Rise of the Machines
Reflections on craft in an AI world
I, like almost everyone these days, have been thinking quite a bit about artificial intelligence (AI). It’s hard not to. I mean, in just the last week alone:
There was Microsoft’s announcement of Recall, a planned AI feature that will record everything you do on your computer. A strikingly similar concept to spyware that has privacy experts concerned.
Then Google basically went all in on AI driven search results, proving that we shouldn’t be so quick to trust our machine overlords just yet.1
Scarlett Johansson struck back after OpenAI attempted to use her voice without consent on its new ChatGPT voice model.
And of course, there was this little piece that BBC ran covering the extremely high energy uses associated with AI.
Yet, despite rampant privacy concerns, worker rights being violated, and environmental costs, companies seem hellbent on shoving AI into our daily lives — whether we want it or not. So yes, it’s been on my mind.
One thing that’s been standing out to me in the AI discourse lately, particularly on LinkedIn, is how okay we all seem to be with it. For example, I saw a LinkedIn post where a guy shared his 5 step process for using chatGPT to generate articles for his business. In another post, I saw someone talk about how they used it to write all their thank you notes to guests following a family celebration.2 What a time saver, sang the praises.
And then there’s the ‘art.’
From images to music3 to video, creativity is now only a prompt and a click away. Limited only by our imaginations (and whatever paywall the tool is locked behind), anyone can easily become an artist, poet, composer, or cinematographer. No training necessary. And the fruits of their imagination are everywhere now. Social media has become inundated by AI content. It’s a trend that is expected to only keep going with suggestions that by 2025 up to 99% of all content on the internet could be AI generated.4 But this is not something that will be limited to your social feeds. Amazon has seen exponential growth in AI generated books, AI is being used to quickly write the news, and there’s even an AI generated movie on the way.
It’s the machine’s world now, we’re only spectators.5
I can’t help but wonder what all of this will do to craft. With AI being able to reproduce creative output at infinitely faster speeds than a human ever could, will that diminish any desire to learn how to do it ourselves? Sure, right now AI art is kinda weird and terrible and has all sorts of tells; but think about how fast this thing is moving. Where will we be in two more years? How about five? Or ten? I wonder how this will impact my kids’ generation in their approach to how and what they learn.
Recently, I was reading a book in which the author quipped that 17th and 18th century woodworkers required significantly fewer tools than today because their skill levels were simply higher. They knew how to build furniture in ways that have been all but forgotten. As a growing number of specialized tools to accomplish very specific tasks were made, our skills shrank. Then came the machines with their ability to cut, shape, and work with wood at speeds and quantities beyond our human capacity. Now, I don’t want to imply that there is no skill required in modern woodworking, of course there is. However, what I am noting (as is the author of the book) is that as machines took over many of the tasks we once did by hand, we stopped learning how to do them any other way.
It’s this process of learning, or skill-building, that I think I’m most concerned about. In past times, learning a craft was rooted in obedience. The rules for how to do it well had been refined by previous generations. In order to learn, one had to submit themselves to another’s teaching and guidance and follow the process until mastery was reached. This was something that could take years of obedient repetition. There were no shortcuts.6 That is until we created them.
Machines offer us that shortcut, but in doing so they cut out the learning process. Yes, they are capable of spitting out a similar end result, but we’re losing the part that connects us to it.
In his book, The Craftsman, Richard Sennett writes about this danger, saying,
“Machinery is misused when it deprives people themselves from learning through repetition. The smart machine can separate human mental understanding from repetitive, instructive, hands-on learning. When this occurs, conceptual human powers suffer.”
The essence of craft is doing something well for its own sake. And the lengthy process of learning is inherent to it. Without it, are we really making anything, or are we just pushing buttons? Anyone can order a 5 star meal, but that doesn’t make them a chef.
Machines redefine our relationship to the thing being produced. As we become less active in its creation, our relationship increasingly becomes that of consumer. And isn’t that really the goal of machines? Making things faster and in greater quantity for us to consume. Once upon a time, our ancestors made almost everything they had. It seems like with each successive generation, we have lost a little bit more of the skills needed to do that. And now, today, we buy almost everything.
AI represents another step in this trajectory. It is offloading the very act of learning to machines. Information becomes content and content is consumed, but are we learning anything in the process? What then becomes of a society that has forgotten how to learn?
Sennett ties the essence of good craft to the space between problem-solving and problem-finding. It is a cyclical, almost obsessive self-reflection on what one is making. In a way, it lives in you. You consider it, then do, then stop and reflect, then do again. Over and over, pushing your knowledge and your skill up incrementally as you go. Machines cannot replicate this obsession. It is fundamentally human in a way they can never mimic.
“The idea of a painting is not a painting.”
Thanks for reading to the end,
Ben Bartosik is the marketing manager for Evergreen Canada, a national non-profit transforming public spaces in our cities to build a healthier future for people and our planet. He is also a guest writer for the Whale and an advocate for the work of SCGC.
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Perhaps most fascinating with the google search news, it was discovered that they essentially buried basic web search with no AI and so users were quick to create a workaround. If you want a less, ahem, sh*tty version of google search, use this instead. Personally, I abandoned as much of Google’s services as I could a few years ago and haven’t looked back. Duck Duck Go is a great privacy focused alternative search engine.
This one in particular sort of shook me.
I came across a youtube channel of AI generated music in which 90s nu metal songs are redone in the style of 80s new wave and I begrudgingly admit that I like them. (Content warning, the original song lyrics are not the most wholesome).
Given both the costs of generating this content and the already massive data centres needed to store and share all of it, this shift could signal an extremely troubling environmental concern. All of that content (and every copy of that content) needs to be held somewhere. FYI if you’re interested in learning more about the environmental cost of data, I highly recommend Gerry McGovern’s book, World Wide Waste.
I say this facetiously but I’m also not sure how far off we are from the internet more or less being AI content interacting with itself. Bots arguing with bots online, reviews of AI generated art written by AI; it’s not that much a stretch.
This is true of most craft. My daughter is learning how to play the piano right now and I have to keep reminding her that practice is the only way to learn. It’s also a reason why I still very strongly believe in the conventional education system, despite its many flaws. It is important for us to learn how to learn and critically engage with information.