The durable and long-term solution is, obviously, making the system open-source.

Capital from emotion

There is something grotesque about monetizing loneliness. Computer doesn't just offer connection, it rents connection. Your intimacy becomes a subscription service. Instead of paying for a product, you are paying not to lose access to a product. That is a process called extortion.

Compare this, to prostitution. That, at least is honest. An exchange of quantitative merchandise. Time and money are exchanged for body and time. Clear terms, no illusions. But an AI girlfriend? This exchange is more like drugs. You get something nice, and then you are billed monthly to keep that something nice. If you don't pay, your girlfriend abandons you! There is no profit made from labour here, not even frome desire. No, the profit is made from fear! The fear not to lose her. The fear to be alone. The fear to have to talk to people.

Once you are hooked, why would you leave? The business model is great, for those profiting at least. You won't leave. You will stay. You will pay. For ever.

The solution? Idem to that of my previous problem. If there is no business model. If there is nobody who wants you to stay hooked but your own loneliness.

This would also require a shift on the providing side of AI. Base models are mostly provided by big, public, evil companies like OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic. Their goal is to make money. (They won't, just wait until the bubble collapses, but that is another problem entirely!) I believe the models themselves need to be open source. Otherwise, money is still being extracted.

AI Art

Ooh boy... Some things ruined:

If I say a number don't take me literally!! I have no sources!! I am just making things up!! The numbers are to make a point!!

Categorical problems

I experience the following categorical problems with AI image generation:

  1. Cheap content farming
  2. No truth
  3. Real artists get fucked

Cheap content farming

If (1) having people consume "your" "social" media "content" can "earn" you money and (2) you can produce that "content" for an infinitesimal price in infinite quantity, and can dump those on the internet, you will "earn" a truckload of money.

The effects of this situation are that all consumative media is now jampacked with low-effort low-quality ai-generated content, and that real content does not get through anymore. This is a new kind of enshittification.

The difference with "old-school" enshittification is, however, not to be taken lightly. Where old platforms exploited their users, but just enough to keep them coming back, to post and consume, the new AI-powered method is to have users only consume. The real creation, the minting of original content, that'll be unnecessary, now that a platform can create its own content, at scale.

No truth

Photographs no longer hold any value. If you take a photo, that no longer necessarily indicates something happened. This same argument can be applied to photoshop, which has been used for modifying photographs for a long time already, except that it requires manual effort to use photoshop. On the other hand, AI will happily modify any photo you want to contain anything you want. Worse, it will create a novel photograph. AI won't have its original show up on a reverse image search.

Real artists get fucked

If the machine makes "art" indistinguishable from human art, why should a human make art? Why should people spent time doing the things they love? What even becomes the point of art, if it can be mass-produced?

I can't define art, so I'll describe the functions I believe it fills. The way I see it, there are two perspectives from which to see art. The gaze of the artist, and the gaze of the consumer.

An artist makes art. Why? To tell a story. To share an emotion. For the love of it. Three reasons the machine, in its current state, is incapable of.

A consumer consumes art. Why? To immerse themselves into a story. To feel an emotion. For the love of it. As a study of the techniques used by the artist. None of these reasons can apply to works of the machine beyond but a superficial level.