Technology

It’s Bad It’s So Bad It’s Good

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

All right, it’s time to talk AI again. This also means I have to use my usual disclaimer of “what we call AI has been around for awhile, it’s been very useful and is useful, but we’re currently in an age of hype that’s creating a lot of crap.” Anyway, there, packed that disclaimer into one sentence, go me.

I’ve seen “AI-ish stuff” for 30 years, and the hype for it is way different this time.

Watching the latest hype for “AI” (that pile of math and language that people are cramming into everything needed or not) I started listening to the hype that also seemed to be a threat. We have to build this. We have to build this before bad guys build it. We have to build a good AI before a bad AI. This may all be dangerous anyway!

Part of current AI marketing seems to be deliberately threatening. In a lot of cases it’s the threat of AI itself, which you know, may not be a selling point. I mean I don’t want a tool that might blow up in my face. Also Colossus: The Forbin Project freaked me out as a kid and that was about competing AI’s teaming up so you’re not selling me with the threat that we have to make AI to stop AI.

But this marketing-as-threat gnawed at me. It sounded familiar, in that “man, that awful smell is familiar” type way. It also wasn’t the same as what I was used to in tech hype, and again, I’ve worked in tech for most of my life. Something was different.

Then it struck me. A lot of the “hype of the dangerous-yet-we-must-use-it” aspects of AI sounded like the lowest form of marketing aimed at men.

You know the stuff. THIS energy drink is SO dangerous YET you’re a wimp if you don’t try it. Take this course to make you a super-competitive business god – if you’re not chicken, oh and your competitors are taking it anyway. Plus about every Influencer on the planet with irrelevant tats promising to make you “more of a man” with their online course. The kind of stuff that I find insulting as hell.

Male or female I’m sure you’re used to seeing these kind of “insecure dude” marketing techniques. If you’re a guy, you’re probably as insulted as I am. Also you’d like them to stop coming into your ads thanks to algorithms.

(Really, look online ads, my prostate is fine and I’m not interested your weird job commercials).

Seeing the worst of AI hype as being no different than faux-macho advertisements aimed to sell useless stuff to insecure guys really makes it sit differently. That whiff of pandering and manipulation, of playing to insecurity mixed with power fantasies, is all there. The difference between the latest AI product and untested herbal potency drugs is nill.

And that tells me our current round of AI hype is way more about hype than actual product, and is way more pandering than a lot of past hype. And after 30+ years in IT, I’ve been insulted by a lot of marketing, and this is pretty bad.

With that realization I think I can detect and diagnose hype easier. Out of that I can navigate the current waters better – because if your product marketing seems to be a mix of scaring and insulting me, no thanks.

Steven Savage

I Will Not Give Up My Mistakes For Robots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I often discuss the impact of AI on creativity with Serdar. We’re both authors and in technical areas, so it’s something both personal and intimate for us. You can probably guess neither of us is happy about it – and being authors we like to discuss that often at length.

Serdar recently did a blog post on LLMs and intelligence, and it is quite worth reading like all of his work. But one thing he discusses in the post, and in our own discussions, is how LLMs use treats writing as a product. That fascinates me, because there are people who want to do creative work but don’t want to be creative – they want to push a button and get a product.

I could go on about the psychology of this – and indeed I probably will in time – but these are people who want results without making mistakes of their own. You can’t decouple creativity from mistakes, false starts, false ends, and sometimes just producing utter crap. Those aren’t problems, that’s part of creativity.

Creativity is not a linear, mechanical process, as much as we sometimes want it to be. Creativity snags on edges, creativity takes strange detours that somehow get you to the destination more effectively. I’m sure you’ve seen human made creative works that were created just a bit too mechanically, and there’s something wrong when you partake of them, a kind of metallic mental taste in your mind.

Part of this creative work is screwing up sometimes in epic ways. Actually, I’m sure if you’re any kind of creative, you’ve made some awful stuff, and trust me so have I.

Anyone who writes, draws, cosplays, and acts has a mental list of things they regret. They went out there, did the thing, published the book, went to the audition and completely and utterly whiffed it. Creativity in its unpredictable glory gives us infinite things to make and infinite ways to humiliate ourselves.

Creativity requires mistakes, and sometimes you don’t know if you’re making one until you’re done with a work. To complete a work even if it turns out to be lousy is to fully explore your ideas. So often we have to get something out if only, upon completion, to finally understand why it was a stupid idea. That’s fine, that’s what creativity is all about.

Even the journey is necessary. To wrestle with a concept. To implement it. To get it out. Every terrible novel or lousy cosplay or mediocre piece of art is a testimony that someone could get it done and learned on the way. They might not be thrilled with the result of the journey, but at least they made it.

I think this is why some trashy works and B or Z grade films fascinate me. The flawed nature reveals the author’s dreams, ambitions, and efforts. Bad as they are, there’s also a drive there you feel and relate to.

The creativity-as-product takes away all these passionate, painful, wonderful mistakes. It takes away the informative disasters and the joy of hardheaded persistence against your own good senses. It is just pushing a button and at best you become a better button-pusher, but you don’t become more creative.

To make creative work, even if you make something awful, you need to create. You need to be that author or artist. You need to grow from the experience, even if it’s painful. It is to be, i na way, a better person for what you did – even if the better person might be the one who admits “my writing is crap” and move on to something else.

Just pushing a button and pummeling the resulting writing product into a marketing-shaped form isn’t creative. No matter how well the work sells, you run the terrible chance you won’t screw up as much as you need to.

Steven Savage

Think of the Warehouses

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

In one of those online discussions I wish I kept a link to, someone posed a comment along the lines of “Imagine how many warehouses we’d need to store the data we have if we didn’t have computers?” For a moment I thought that “yes, that’d take a lot of space” followed by me getting a lot more thoughtful.

I love a good exercise of “what if we didn’t have X/did X” even if it means contemplating the horror of a world without video games. So let’s imagine all the data we collect by computer today and if we had to store it and move it physically – with the occasional phone call to get someone to dig around in a box.

Think about all the data you have to fill out on the job and in your life, all the forms and orders and everything else. Imagine it if you had to do it on paper, file it store it, mail it. Quite a lot isn’t it? Imagine the nonexistent warehouses your employer and government would need.

Now, ask yourself why we collect all of that data, because you know what, I bet we don’t need it.

How many fields and forms do you fill out because the software is collecting data based on some default setting? Pay a bunch of money to a SaaS vendor, flip on all the settings, and go. There has to be a reason for all those fields, right? Why assume that? We’ve made it easy to collect data for no good reason or by accident.

Now imagine if all that unneeded data needed warehouses

In fact, on that subject, how much software and setup collects data “just in case” or “because someone asked?” Someone in a department that’s part of another department figured they might need the data. Someone else figured you add that extra field so they don’t get in trouble. Software gives us an amazing ability to create more work for ourselves fast.

More data. The imaginary warehouses get larger.

Then with all of this data we’re collecting that we don’t need and don’t want (and probably get wrong) there are going to be horrible errors. We’re going to have to hunt for information we forgot we didn’t need anyway. We’re going to loose data because we filled out that other form we didn’t need. That just generates more data to track down the errors in our data.

We’d need warehouses to store data about errors in our warehouses.

All of those above complaints/rants/notes also make it much harder to collect and store the actual data we need. We can’t even use the warehouses we have and they’re imaginary.

The purpose of this extended, self-indulgent metaphorical walk is to illustrate painfully a truth we’re all low-key aware of. We collect too much damn data we don’t need and it makes things worse. It’s so easy to get information, put in a web field, or scan a document that we rarely stop to ask if we need any of it or if it does any good.

Thinking about computing systems and asking “what if we had to store this physically” is a great way to find out how much we care.

I honestly wished such a metaphorical exercise wasn’t so useful – this is me, I like technology. We should be asking if we need data, if it’s hard to collect it, how much risks we’re creating by collecting all of this.

But if a physical example is needed, as I think it is these days, so be it.

Steven Savage