Unpacking AI's lofty promises and lowly returns
š Growth Imperatives, No. 15
This week is about questioning the promises AI advocates sell usāhyper-productivity, unlimited creativity, and...text message summarization, to name a few. While some of these solutions might be useful, what are we willing to give up in return? And is the return even worth it in the first place?
Is uncertainty such a bad thing?
We live in a unique time where the powers that be in Silicon Valleyāand, by proxy, the design industryāimplore us to believe that any content is better than slow or no content. Even if that content is both made and consumed by machines. They push us to ignore the unproductive, questioning, and inefficient side of creativity.
But what kind of world do we get when we continually scratch this itch for ROI? What's the point of using AI to make a thoughtful and hard thing thoughtless and easy?
This week's main article is about what technologies like AI (and social media and web 2.0) give their inventors and what they take away from the rest of us.
Read below šš½
In his book Non-things, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han draws a distinction between two styles of reading: the pornographic and the erotic. The pornographic reader āis looking for something to be uncovered.ā He wants to get to the point, as expeditiously as possible. The erotic reader takes pleasure in the act of reading itself. He ālingersā with the words. āThe words are the skin, and the skin does not enclose a meaning.ā I would broaden Hanās distinction to describe perception in general. The pornographic mind is concerned only with what can be made explicit, what can be turned into information. It seeks to pierce the obscuring veils of mystery and wonder, beauty and ambiguity, to get to the gist of the matter. The erotic mind likes the veils. It sees them not as obscuring but as pleasurable and even revelatory.
The mind of the LLM is purely pornographic. It excels at the shallow, formulaic crafts of summary and mimicry. The tactile and the sensual are beyond its ken. The only meaning it knows is that which can be rendered explicitly. For a machine, such narrow-mindedness is a strength, essential to the efficient production of practical outputs. One looks to an LLM to pierce the veils, not linger on them. But when we substitute the LLMās dead speech for our own living speech, we also adopt its point of view. Our mind becomes pornographic in its desire for naked information.
Read ā Dead Labor, Dead Speech by Nicholas Carr
š® Visions
Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:
Why are we assuming that people want more, faster? Has anyone ever said, āif only I could make unlimited presentationsā?
What if we want to craft one presentation, but do it beautifully?
What if we actually, genuinely, love the in-between moments when we return to a draft after days have passed, sharpening one word here, adding a better verb there.
Great software products arenāt simply a collection of buttons, icons, and menus. They shape how we think and who we aspire to be.
The problem isnāt that machines are becoming more human-like, itās that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.
ā Sari Azout in What does slow AI look like?
[The idea that āAI will solve climate changeā] is not merely foolish but dangerousāitās another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isnāt necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isnāt necessary right now. Itās techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.
ā Brian Merchant in AI will never solve this
AI-produced things āsort of suckā not merely because they are inherently derivative and often erroneous; they suck because AI is only ever a simulation of care, and it improves by allowing people to be more careless. AI is fundamentally āartificial intentionalityā rather than āartificial intelligence.ā
Tech companies seem to hope that they can make a brute-force case that āhaving intentionā is inconvenient, just as they continually try to persuade users that interacting with other people is inconvenient (rather than the point of life).
ā Rob Horning in Artificial intentionality