You can't go on any social media site, read any feed, or even go on a news site without 75 or 50 otherwise intelligent people gushing over the latest advent in some sort of AI-enabled film technique, word-to-image technology, weapon-system, satellite rapine or whatnot.
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| Different in every way. But hyperbole. |
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| The system is rigged. |
Humankind seems to be gushing more over our collective binary destruction than Texas oilmen did over gushers at Spindletop a century and a quarter ago.
The wealth bubbling up was going to change everything and all would be right with the world. We refused to see the unintended consequences of all this gushing. The corrupting wealth. The environmental destruction. The forcing people off ancestral lands. The climactic cataclysm.
Today, people post absolute AI garbage. Worse than crap. Awful disgusting ugly dumb insulting. Seriously, the above is the technological second coming? I've sat through thousands of meetings in my day. I'm 66 years old. I've been to Disney Land and through "It's a Small World." I've never seen anything worser.
Yet.
The gush continues.
And for whatever reason, on Twitter, I'm in a small coterie of ancient ad people. And non-ancient ad people like to share these things with us. Like an early neanderthal might have shown an early sapiens his latest cave drawing. We're supposed to be awed, I suppose. Lascaux-a-go-go.
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| Seriously. AI can't even top Neanderthals. |
It's all so empty.
You learn more looking at the fractals of a puddle in a Bronx parking lot. No aurochs need apply.
Yet.
The gush continues.
While it doesn't take a lot to anger me, it takes a lot to anger me enough to write about it on Twitter. But finally, I cracked. And I wrote this:
And that's how I feel. That's what I believe. STFU about the splendors of science if you ain't willing to what a piece of work is man, how Noble in reason, how infinite in Faculty, in apprehension how like a god.
Every time I see some butterfly with a clown face playing pickelball on Mars, marvelously rendered by a billion-dollar machine programmed by people who have never visited a proper museum, we should look at a Caravaggio or Artemisia Gentileschi. Or go to the Egyptian wing at the Met or see an old Roman mosaic of fish or gods.
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| AI. Cain't. |
Or read Ozymandias, whose giant trunkless legs are today built on binary bullshit and their description has a 140-character limit. Or go outside one dark and moonless night at look at the blackness of black and see the flicker of a billions years' past and wonder like the ancients did as they tried to derive our place in the universe.
A place made by humans and brains, of awe and fear and wonder.
Not pixellized spin art.
Sorry, Alan.
It's worse today.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
Or, Babs. Even better.
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