AI. Because I have skin in the game.

My penny in the discussion of AI with regards to writing isn’t new or different philosophically but I do have an opinion.

I’ve been following the AI train for quite a while because I’m middle aged and I’m like that Back To The Future meme: “Hey, I’ve seen this one.”

Like most things in this first quarter of the 21st century (I myself being born in the second Elizabethan age of the late 1900’s) it’s a partial scam.

The fourth industrial revolution is supposed to be: medicine, green and technology. That’s a generalisation but includes AI, its forms. and automation.

Like all frontiers of investment and development for every actual genius making a single sustainable leap there’s a thousand carpet baggers and snake oil hawkers pulling in gullible punters (investors). These, as tradition and nature shows, will be the most colourful and loudest showmen. This, combined with the grifter’s idiom that no-one likes to admit they’ve been fooled and the strange conceit that billionaires cannot be idiots or believe themselves capable of being duped like the rest of us, because somehow you can’t be dumb and rich, is the point we’re at now.

In a very short time AI, instead of being the Ouroboros of death and birth, has become the dog chasing its own tail.

At our current stage AI is eating itself, and, like the dog chasing its own tail, it’s also eating its own vomit.

Initially the concept was that AI would consume the world’s data, with the help of human programmers, and generate results from that information. Eventually it won’t need the human element, much like no human involvement is made in programming chips any more, the chips make the future chips themselves because they have gone beyond the programmer.

Actually, that’s quite worrying in itself.

The programmers are no longer capable of making the chips or the code. It’s been automated past their ability (by their own intention) to an almost quantum realm. We taught a rock to think and replicate.

When you see a guy in a leather jacket and jeans on stage introducing the next generation GPU or chip none of his or his team’s ideas were on a drafting table or in any development other than a language of code they can no longer read. A GPU created that GPU. And, because the coding in its development doesn’t consider heat or resources (because its a rock that thinks on a level outside the earth) all the GPU wants is more power and energy, and so the data centres and servers running the show also only require more power and energy until we find ourselves in the situation where water is rationed in Taiwan because the factories require the water to cool the chips making the chips rather than the people living and farming outside it. And don’t forget the heat coming out of these fields of data servers warming up the planet nicely and sucking all the energy resources. But your TV on standby is the problem.

Yeah, but what’s this got to do with writing or art?

Well, it goes back to the dog chasing its own tail. I don’t think anyone considered the circumstance that because the AI data would start to outweigh the human data the AI would start to regurgitate its own input. It’s getting worse but unable to recognise it’s getting worse because it’s using its “correct” information that it created badly in the first place.

Pure digression here but let’s take video games as an example.

Star Wars Outlaws just came out, a triple AAA game. A 2024 game.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018.

You can look at comparisons of these two games on YouTube.

I guarantee that AI was involved in developing Outlaws because there is no way a human would program some of the flaws in that game. Or programmers have somehow gotten worse.

The concept is great, it looks good, but Pooh Sticks handles its environment and mechanics better.

RDR2 is beloved, years later. Once, in Red Dead, I randomly saw a fox chase and catch a squirrel. I shot the fox. I was able to go to the fox, the squirrel dead in its mouth, take the squirrel from its mouth and put it in my satchel and then skin the fox. In Outlaws you can walk through a speeder bike and punch storm troopers to death in a crowded room of other storm troopers. You can’t carry a weapon down a ladder.

In the past month alone we have watched supposedly huge games/films be universally mocked and fail at the cost of billions of dollars because a human possibly didn’t even draw the concept art let alone make them without some AI. Video games, movies, books, art, cannot just be concepts to be extrapolated. Yes, it can be done. Anyone can write a book. It doesn’t mean it’s a good book, and hell there are thousands of shit books, but surely you don’t want to read shit books? You don’t want to play shit games or watch shit movies.

I think this is what they forget. I’m not saying AI can’t write a good book or make good art or music but shouldn’t AI be doing the things we don’t want to do to give us, the humans, the time and desire to write the books and make the music? Shouldn’t that be the end goal?

I heard someone say recently, “Why would I bother to read a book no-one bothered to write?” And that’s almost exactly it. Why would I value a picture no-one painted or show up to a film no-one cared to make?

They also don’t consider (and the AI can’t) that humans are both fickle and discerning and contradictory and have been forever and do many, many things that don’t make sense or have purpose, probably because they don’t make sense or have purpose.

We domesticate wild animals and keep them in our homes, we both enjoy being entertained by things that make us laugh and make us cry, we eat food not for fuel but for pleasure, we like to do exhausting things and also like to do absolutely nothing.

No-one ever imagined that we would be content to watch a film on a device in our hand. They imagined we wanted bigger and bigger TVs, we wanted to fold them up like a map for some reason or have them appear in front of us on the wall and be invisible the rest of the time. No we didn’t, you didn’t ask. You may have asked a five year old or your rich mate but you didn’t ask us. We boil water over a flame the same as we’ve always done.

We’re more simple than they want, or need, us to be.

The smart device is a great example. We’re in love with them for about a week and then we just use them as egg-timers or alarm clocks. Not enough of us are going to use an app to brush our teeth but it’s there if you want it. You can subscribe.

AI will write books and screenplays, as well as most people. Not good, talented, skilled people, and it may never do so if it continues the model of eating it’s own infinite data to generate them or just steals actual people’s.

I can see it already in some TV and films. There’s dialogue and exposition that shouldn’t be there. A good human writer will know when silence is better, when a look is better, when the actor needs to project instead. Look for it: You can spot the AI because it fills in the gaps. It tells, doesn’t show. It fast travels, puts people or things exactly where they need to be with no step how they got there, only that they are needed and all with way, way too much dialogue, like a lawyer striving to obfuscate a jury.

It does the same in books. It leaves no gap for interpretation, says everything, tells everything, has no experimentation or craft, subtlety or nuance. Mediocre books and films, plays and art have always existed. Why do we want to emulate that?

Maybe it’s because, unwittingly or by design, AI intends to create a future without satire or parody or alternative commentary. It can’t emulate these things so it discards them as it’s not in its own data that it has consumed. It doesn’t know how lazy, contrary and contradictory we are because it doesn’t know we want to be like that sometimes or that we are like that.

And it’s not about creating. It’s about cost.

Capitalism no longer requires that the end user is satisfied for it to achieve success, those days are gone, companies are no longer interested in pleasing the consumer with the best service or product. The goal is monopolies, universal ownership and anti competitive logic, so there is no choice in service, only that the service was delivered. They got your money because you bought a pair of shoes from a choice of five companies all owned by the same asset firm who also happen to be the majority shareholders. (My coat example at the end of this piece).

The dream is to have nobody being paid to be working in the warehouse, nobody to be paid for manufacturing, nobody to be paid for delivering. Robots to do it all and a robot will fix the robot when it breaks.

Companies are satisfied that only “content” is enough, not quality. Meh is fine, because the market is all owned by the same companies and the loss from one is a gain for the other they also own.

Regarding goods and services the model is only that something was delivered on time and at the price they stipulate you pay. Doesn’t have to be a “good” product, that’s not the objective.

The ideology is to remove human labour cost from production and creation, typically the most expensive resource so obviously it would be the one your shareholders would want to eliminate if able, and they see it happening because they want it to happen. You can’t keep generating profits exponentially year on year in a world where consumer’s buying power is lower so you have to cut labour and manufacturing costs by removing the human to keep the profits, which aren’t profits, rising for the shareholders who also happen to be the asset holders. Every year we see company profits rise and then look around at the poverty and destitution and wonder how. It’s not price gouging, it’s cutting costs. The profits are generated by them spending less not because we’re buying more. It’s a trick.

Here’s a quote from The Hollywood Reporter regarding Lionsgate’s development with Runway AI and their IP’s: “Runway… will help us utilize AI to develop cutting edge, capital efficient content creation opportunities.”

That doesn’t sound like a sentence you want a creative to say, but it is a sentence you’d expect from someone who doesn’t want to pay people for creating and just wants John Wick 14 when Keanu is dead. (Also Lionsgate doesn’t seem too concerned that Runway is currently being sued for copyright infringement).

It doesn’t matter if the films or the games fail, they don’t care, because the money went from one pocket to another pocket of the same coat, and you didn’t have skin in that game.

This is the objective.