Infinite taste

I quite often find myself paraphrasing Ira Glass, most famously the host of This American Life, in his depiction of the creative process. Essentially, he argues, those prone to creativity first learn their taste by consuming the art in their desired medium. Writers read voraciously, dancers watch professionals (and those who are just very talented), aspiring auteurs devour every film they can get their hands on.

But, paradoxically, in developing their taste these emerging artists often find that, when they go to create works of their own, just … sucks. Though prodigies they may be, their work often as not carries the qualifier “for your age,” or “for your level.” Their taste outstrips their talent.

And this is where many creators fall into a hole that some of them never escape from. “I know what good looks like, and I can’t achieve it. Therefore, why bother?”

It’s a dangerous trap, and one that can only be escaped from by digging through to the other side.

I find myself coming back to this idea in the era of generative artificial intelligence. I’ve been reading story after story about how it’s destroying thought, or how many people have replaced Jesus (or, worse, all sense of human connection) with ChatGPT. The throughline that rang the truest to me, however, views the problem through the lens of hedonism:

Finally, having cheated all the way through college, letting AI do the work, students can have the feeling of accomplishment walking across the stage at graduation, pretending to be an educated person with skills and knowledge that the machines actually have. Pretending to have earned a degree. If Nozick were right then AI would not lead to an explosion of cheating, because students would want the knowledge and understanding that college aims to provide. But in fact many just want the credential. They are hedonists abjuring the development of the self and the forging of their own souls.

To me, the primary problem with using generative AI to replace communication of most sorts (I will grant exceptions chiefly for content that has no ostensible purpose for existing at all, e.g., marketing and scams) is that it defeats the primary goal of communication. A surface-level view of communication is the transferance of information; this is true inasmuch as it’s required for communication to happen.

But in the same sense that the point of an education is not obtain a degree (it’s merely a credential to prove that you have received an education), the primary function of communication is connection; information transfer is the merely the means through which it is accomplished.

So my worry with AI is not only that it will produce inferior art (it will), but that it will replace the spark of connection that brings purpose to communication. Worse, it’ll dull the impetus to create, that feeling that pushes young artists to trudge through the valley of their current skills to get to the creative parks that come through trial, error and effort. After all, why toil in mediocrity to achieve greatness when you can instantly settle for good enough?