Why write (or draw or build or play or think) if a robot can do it for you?

I like you more than I like the machines, and I'd like to keep it that way

Last week, I saw an advertisement for a class. Let’s assume (because it beats the alternative) that the woman offering it has a kind heart. Let’s say that she is nice to dogs and remembers birthdays and showers her friends with genuine compliments. If we were to ask her loved ones “what do you think of the lady with the class?” they’d say “oh she’s the best, salt of the earth.”

The class being offered by this woman who probably picks up litter and calls her Congressperson was about Artificial Intelligence. It promised to help writers use AI more effectively, which sounds like a course at Henhouse University called “The Fox: Your New Best Friend” There was an FAQ at the bottom, correctly anticipating that I had concerns. “Isn’t AI illegal/unethical?” it asked, followed with “isn’t it bad for the environment?” Her answer, on both counts, was “no.” There were citations, which I dutifully read. I tried to keep an open mind, but I wasn’t convinced. Some of the arguments were fine in a vacuum, others were atrocious, but the general vibe left me with the sense that their authors cared more about “well actually-ing” imaginary foils than making the world a more decent place. Have you ever had a pedant shout at you about how much better they understand watt-hours hours than you do? Tough hang.

Friends, you may wholeheartedly believe that AI is not that bad. You may use it regularly. You may find great value in using it. You may feel like you have no choice but to use it, which must be an immense bummer and I’m truly sorry. If I were to come to you with a set of passionate but pedantic arguments of my own, you might reply “well, you have to understand, for somebody in my unique personal situation or occupation, AI is deeply necessary and helpful.” Furthermore you might argue, “you are a hypocrite, Garrett; there are so many things that you do that are equally wasteful and make the world worse.” You may very well be right on the first point, but you definitely nailed the second one.

I am not judging you. Or, better put, I’m trying really hard not to judge you. You’re doing your best. It’s so tough, isn’t it? Surviving right now. I know you’d prefer to do it all yourself, but that feels impossible, and the robots make it a bit easier. I could yell at you if I wanted, give you a million reasons why you shouldn’t lose the best part of yourself to a prompt box whose primary use case is helping cynical people complete their Series B round. But I would rather give you grace.

I worry though. I worry that we’re careening faster and faster towards a world where I have no choice but to judge you. Because it’s too late. Because we’ve forgotten how to trust one another. Because all that’s left of the space between us is a scorched earth of profit and lies.

Here’s another story.

A good friend of mine is in a virtual masters program. His classmates, I’m sure, are highly motivated, not only to receive a degree, but to actually learn. They’re also quite busy— working day jobs, raising families, etc. The other week, they had a two part assignment: write a poem in response to a unit they had just completed, and then reflect on one another’s offerings.

I bet some of my friend’s classmates were annoyed by this assignment. No disrespect to the art form, but none of us— not even poets— are fans of compulsory poetry. But I also understand my friend’s consternation when, after noticing a striking similarity between all of his classmates’ poems, he plugged the assignment into Chat GPT and discovered that they all… shared a common muse, if you will. He asked, quite fairly, how he was supposed to engage with his classmates when he was actually just talking to a machine.

The answer, it seems, is that he shouldn’t. He’s supposed to join in on the illusion. He too is expected to ask Chat GPT for a response to his “classmates’” poems, and post whatever it spits out. His classmates will then ask Chat GPT to respond (to itself!) and nobody is supposed to ask any questions here, not “what the hell are we doing?” or “what happens when we wake up and realize that the ouroboros has completely surrounded us?”

You, no doubt, haver heard plenty of stories like this. Hundreds, I assume, if you’re a student or an educator or a job seeker. Apparently the modern interview process is increasingly just candidates using AI to game the companies’ AI. And you all just have to accept it? Oh God, I’m so sorry. I assume LinkedIn is to blame somehow. I bet there are a million posts from self-proclaimed Chat GPT Hustlers about how your skepticism is just a skill issue.

The poems were bad, by the way. But that’s not the point. They (the techno-optimists) assure me that I should not judge the robots’ current abilities. Some day soon, I’m told, I will encounter a robot-produced sentence and be filled with the same awe I feel when I read Hanif Abdurraqib or Rachel Kushner or Tommy Orange or Tressie McMillan Cottom.

That depresses me even more.

My problem with AI isn’t just that it is bad right now. It isn’t just that this isn’t the moment in ecological and human history to welcome a new energy sucking monster onto the scene (“each prompt only utilizes a fraction of a bottle of water, actually” shout its defenders, as the thousandth bigot of the day posts “Grok, tell me if this guy I hate is Jewish” on X dot com). It isn’t just that millions will lose their jobs, nor that it is making us dumber, nor that we woke up one morning and found it pre-installed on every device we own, nor that the Google search bar lies to us, nor that millions of dollars have been spent on high concept ad campaigns convincing us that we need AI in our life because it can make a restaurant reservation and then text your friends about it. I mean, my God, robot companies: I assure you that the reason why I haven’t successfully catalyzed a grand people’s revolution isn’t the time I’ve wasted texting my friends “hey, let’s go to Chili’s tonight. We don’t need a reservation because that’s the great thing about Chili’s.”

I strongly dislike AI for all those reasons, but before the true believers come my way with their counter-points, let me at least add one more into the pot.

You’ll recall, a few paragraphs ago, when I said that I want to trust you. I meant it, but it’s deeper than that. I desperately need to trust you, and for you to trust me, because the most malevolent people in the world— billionaires and oligarchs and liars— are betting on us to distrust one another. They are betting on us to feel so alone, frightened and powerless that we have no choice but to accept their vision of the world (hostile, pre-broken, wildly profitable). They want us to believe in the robots’ abilities to love and work and fill in the negative space of our lives more than we believe in ourselves.

I desperately need to trust you, because I do not want those voices to win, but also because everything that I love the most in this moment (and everything, I’m now realizing, that I’ve loved for my entire life) emerges from trust. A potluck is an exercise in trust. So too is an anxiety-filled first canvassing shift. So too is a raised hand shouting “I will take on some extra work for our group” or another one offering “hey you seem busy, would it help if I watched your kid after school?” A community garden. A donation to somebody’s work that we admire. A new love and an old friendship. A political campaign that actually makes us feel something again. The choice to hear or read or watch somebody’s art and be moved. They all require trust, which is to say that they all live in that sacred moment of risk when we reach out our hand and we don’t yet have a guarantee that anybody else will reach out in return.

In this tenuous shared present, we need more rather than fewer reasons to trust each other. But instead of tools to rebuild trust, we have been given the cursed gift of malevolent trickster proxy robots. We can now send each other a picture or a song or a video or a poem or an essay and say, implicitly if not explicitly, “this came from me” and have that not be the case at all. We can pretend that we stared at a blank page and considered the people who might experience the end product, when in reality there was only a prompt and an instantaneous search of a thousand other people’s once genuine words and the last minute lacquer of false sentiment.

The last time I painted, it was in the early months of the pandemic. My family gathered virtually for my nephew’s birthday party— a Zoom art class. By every reasonable standard, I am a hopeless painter. We were supposed to create a mountain, but I only managed three thick lines on my tiny little canvas. They weren’t perfect lines, but I liked them and knew that if I kept going, it would only look worse. I didn’t challenge myself, nor did I learn and grow. But when I put my lines-that-did-not-add-up-to-a-mountain next to my wife and childrens’ actual mountains, there was no doubt about it. This thing, neither beautiful nor profound but at the very least created, came from me. The people who loved me saw that, and saw me, and that was enough.

I don’t care how good the robots get at pretending to be us. I will always choose something made by you. Even if you’re a lost cause. Even if you’ve got terrible taste and even worse execution. I will choose your cliché-ridden essays and research papers riddled with logical inconsistencies. I will choose your clunky meeting summaries and typo-ridden emails. I will choose your stick finger drawings and screechy, out-of-tune anthems. I will choose anything you create— out of love, out of hope, out of sadness, out of anger, out of deadline-induced panic. All I ask is that, when you sign your name to it, it is in fact yours.

This all may seem so tiny and trifling. Does the assurance that we are the actual authors of everything that bears our signature truly build trust? Maybe not, but it doesn’t erode it further. And in a time of absolutely Olympian feats of untruth (by the President of the United States, by the podcasters and online yahoos who now represent the last vestiges of America’s crumbling third estate, by the robots themselves), it would mean a lot to me, in fact, to know that you aren’t deliberately adding to the problem.

This past weekend, I found myself inside a Mcdonald’s in the middle of the afternoon. Have you been inside a Mcdonald’s lately? They’ve remodeled. It’s spooky now— slick, optimized, Sweetgreened. It feels like a hamburger-themed Apple Store in there. At least the one on North Avenue in Milwaukee still provides a respite on a hot day for people who don’t have anywhere else to go. A third space, if you will (though often a second or first space, if we’re being honest).

And so, on Saturday, I sat there eating a limited edition Hershey’s S’mores McFlurry, listening to and occasionally participating in cross talk with guys sitting at four different tables. One dude was watching TikTok. “Oh damn,” he remarked sleepily, “Trump’s gonna let people drive without licenses now.” We all took the bait. Asking questions. Positing theories. We weren’t particularly animated, but it was something to discuss. Was the TikTok lying? Or was Trump? “It might as well be real, what with how everything’s so crazy these days.” “You got that right!” It went on like that for a while, all of us just shaking our heads. “Now we’ve heard everything…”

The rumor wasn’t true, actually, but I didn’t find that out until later. In the moment, none of us cared whether we were being lied to or not. It was all just spectacle. Somebody else was calling the shots, and who the hell knew what they were up to or why? Our job was just to take it in.

“Well, what are you gonna do?”

We need to be prepared for a hell of a lot more of this, I fear. This whole business of not knowing who, precisely, is yanking our chain or ripping us off. Of assuming, for self-preservation purposes, that it must be somebody. And if that’s our reality, how can we be expected to meet a new buddy and say, in all earnestness, “wanna come to a thing I’m hosting?”

That’s such a massive challenge. To trust each other that deeply and vulnerably. To trust ourselves. And we’re up for it. I really believe that. At the very least, we’re desperate for it. But objects in motion stay in motion, and if we just keep lying to each other, well Jesus. What chance do we have of turning back the tide in that scenario?

So please, my friends. I don’t care if your dance moves are derivative or if your prose sounds like a Hallmark card written by a lovestruck eighth grader or if it takes a year for you to reply to my email because you just couldn’t find the time. I just want whatever you create to belong to you, not the robots, because I don’t want to build anything with them. I don’t want to march in the streets or pick up litter or learn how to unclog a drain or cry alongside a neighbor who just lost the person they loved most in the world. Not with the machines. I don’t want to organize a union or pass out sandwiches, or hear a song come on at a bar and start belting it out in unison.

I want to do all that with you. For the rest of my life. But only if it’s really you.

End notes:

1. I hope it goes without saying, but yes, this was written by a human being, a dad in Milwaukee who has decided to lean hard into sentiment and optimism and exclamation points because, well, that’s honestly how I process the world right now. If you find any of this (my writing, the trainings I offer, the overarching sentiment, etc.) useful, I’d love your help. I’m grateful to do this work, but it’s precarious. When folks toss in donations (or share my words with friends), I get to keep doing this. When folks don’t, it gets trickier. Thanks for considering.

2. Yes, the summer movie series continues (though boy am I taking my time with it). This week I’ll be doing the next movie in the series, Arrival (which I’ve never seen). Instead of an essay, I’m doing a live watch thread using the Substack chat function (for those not familiar, it’s easy to find if you want, but fully ignorable if you don’t). I’m kicking things off live on Thursday, July 3rd, at 8:30 PM U.S. Central Time (though you can check it out later whenever you want- I’ll share the link in future essays).

3. Here’s the upcoming line-up for the movie series (with dates for the next few contributions). Again, will I get through all ten? Maybe, maybe not. This is a fun hazy summer bonus, easily bumped to the side whenever there’s something else to discuss.

4. Hey! If you’re in a place with physical copies of magazines over the next few months, maybe keep an eye out for the summer issue of Ms. Magazine. I didn’t know this would mean so much to me seeing this in print, on the cover. “PLUS: Garrett Bucks ponders “Why is the Vice President sitting like that?” A funny sentence to see on the cover of Ms. Magazine, but accurate.

   garrettbucks

   

   A post shared by @garrettbucks

By the way, the cover is an homage to a classic 1975 issue (featuring Robert Redford’s back). Homage! Riffing on creative work! And not just cycling through other people’s creation and spitting back a computer-generated copy. The robots could never.

5. Speaking of “the robots could never,” I wanted the song of the week to be something life affirming, something that makes you want to run into the streets and start bouncing up and down, your fist in the air, because you have a hunch that maybe, if they heard it, a stranger might join you. Something that makes you want to yell “we’re gonna have a good time, we’re gonna have a party.” Friends, let’s listen to Loaded.

The full song of the week playlist is on Apple Music and Spotify.