While the crowd at sxsw2024 booing a sizzle reel of people either promising the beauty of the future “AI” will bring or claiming it to be “without alternative” is funny and went viral for all the right reasons, this event speaks to a deeper shift in perception.
As Brian Merchant writes:
“For the buzziest tech of the moment to get shouted down at *SXSW* speaks volumes about the scale and nature of the animosity generative AI has amassed. The tech is seen, here, as exploitative by tastemakers and *by technologists*.”
But I’d go further: It’s not just the public perception that OpenAI has been trying to plant in our collective understanding is falling apart due to the actions of that strange company, I think the actual narrative of “AI” is untangling.
Because where are all the promised gains in efficiency? Where is the better world? All we see is a wasteful technology that’s propped up by VC and Microsoft money that’s easily detected as a way to further centralize our digital infrastructures while laying our digital spaces to waste.
After having played with ChatGPT many people don’t really integrate it into their practices because these systems are just not that good and if you care about quality anything after “quick sketches in the beginning of the process” is unthinkable.
Some systems labeled “AI” today will stick around. Especially the non-generative stuff (for image processing, object detection, pattern recognition in data streams, heuristics to detect errors in work products, etc.) but a lot of the generative “AI” field is just spam creation. And it’s actually making some – especially creative things – harder to achieve.
Famous film critic Roger Ebert once said “The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before.” and the booing is people coming back to realizing this simple fact. You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work.
In this way “AI” is deeply dehumanizing: Making the spaces and opportunities for people to grow and be human smaller and smaller. Applying a straitjacket of past mediocrity to our minds and spirits.
And that is what is being booed: The salespeople of mediocrity who’ve made it their mission to speak lies from power. The lie that only tech can and will save us. The lie that a bit of statistics and colonial, mostly white, mostly western data is gonna create a brilliant future. The lie that we have no choice, no alternatives.
Luddism is back, baby.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.