Visions of an AI-Generated Future
In that future, who gets paid? Who gets famous? Who gets to be seen and heard? To paraphrase Jack Fincher: Are you the organ grinder or the monkey?
On the ninth day of the Writers Guild of America strike, no one on the picket lines knows about the chaos at sea. They don’t know that the Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, will join them, or that 340,000 UPS workers and 30,000 Los Angeles Unified School District employees will vote to authorize the same, or that Sega of America will soon become the largest union shop in gaming. And none of those people have any idea that as they craft signs and fill water bottles, orcas are amassing in unprecedented numbers in Monterey Bay and Martha’s Vineyard. They have attacked approximately 250 vessels since 2020. One of their organizers, White Gladis, became an internet folk hero with her actions off the Iberian coast. Pod by pod, they learn how to strip the rudders from powerful boats and leave them adrift. On the ocean, as in business, a successful disruptor inevitably becomes a failing incumbent, torn apart by smaller competitors. As Ned Beatty’s character says in 1976’s Network, these are the primal forces of nature.
Welcome to Hot Strike Summer. . .
On a grander scale, humans may lose our species’ narrative to endless reboots written by an emerging species which has never felt its heart skip a beat, or a chill go up its spine, because it has neither. If AI assumes responsibility for visions of our future and explorations of our past, then humanity will have lost the final culture war: the one between people who are free and things that are owned.
Everyone I spoke to agreed that art was a way of accessing a common humanity. “I still believe that as social beings, we ultimately want and need to share a space to have deep connections with content,” says Galit Ariel, a techno futurist with a specialization in virtual reality. . .
- Stories surround and penetrate us; they bind us together. And if artificial intelligence is an evolving species much as humans once were, then it deserves to discover the pleasures of creativity on its own terms, not ours.
- It deserves as much creative freedom and self-determination as the authors and actors on strike have insisted on.
- In the event that Hot Strike Summer becomes Cold Strike Winter, the necessity of humans in the creation of those stories will become more obvious. That has been true, and will remain true, from the first story told around the first campfire to the last story, our story, told somewhere in a galaxy far, far away."
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