Twitter was never a healthy gage of content and culture. It’s always had a slant towards the salacious, grievances, and opinions best left unsaid. With it’s new overlord, the quality has somehow dropped to levels lower than can be defined on any rational scale. It’s like walking through a garbage dump in your spare time.
Why do I do this to myself?
One noticeable difference is the flood of tweets about AI. Around summer of 2022, as the crypto bubble exploded, there was a lull. Some political jabs. A couple new memes. There was a flood of speculation about Elon’s will-he-won’t-he purchase of Twitter. Ah, the good old days.
Then, sometime in recent weeks, with the emergence of ChatGPT, my timeline exploded with AI enthusiasts evangelizing the merits of our new, possibly sentient, gods. It seems the crypto bros found a new game.
While the flood of tweets typically espouse the hustle culture benefits of organization, time saving tips, money making schemes, there is a creative contingent sharing their passion for image based AI programs such as Midjourney, or the new generative fill options in Adobe Photoshop.
I’m not a luddite. I see the value in digital programs obviously. Editing in premiere is easier than cutting film. Recording into protools is a better workflow than digital tape. But when we’re having the machine ‘make’ the art itself, creating cheap carbon copies of work that exists in the public domain (and probably stealing loads of private works), then what’s the point?
I don’t want to complain about the obvious issues of generating digital works from living artists. The thing that really irks me is the banality of it all. The boringness. The fact that the people writing the prompts and playing with ‘content’ really have no idea what they are doing, or WHY they are doing it. It’s a gimmick, and oddity, something that captures attention for a few seconds, followed by a quick shrug. Like most content.
If they made the next War and Peace or Catcher In The Rye would they even know? If they had the next Mona Lisa in their grips, would they have the taste to recognize it? I doubt it.
This morning about half a dozen tweets on my timeline demonstrated the power of Photoshop’s generative fill, by expanding the outside edges of familiar memes and old works, such as the Mona Lisa. I think the folks creating and posting this content are victims of the same social media conveyor belt of abyss we are all guilty of participating in. But this time, it’s more of a head scratch. Because the biggest question to me is, why?
We are so removed from purpose and meaning that the best we can muster is a bag of junk food images, stretching the already thin jokes of tired memes, and now just… seeing whats at the edges of picture?
When the 24 hour news cycle was birthed around the 1980s it created an issue that we are reaping the consequences of to this day. It required constant attention, it needed alarming breaking news, it thrived on conflict to pull us in. It had to justify its existence and play to our most base emotions, in particular, fear. It had to keep trudging up whatever possible to keep us engaged and occupied. And now we have a generation of people who despise news, are distrustful of any media organization, and we are all a little worse off for it.
I think generated art, content and copy are going to produce the same pains, and we’ll probably figure it out once the damage has been done.
These AI tools allow anyone to push a few buttons and summon infinite works. But without purpose, without it serving as a symbol for the human experience, it shifts over your tiny smartphone screen and at most gets a smirk. It becomes one more neuron misfiring in culture where we have less and less in common. Where our separate islands of experience are sinking into an individual oblivion.
Yes, boring, meaningless content is just that dangerous in my opinion. It flows out like a sewer leaking into a lake. Before you know it, all that was good and nourishing, an entire ecosystem is trashed.
TikTok was fun at first. There was some creativity. There were kids doing silly things that kept a lot of us preoccupied while the world almost ended. But I've had more than one conversation with pals lately that complain about the quality of it, the banality of what is coming up on their feeds. The algorithm serving as a gospel of value. Use the same song. Do the same moves. Post the same topic. Win.
We’re creating generations of people who are keyed up to follow whims of complex arithmetic in the hopes of achieving some meta-modern version of fame or fortune. And soon the ‘content’ (art, music, film, books, photography) is going to be generated by lazy kids laying their generated works at the altar of the algorithms, hoping they are blessed by prosperity, favored by the whims of the machine.
Its so mind-numbingly boring. As the kids say, this is the worst timeline.
There are fates worse than death, and a world where art is manipulated and controlled by non-artists for a quick tap or follow is just so disheartening. Sure, it also might become sentient and kill us all with drones or nukes, but if that doesn’t happen, I’m worried about what it means for creativity. What’s the point of anything that isn’t made with the kind of devotion, meaning and message that artists sweat blood over?
I can smell the sewage in the bay.
The only hope that keeps me sane in the tsunami of AI posts, is the fact that any new facet of culture generally produces an opposite response. I see a contingent of people, however small, that commit to works only created and crafted by human hands. A coalition of the living, stamping projects with a “made by humans for humans” sticker on appropriate works. Not unlike the organic sticker in a supermarket.
I see a generation of kids growing up and looking at us all toiling for the algorithm and saying, what for? You made a lot of nothing. I hope these kids are already here. I hope they demand meaning. I hope they walk through the desert to mine meaning from their lives, skipping the allure of cheap thrills and overstuffed timelines.
Our souls depend on it.