A.I. = Awkwardly Intuitive

Artificial Intelligence, as a name, never made sense to me. It’s not artificial, it’s manufactured and as real, on some level, as real can be. And it’s not really intelligent, is it? It’s calculating, shrewd, a stand in for real intelligence. 

As a stand in, it’s sometimes really helpful but other times insidious. It can create the germ of an idea for you, acting as a sketch book or a launching pad for where your mind wants to go, but it can also fool you into thinking that germ of an idea is complete, unique and personal to you. Um, that would be a No. 

Real intelligence, hopefully, has depth and nuance and surprising stream of consciousness thinking. And the more you think, the better you get at it, just like cooking, or playing chess, or doing sit ups. You build your own rhythm, establish your own flow, develop your own voice. You aren’t dependent on an A.I. voice that sounds remarkably like you…but not. 

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because it’s unavoidable and if you were to only depend on press coverage and social media, it would be easy to believe A.I. is all evil all the time. But you can’t know anything about it until you’ve tried it, right? Walk a mile in my shoes, and all of that. So, I’ve been playing a lot, with writing and art, and what I’m finding is, it’s like having a Mini-Me, a stunt double, something that looks kinda like me and sounds kinda like me, but can’t nail the punchline because their timing is a beat off. 

A million years ago, when Photoshop was brand new, graphic designers and illustrators had a field day making beautiful new compositions with this seductive tool that could, among other things, create really beautiful color gradients that were seamless and sexy and hard to do in other media. And there was one specific gradient going from deep blue through sky blue into lavender that was amazing to look at and new. And in that first year of Photoshop, everybody used it. Everybody. On everything. And very quickly, there was nothing unique about it at all. It was a cool trick, a fast gimmick. But that was just the surface of what Photoshop could do.

I think the same storyline is true of A.I. The surface is magical and sexy right now, but it’s just the surface – a remarkably soulless, generic surface that gets applied evenly to everything it touches. Like Cheese-Whiz. It’s just a tool or a vehicle for expanding our methods of thinking and creating and it’s delicious in a plastic-y kind of way. 

I think of it kind of like a beautiful, magical train going anywhere and everywhere…but someone’s gotta be driving that train, otherwise it’ll just go nowhere fast. And if you’re the one driving that train, don’t just follow the course dictated for you because it seems to know where it’s going. Slow down, speed up, change direction and every now and then, just turn left for the hell of it. That’s my recipe for A.I., and pretty much my recipe for life, come to think of it.

“Before we work on artificial intelligence why don’t we do something about natural stupidity?”

—Steve Polyak