The other day I was having a quiet outdoor drink with a friend, chatting about work. I mentioned, with a dramatic sigh, that I had to transcribe an interview that I’d done recently—an onerous but necessary task. A woman sitting next to us took that as a cue to stop her passive eavesdropping and chime in. “I’m sorry, did you say ‘transcribe’?” she asked. “Can’t you just, y’know, feed that into ChatGPT?” I balked a little and replied, in a manner meant to be principled but which was more likely haughty, that I didn’t use things like that. I added that I thought such things were bad for the world. She shrugged, raised her eyebrows, and that was that. I spent the rest of the evening regretting my tone—if not the sentiment behind it.
This morning I was writing something for work and, for whatever reason, found myself taking particular umbrage with the syntax suggestions made by the Google Docs AI. The machine kept wanting a simpler and, I deemed, worse version of what I was trying to do—it sought to iron out idiosyncratic cadence, trying to guide me toward the most basic of prose. While my writing is certainly not unassailable poetry, I at least prefer to rely on my own sense of tense and rhythm.
Yet there was Google, insisting away. There was the lady at the bar, interrupting a conversation to suggest an easy fix—I’d merely have to feed yet more words into the hungry maw of a robot. And there was this depressing ad for the new iPad—skinny and therefore fabulous—that at least had the temerity to admit technology is coming to crush us.
The video shows a piano, a guitar, a sculpture bust, a small figure-drawing model, paint cans, and other tools of art smooshed by a pressing weight, reducing them to smithereens and replacing them all with Apple’s shiny new product.
To be fair, I don’t think Apple actually decided to go mask off about its and its cohort’s villainous intentions. This is more likely just a bad metaphor made by either internal or external ad people. (Creatives in their own right.) The ad is, of course, simply trying to say that all the multitudes of the creative world—music, visual art, video games, and beyond—can be contained within this one slim device, while taking influence from the popular genre of hydraulic press videos. (Which are satisfying in a slightly guilt-inducing way.) The aggression of the ad was probably (hopefully?) unintentional.
Yet the video invokes dread nonetheless. It’s become increasingly apparent that many of the ills facing the arts these days—in performance and design and all manner of other fields—are due to the annihilating philistinism of the tech world, its almost sociopathic disinterest in the making of things. Tech wants only to rush to commodification, to cut corners and costs so that its algorithms can serve more barely comestible slop to the masses from which it’s isolated by its ever-more-hoarded wealth.
So of course the people at Apple—who make the computer I’m typing on, and the phone I was just playing word games on instead of writing this—didn’t see anything wrong or otherwise alarming in an ad proudly displaying the destruction of the implements that real people use to create things. Forget all that: You can use your new iPad or whatever else Apple—which is heavily investing in AI—is currently, or soon, offering you.
The common rebuttal to the fears that I have—which are certainly shared by many others—is that people like us would have been dumb Luddites back in the days when other, now wholly accepted technologies were invented; that we’d have been thrashing against light bulbs for putting candlemakers out of business or whatever. I see their point, but still cling to the (perhaps naive and reactionary) idea that innovation does—or at least ought to—have a terminal limit. That limit might lie somewhere around the point when humanity is utterly subsumed—or, in this case, crushed—by its own inventions.
