I have a tattoo that reads "you get proud by practicing."
"You get proud by practicing" is a line from a poem by Laura Hershey. The poem is also called "You Get Proud by Practicing."
"You Get Proud by Practicing" reminds us that our humanity lies in the fact that we are the ones who do. The quality of the doing matters less than the act. Perhaps the quality matters not at all.
Sure, the quality of our doings might matter to some secondary goal, like winning an art prize or clearing a step or not poisoning our restaurant patrons. But to our humanity, all that matters is the doing. We get proud by practicing.
Generative AI steals our practice. By doing, it steals our humanity.
I've been opposed to generative AI since the first models started gaining traction. For a long time, I couldn't articulate why. None of the reasons I saw articulated by others in the press or in blogs or on talk shows really struck the heart of the matter.
On top of that, all of them were too easy to dismiss with the basic capitalist logic that runs our economy and, increasingly, our lives. According to this logic, jobs "should" vanish when some new technology makes them "obsolete." Once they do, those jobs never had any "value." We "should have seen this coming." Who Moved My Cheese? is a warning, not a motivational book.
None of the anti-AI arguments being forwarded seemed to address the pro-AI pushback I got for addressing my concerns, either.
"Environmental impacts? What are you, some kind of anticapitalist, pie-in-the-sky tree hugger?" Actually, yes. I'm also deeply pragmatic - enough so that I think destroying the only planet that produces the air, water, and food we need to survive might be a poor idea. But I'll never win that argument against growth-at-all-costs hypercapitalist logic, so let's move on.
"You're just worried a computer will take your job." Not really. I never believed writing for the commercial Web was a job that deserved to exist anyway. I only did it because other people believed that job deserved to exist. Which meant that, for many years, those people paid me very well.
Now all those years of work have been scraped and reproduced by large language models. That these models can replace such writing so easily only vindicates my belief that commercial Web "content" never deserved to exist.
So no, I'm not worried a computer will take my Web writing job. It's a bullshit job. The computer can have it.
"But AI levels the playing field! It lets people make things they can't make themselves!"
No.
Generative AI does not and cannot, ever, "let people make things they cannot make themselves."
Generative AI can only make one thing: An amalgamation of the data it has been trained on. That's it.
The AI's training data is not what is in the mind of the person entering the prompt. The person entering the prompt is thinking of the thing they're asking to see. The person entering the prompt has some conception in their mind of what a "description of a slightly scratched Samsung Galaxy S8 for sale" or a "home page for a cupcake bakery" or a "big titty moth girl" looks like.
The AI cannot access this conception. The only being who can access it is the person in whose mind it exists. And so the AI will never produce that person's conception.
You can tell an AI to generate all the big titty moth girls you want, but none of them will ever be your big titty moth girl.
Reasonable people can differ, of course, as to the artistic or social value of drawing big titty moth girls. I'm not really concerned about it. What I am concerned about is what we take from humanity when we short-circuit the process of big titty moth girl creation. When we short-circuit the impulse to create and replace it with endless iterations of crap, all scraped from the same pool of plagiarized training data.
I am concerned about what happens to our pride when we stop practicing.
One of my dance teachers used to insist that "movement is a human birthright" - before we're even born, we begin to move. We claim movement. We move every moment of the day: our eyelids blink, our lungs expand and contract, our hearts pump.
I believe that doing is a human birthright as well - one closely related but not identical to movement. Our doing occurs when our innate human movement meets our innate human curiosity.
Humans, as a species, love to do. We adore doing something, then seeing the world change as a result of the thing we did. It's why kids dig holes and divert streams on beaches. It's why we carve our initials into trees and park benches. It's why we build everything from cairns to skyscrapers. We love to do, and we love to change the world by what we did.
Typing a prompt into generative AI is not "doing." It's the opposite of doing. We pay for every AI prompt we type with a piece of our souls.
When I got my tattoo, I left room underneath it. I did so because I envisioned a time when I might feel ready to complete the thought with the final lines of the poem:
once you are proud,
keep practicing so you won’t forget.
You get proud
by practicing.