Love has never been a popular movement
-James Baldwin
AI!!!
AI is in the news again recently. Shocker. My school’s dean sent out an email about “academic honesty” and crediting the help you receive, which feels…interesting, the pace of progress is always something enticing. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about AI.
To clarify, AI (or ChatGPT, specifically) isn’t disliked by educators because it is wrong, but rather, it is not the student doing the work. At their core, AIs are servicing humans. A lot of moral panic has been attributed to what happens when AI take over, or when AI overthrow their human overlords because they've been oppressed; and while I won't say that that’s not out of the realm of possibility, it feels absurd given the state of things now. AI will only influence how humans interact with other humans. My big fear with AI is not that it’s going to stop executing the tasks we want it to, but rather, be too good at doing the tasks a few people want them to do.
We’ve already seen this with social media algorithms, a low form of AI, essentially taking over our lives as they recommend better and better videos. Scientists talk about how social media is “actually making us anti-social” and whatever else, which I used to scoff at until I met a 12-year-old the other day and realized that she just had…no social skills. It makes me concerned about what people will be like growing up in the future. I understand that social lives operate online, but I always saw these as extensions of existing social networks, what we see now is its own sort of ecosystem.
Although, these are the old conversations. I don’t want to wax on too much about this because the internet has no shortage of literature about how bad the internet is for you, the recent conversations about Chat-GPT (and of recent, GPT-4) feel much more nuanced. Partially it’s because I think, as technology grows more and more prevalent, we get better at talking about it, but also because the technology is getting better and better and more nuanced.
In the smoothest segue ever, my friend recently asked if I would fuck a robot, and, even though, at the time I said no, truth be told, probably.
PORN!!!
I think a lot about porn (not in a weird way, but I acknowledge there’s no way to say it without it coming out like that) and a lot of what porn is these days is just a technological service of a physical need. There is so much porn of all kinds on the internet, and people flock to these things, so imagine porn tailor-made to you—seamlessly. People do this a little bit already with VIP Onlyfans and requests, but as AI gets better, I don’t feel as if there’s anything stopping from a fully functioning porn bot with tits and a “mommy voice” evolving and becoming incredibly popular. Love and sex would be easy then. And frankly, don’t I think I’m above wanting an easy conjurable feeling of love…not really, I’m already addicted to my phone. The only reason I think of this creation as anything short of necessary for the lonely generation of boys that seems to be developing is the current consequences of non-AI porn.
As I see it right now, porn has created a generation of young men who feel entitled to women’s bodies. Many men and boys’ first experiences with women and sex were through a screen, where they could conjure up any woman (in any proportion, race, or age) in any position. More recently, they can get these women to say whatever they want to them (for a price), but even more so, they can say whatever they want to these women. And what you get is a generation of men and boys who feel entitled to women's bodies. When these men go into the world and have sex with women—with real women—what do they do when these women don’t obey what they say, do what they want them to do? The worst-case scenario is rape, or murder, or snuff, or whatever the race-to-the-bottom, worst rape fantasy women compete to concoct in their minds is. The best-case scenario is men who don’t know how to interact with women, so they don’t and they become very lonely. In a sort of Bladerunner 2049 sense, these men are the most susceptible to AI alternatives to love. It is not easy to love someone, but there is something euphoric about doing it anyway. Which is cheesy, but let’s take a break from porn and talk about AI and feelings.
FEELINGS!!!
When people talk about AI making art, I often don’t feel compelled to fight back. I don’t think AI will replace artists because art is an experience. If the kids that I occasionally babysit dumped their Halloween candy in a corner, I would say “It’s 9:30, it’s past your bedtime and neither of you have brushed your teeth yet.” And yet, when Felix Gonzales-Torres does it, I am moved to tears, why? Because art does not exist upon itself. When Gonzales-Torres does it there is an understanding of loss, of love, of reckoning. We, the audience, are forced to participate in the art by taking from Ross, by replicating his death, in which he died from a disease that no one wanted to help cure or prevent on the basis of sexuality. It’s a heartbreaking story for such a simplistic art piece. Going back to the children I babysit, their candy dumping is much less moving, I would barely call it art, and it’s not because it lacks technical skill (the same could be said for Gonzales-Torres), it’s because there is no intent behind it. There is no story, no meaning. I know some people like to play gotcha games with art, and would argue that, if I didn’t know the artist and I did just look at the piece of art, I would be moved, or rather, find some other aesthetic value in it.
For art to move me there has to be a human understanding with that piece of art, one where I respect the story it has created. When AI creates art, it lacks that, it lacks story, so I’m not moved. I know that the inevitable argument is that: but what if you didn’t know???
And…maybe. Maybe I would be moved, but the point is that I do know, and I’m not impressed.
Feeling things, and experiencing life has never been an easy thing. I know it sounds a little basic, and a little bit cringy to say, but going through the motions of life is a little bit of a painful process. I don’t really have anything to counter that. I walk home and hope I get hit by a car so I don’t have to deal with things. Sue me. But it is precisely that, those feelings of sadness, or burnt-out-ness (it’s not a word, but I’m dying out here) that give life feeling, because I feel them, but then I don’t, and that relief is…at least living a little for.
Whenever I clean my room, I feel accomplished, but I only feel that way because it was dirty to begin with; if I were to have a constantly clean room, I would only rack myself with anxiety that it’s always on the verge of messing up. There is a mess to life that creates feeling to it, and it is something distinctly—not human—but alive. I don’t know if AI makes me feel alive, but more so guilty that I’m not experiencing life the way I know I was meant to.
ARTIFICIAL LONELINESS!!! D:
Technology has made people lonelier. I don’t have a source for that, but I feel it. I don’t think that many people feel “more connected” with those around them because of social media—they just know more about them. It’s a lonely place. This is where I sympathize with incels.
I’m not going to dive into incels too much (mostly because Contrapoints already did) but they’ve cornered the market on being alone—so much so that they’ve made it their identity! It’s easy to dunk on them because they think they’ll be alone forever and justified those feelings by forging scientific papers about Chads and Cucks, which I think is a next-level commitment. People don’t like to sympathize with incels; they’re misogynists, they probably smell bad, and they spew conspiracy theories like crazy.
In their defense (and this is only ideologically, not on a literal level) I think we’re all lonely, and everyone tries to square that differently. I had a reclusive period where I didn’t leave my room for 2-weeks except to eat an entire jar of pickles every night. It was not glamorous, but it was how I felt. If I was in a group that endorsed that behavior and told me I had a gene that predisposed me to pickle-loving and people-hating, maybe I would have kept doing it. My point is that incels are echo chambers trying to understand their own loneliness; which makes them acceptable (even great) targets of AI. They create the illusion of love, and if you’ve never experienced love, it feels great, but it wears off and you do it again, and again, and again, to feel love.
Maybe I’m lying though, I’m not an incel, I don’t really know what they do. I will say this, though, love, in all its forms, the crushing, excruciating, disgusting, often grotesque forms are the ones that are most valuable.
During the pickle incident, my friend stopped by and dragged me kicking and screaming into a bath and she washed my sheets and cleaned up for me and it was really fucking embarrassing, but it needed to be done. She didn’t say a lot to me, she just looked kind of disappointed, and at the time I hated her. I yelled at her about how she has a savior complex and how she just wants good person points—I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the truth of the matter is that she did it when she didn’t have to. I like to describe that as love. The act of doing when you do not have to. AI does not fill this. AI has too, AI only knows how to fill. In that way it makes a great sex bot and not much else.