Maybe it's the weather. Maybe it's the fact that my titanium bones make me a human barometer who detects every change in said weather with screaming bone pain. Maybe it's the end of the school year. Maybe it's a lot of things.
But: Today, I have a hefty case of "what is the use?" when it comes to our AI future.
This crap machine has taken over EVERYTHING. I've nearly given up on the Web because there's so little that isn't offensive to look at or read. It's not only that I can't trust information; it's that it's actually painful to behold AI-generated crap.
Gremlin's mom's neighborhood association sent out flyers announcing a new brick entrance sign project. The flyer was AI. The back had a "picture" of the proposed finished product. The picture was also AI.
Included on the order form was a diagram of the finished project, showing which sizes of bricks went where and what they'd cost. This is the only thing I suspected was not AI-generated. It looked like someone in charge of design actually sketched it. It looked nothing at all like the AI version purporting to be the finished project in all its glory.
I still insisted we get Gremlin's mom a memorial brick. She spent fifty years of her life in that neighborhood. She loved it. (We're both still trying to come to terms with the fact that the best course of action is to sell her house - it's way too big for the two of us, and neither of us wants to live in a major metro area, not even in a beautiful historical district. but I digress.) But I'm pissed at the AI.
The state library association listserv conversation about the Librar Labs crap I ranted about in my previous post is both heartening and alarming. Heartening because everyone sees this thing for the crap it is. Alarming because we know the "product" is aimed at admins who don't know and don't care to understand what school librarians do.
I ventured a look at freelance writing ads the other day. Big mistake. Everything is AI now. Ads are AI. Interviews are AI. How do you use AI to churn out good-enough shit that we can sell? Nobody is hiring for expertise or experience anymore. It's all "how fast can you make the probability machine make stuff, and how ignorant are you of the fact that you're really only here as a liability heatsink in case it fucks up?"
Meanwhile, I'm spending my free time this week reading The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, by Phillip Hoose. It's a beautifully written book about the efforts - now nearly a hundred years ago - to save the last remaining habitat of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States. Cornell has the only video and audio ever recorded of the birds:
Ivory-billed woodpecker (Cornell)
There were a lot of reasons I didn't follow my parents into biology, botany, and conservation. One of the biggest was that it's a heartbreaking field, with lots of stories that don't end happily. I've known this since I was five and found out what DDT was. Again and again, stories like the ivory-billed woodpecker's end the same way: We can't stop being greedy capitalist enslavers long enough to let anything else in the world thrive for one hot second.
(Literally. Capitalism and slave labor killed the ivory-billed woodpecker. Spoiler alert.)
Reading about the ivory-billed woodpecker feels a lot like beholding the death of decent writing jobs. I'm taking the death of writing harder than I expected. Since I started freelancing in 2009, I've sworn that I tolerate the work at best. That it's largely nonsense. That I'd happily do anything more fulfilling that came along.
Lately I'm finding that's not entirely true. Yeah, it wasn't my heart's desire or anything, but it was moderately engaging and kept my household together for 17 years. To see it go down to a probability-based text extruder, to see everyone with any skill at it forced to harness themselves to the machine or starve, appalls me.
The last species humanity will hollow out is itself.
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