Chutes and Ladders

I’m in my slightly darker than sky blue room in Richmond Virginia (having painted it my then favorite color, as bold a shade as my parents could stomach), it is probably a Saturday, and I am safe and probably bored, and I decide to make a series of slides out of cardboard that will make it so that I don’t have to reach around to the side of my desk to throw away trash. Instead, I can put it on the slide where it will fall to a second slide making a tight “L” and into the wastebasket (swoosh).

I am a lover of slides. I always include AT LEAST one in any mock-up of the high rise fantasy mansions I file away for future use. I have king kid dreams of having hot wheels tracks arcing through the features of our house, and it is time to put my weekend hands to work. And so for an hour or two I make these slides, I tape them to my desk, and I put a crumpled up piece of paper on them a la classic brainstorm debris. It doesn’t move. So I adjust. I make them steeper. And try again, they slide down one, then the other. I have achieved mastery over the domain of my desk. My efficiency will balloon. I am untouchable.

I call my sister in to witness my mastery and shower me with praise, at awe of my genius and endeavor. And she says something like “that’s stupid.” I am flabbergasted. Maybe she doesn’t understand.

“Look at the ball of paper, it goes down not one, but two slides.” She must have missed one of them.

“Yeah, but you can just reach around the side, and put it in the trash.”

I am shaken to my core. I am misunderstood, and I also don’t understand.

This over-dramatization is meant to evoke the BIG FEELINGS that you have when you are 13 and you just moved a couple years ago from Texas which you loved more than anything, and now you are trying to recreate some of the circumstances of your short life as you know it. Resume the innocence, recommence the joy, game on!

I will admit (if you make me) that this is probably the most tame and normal sibling interaction in the history of all time. I don’t hold that opinion against my sister (anymore) but I consider it exhibit HOT97 Section23A of how I see the world at work. Impracticality and inefficiency chafe at the fabric the world wears. It is a misuse, a misfire, a snagged stitch. It’s not so much that my sister didn’t like my slide, it’s that because it purported to have a use, that use must then be measured. In the Richmond interim, my sister had grown up (to a very big age of 16) and I hadn’t. She spoke the standards of measurement and I did not. Her tone is embarrassment as much as admonishment. I wish you had come to me first so I could translate for you.

This specific set of measurements, offers in its authority that there is a tangible value in the doing. A tool has a use and some work better than others (this screwdriver is faster, more durable, easier to use), but saying a tool has no value, even if it doesn’t fix the problem seems to me to be an issue of ideology. One that extends out to a further idea, that lives can be expressed in a similar manner of how they work. The measurement seeming to be the ever growing body of data that exists on people in general and in particular. Some value of life can probably be represented by data, servers stacked on servers worth, just as a life can be captured with words, and many libraries and tomes have captured much of it, but all the libraries and the servers in the world do not make a single human emotion, cannot express the feeling of a paper cut, the imminently recognizable sound of a sneeze.

 

I find comfort there. Within the confines of the insignificant and the sublime, lies the domain of man. We can never be fully measured because it is the matter of an intangible soul. The indefinable thing at the core of us all, that is a sort of refuge. By building a series of SWEET ASS slides that didn’t convincingly demonstrate a solution (or a problem for that matter) did I fail? Did I lose something? More to the point, was anyone affected by this at all (besides me, obviously). Perhaps no, and in the tides of time it is nothing but water. But by telling the story, by holding on to the memory and exploring the concepts within I can share with you all a formative piece of my past. A singular drop. One that I hold in my hand so much as anyone can.

My brain obsessively looks forwards and back. Whether that’s the muscle memory of a life-long relationship with depression and repetitive thoughts, or from my more probing, questioning, artistic-self, or even just as a transient being in this world, looking around for validating stimuli. In my eye's and mind's many wanderings, I so often find little splashes of light. Reflections of the soul peeking out. A wild human call, cutting through chatter. And more and more these days when I look in a certain direction, hear the recoil of a certain future, I see a soft dark and quiet.

I try to resist oversimplification when it comes to “society’s ills”. I’m wary of moral panics and how hysteria-tinged they become. For instance, I hesitate to blame phones for our problems and those of the next generation. Not that phones are a frictionless feature, just that actually we have heaps of problems of a greater weight and few if any are being solved. The phone, the internet, and social media has simply become a refuge from those things, while also providing a new laboratory for schemes and the proliferation of previously pointed to problems. Talk about a messy tool that is easy to measure but impossible to see!

But there is one issue that I think is developing like a kudzu, not so much unique in it’s ability to rot the floorboards, but simply faster, and in a way that changes how we walk. And that is AI. I think as an artist you can probably imagine how much I despise AI art. Even as a tool for creating memes (and I love some internet brain rot as much as the next netizen) it’s never as funny as a bad Photoshop. I think AI writing, is corporate and hollow, it’s an uncanny valley of cliche and aggressive attempts at mimicking a low vibration of humanity. There is no serendipity, nothing to surprise you, except if you are simply amazed at how good it is at pretending. Personally I find it unconvincing and I don’t know what possible problem it is solving.

Are we all thinking that the reason we have bad art is because of the artists? That we’ve only allowed people to make art who possess strong desire to create? What if instead we let the people who have first draft ideas, who don’t feel driven enough to do the work on their own, the people you might otherwise call lazy, let’s see what they have to say, with the help of a word-guessing, shapes and colors chatbot?

But even more damaging to me than displacing artists, because that’s been popular for the entirety of my life (and one of the major markers of a society moving towards fascism by the way, disdain for art and artists), is hearing about the younger generation using chatbots not just as companions, because that’s attractive to any 13 year old who has just been crushed in the sanctity of their own bedroom by the standards of an unfeeling society that doesn’t appreciate slides. Rather that people are using AI instead of google, to interpret the world for them.

That last step between the search engine and the chatbot is a small, but steep one. To ask a question to google, involves language, albeit limited. There are ways to search more efficiently, search more rigidly, even use to search within a particular site. Some questions make sense to an engine and other ones will not, however, with AI you ask a question as a child would, first formed. There is power in that simplicity, but you have to wonder about a tool that doesn’t show its work, and should worry about copying their test.

The placation of the urge, that too quick connection to “the answer” represents a loosening of experience, and a throttling of knowledge. Especially when that knowledge is often wrong, capable of hallucinations, and programmed to tell you what you want to hear. And in that last detail lies my biggest worry.

Feel intimidated by that email you have to write? Don’t know what to text your crush? Want to write a song but you don’t know where to start? Or maybe you started and it made you feel embarrassed how bad it was, how unpolished. Are curious about therapy but don’t want the messiness of having to be responsible to a set time every week, the feelings and expectations of a real therapist? Which use is reasonable and which absurd?

Regardless of how many young people are or are not using AI in this way, the access to this relinquishing of thinking is scary. Not only because some artist thinks it’s bad for the soul, but also it makes the truth so much harder to access. But also I think it threatens to blot the light within us. One that brightens in the company of others and in solitary silence. That captures all those bright bits reflecting off the world. A prism pulling from the shine of others.

We must fight against the urge to see the world as measurable. Because when we do we attempt to solve the problem of being alive. By using a tool propped up by human intelligence and endeavor, an attempt to mirror back the makeup of man. We don’t need machines to tell us who we are. We need art, we need books. We need conversation, sore muscles and novel experiences. We need not make anything to make us more human, only to show ourselves, as bright as we can be, and hold our lights together.