Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash
I’ve been waking up in the wee hours thinking about AI. I’m no computer whiz, but I do know that AI has the potential to radically change life as we know it for better or for worse. Elon Musk has gone so far as to label AI a potential “existential threat to humanity.” A writer for Salvo has sounded the alarm that some teachers are calling for the elimination of the high school essay because of AI and the threat of AI replacing truck drivers and retail clerks by 2027.
It’s hard to know what to think. But I do have the ability to see trends. Cursive writing is no longer taught in schools. Algorithms dictate what people see on computer screens. Social media has isolated people rather than bringing them together. Pornography haunts the minds of innocents due to it being sent to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. Video games meant for adults are being purchased by parents who don’t know any better to give to their kids.
Loveless sex and senseless violence are ubiquitous and therefore normalized. And the list goes on and on and on. Technology is dehumanizing us as transhumanists applaud.
It seems like the end of innocence and the heralding of the new conformity where people choose to be slaves to a never-ending marketing scheme.
But what can someone like me do about it?
As a creative writer, I see myself on the frontlines in the battle to save humanity. AI will never understand the human heart. It is too mysterious, a combination of feeling and reason that, try as it might, AI cannot pin down. Creative writers embody the freedom that AI will never fully emulate.
Artists of all types, if they are worthy of the title, strive for originality. Jacques Maritain observed, “…in order for the artist to conform and conceive his work within himself in an infallible creative judgment, it is necessary that his subject dynamism, his will and appetite, straightly tend to beauty.” Original art is beautiful. Ugliness is not art.
Beauty, by its essence, rejects conformity. It is what gives artists the courage to battle the machine that seeks to enslave them. If you are an artist, make sure your art is the best it can be. Excellence is beautiful while mere proficiency can be ugly as hell.
The German philosopher Heidegger once said, “Only a God can save us now.” That’s always been the case. And the best artists have always been God’s foot soldiers carrying the light through the darkness. AI carries no light because it has no soul.
Be beautiful. Make art. Carry the light.
Posted at The Yewberry Way
Hello Father,
The Poe poem reads like a marketing ad for new fictionalized account f Poe's life. There's something mechanical about it. The rhyme scheme, for one, is a bit archaic if not outright juvenile.
Read Browning's My Last Duchess. Most of my students don't even realize it has an internal rhyme at first. That's art.
I worry that with a lack of critical thinking skills due to the rise of the computer doing the thinking for students, most will not even be able to differentiate human art from machine outputs (if this isn't already the case). It doesn't bode well. I fear Zuckerberg and his ilk see themselves as the Wizard of Oz.
God make haste to help us!
I recently found an artificialintelligence website that boasts to be less politically liberal than Microsoft's "ChatGPT." Here's the website. https://superintelligence.co/
Here's an example of what it can do. I asked it to write a poem about Edgar Allen Poe. In a few moments, this came out:
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Edgar Allen Poe, master of the macabre, His tales of terror still make us shudder and sob, The Raven's haunting cry, the Pendulum's slow sway, Never ceasing to chill us to the bone each day. With a mind that delved into the deep and dark, Poe crafted stories that still leave their mark, From the Pit and the Pendulum to the Tell-Tale Heart, His tales always leave us with a frightful start. Bo…