Technology

We Stopped Caring. We Can Again.

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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)

Am I going to talk about AI? Sort of, yes! But mostly I’m going to talk about caring and people, inspired by Dan Sinker’s blog post “The Who Cares Era” – just go read it.

We live in an era that doesn’t seem like people care. Market-tested perfectly created media is there, completely designed to interest us no matter what its content is. Extended cinematic universes calculated carefully enough enthusiasm has become drudgery. Politics are publicity stunts, religion is a lifestyle brand, nothing is what it is.

Finally we’ve got AI, and you can use AI to generate content for someone else – who might then use AI go get a summary of what you didn’t create.

So many people don’t seem to care. We’ve got all sorts of content, writing, media, but so much of it isn’t made by people who care or even consumed by those who care. AI is a pain in my backside, but its the result of where we were slowly heading.

(And as I note, I don’t consider AI new or always bad, but by now you know that, so let me keep ranting).

What I think we’re missing is that good art, or writing, or media is by someone and for someone. There’s an intimately involved creator who gives a damn and someone who wants that media. Real, meaningful creativity and communication is about people on both ends.

Every now and then people rediscover Ed Wood, a man with many flaws, erratic talents, and an unstoppable desire to make things. There is a reason he had and has fans, because he was doing something – if not well – and that connects with people. I say this as a person who has watched his films without the Rifftrax treatment.

I get zines and the sheer personal feel of them is amazing. I love getting to know people, and the personal nature of zines lets me connect with people who want connection. I have a shelf that includes strange collage art, speculations on podcasts, street photography, and more. There’s people on both ends.

On a very personal level, I had a friend who got inspired to change jobs in part due to my book Fan To Pro. That’s what I’m talking about: a person really wants to say something, another wants to listen, and in some cases a dialogue ensures.

AI in the way it’s often deployed messes it up, creating both generated content without a person and summing up data so people don’t have to connect. But that’s been an issue of mass media for awhile, with calculated marketing, mass efforts, calculated creations, and plenty of imitators. We’ve industrialized our arts too much, and AI just slots in there really well.

If you feel that dissatisfaction, that there is something missing in culture and arts and just talking to people, you get it. We’ve industrialized, and misuse of AI takes it farther.

It’s time to care, to care enough to create – and care enough to pay attention.

Steven Savage

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