I have been thinking a lot about Ted Chiang’s piece on artificial intelligence (AI) in the New Yorker. His basic argument is that AI, exemplified by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT that produce text and text-to-image models like DALL·E, can’t make art because it is not capable of making the specific and contextual choices that artists use their years of knowledge and experience to make. There’s a good critique of the choices framework here, and I more or less take it for granted that AI can’t make art (though it can make things that look like art), and that people who care about craft and prose and the quality of words going together one after the other are not likely to put prompts into a LLM to make their essays and poems and books.
What’s more interesting and more worthwhile to consider is why someone might want to use a LLM to write something, and in what context. Someone in an office job of any kind, someone who has to produce lists and reports and form letters, might find in a LLM a way to work less and enjoy their time more. The logic of labor exploitation under capitalism means that all workers are treated as interchangeable widgets; it follows that someone who has to survive in that system would use a tool that helps them become a better, more efficient widget with minimal effort and time, so they have more time to do the things they actually want to do.
This is rather easy to point out and hard to do anything about. The people who stand to make money-money-money-money from the output of LLMs do not care that the end-of-quarter summary report was written by “artificial” and not human intelligence. And maybe the people plugging words into the system and waiting for it to churn out that report don’t either. They’d rather be online shopping or reading a book or looking at social media or talking to their coworker or whatever. That’s fine.
The problem is that robots are going to put us out of jobs we…
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Auteur: Marianela D’Aprile
