You Are Being Tricked By a Genie Right Now
December 12th, 2024
I just remembered something funny. 10‒12 years ago, I had an idea for a short piece of writing about a computer program that could produce visual art. Someone invents it, the images it spits out are compelling, or at least popular. Everything changes, [insert speculative fiction here]. I never really thought it out much further than that. There was no element of the machine working off of “prompts” or using a database of imagery to replicate. Probably if I was more tuned in to the development of neural networks already underway at that time, I could have connected the dots better and seen something more relevant to what’s happening now. All I was imagining was a somewhat linear algorithm that would run through a huge flow chart of combinatorial factors and produce a resulting abstract image. I think I wanted these abstract images, in the fiction, to have some kind of sublime quality that captivated masses of people. The questions I remember feeling that I wanted to explore were along the lines of “Is this art?” “What happens now?” “What is the meaning of these images in relation to images produced by human intention?”
I didn’t have strong feelings about this back then, not like I do today. I had an inkling of a thought, maybe based on something I’d heard from tech news, and I felt curious about it enough to jot it down.
The big irony of the thing is that I never wrote it. It sat in my pile of ideas that I wasn’t really working on, a pile that existed in the way that it did because I wasn’t actively cultivating a relationship to any kind of real creative practice. Spookily, this is exactly the demographic that “AI” “art” is targeting. If an LLM had somehow come out back then, I could have tried knocking some things off my list by plugging them in and seeing if anything interesting came out. A strange sort of self-terminating curiosity.
Whenever I hear the idea, promulgated by proponents of “AI,” that these machine-produced images allow people who “can’t make art” themselves to suddenly freely make art, that it’s either transcendently liberating or simply another tool, I sort of fall to my mental knees in terminal desperation. I have this image in my head of begging them, literally begging someone, to please pick up a crayon and draw a shape on the wall and see how it looks. Stack some rocks on the ground and see how it changes your sense of where you are. Arrange words together, by any means you are capable, to form a thought, and find out what comes next from that. Go engage with an art or a song or whatever and wonder what is there to know or feel about the person who made it. Just do something and find out what happens. “You are being tricked by a genie right now,” I want to say to them. “You think it can change your reality, but it won’t, it isn’t, you are, and you already were.” “You already have what you need, and this false gift is robbing you of it.”
Maybe the reason that just telling someone this doesn’t work, the reason that if feels like it comes down to begging, is that there is no way to immediately and directly re-deliver curiosity to someone, no way to reintegrate them into the flow of lived understanding that there are no shortcuts in life, that life just is what it is, and we live it by living it, that we don’t get to have genies or robots to serve our every need so that we can get on with the “real” living, which is supposed to be some kind of neutral pleasurable enjoyment, forever out of reach, detached from the mundane stuff the robots take care of. It doesn’t matter how cleverly I try to put this; explaining it to someone doesn’t work, because it isn’t the lived thing itself. Explaining it is a shortcut, and there are no shortcuts.
Maybe when the thread of the curious thing is ruptured for them―developmentally, socially, historically―they have to literally re-learn, by themselves, from within, square one, childlike, the basic feeling of what it is to draw on the wall when you’re not supposed to. And if we want to help that along, maybe all we can do is keep stacking rocks, keep drawing on our own walls, stay curious, share a thing we liked. Maybe literally all we can do is the thing we were already doing. I dunno. I’m not above wondering if maybe the genie is tricking me in some way, one tier up from where I thought I was keeping an eye on it.