AI is high-frequency trading for ideas
AI is everywhere these days. Literally, I cannot go five minutes without someone talking about it. Bobby Kim, a writer, artist, and entrepreneur who I really dig, recently wrote up a solid essay about AI that resonated with me for the same reason that things resonate with anyone…because it fed my own opinions back at me in a way that was smarter and better than I could have written them. It’s worth a read, though, because Bobby is a hell of a writer and again…I agree with his take.
Twitter is all abuzz with it, as is every other social media platform that I slum around on, and the takes run a wide spectrum between “AI is the future of everything, get on board now” and “Skynet is gonna eat your fucking babies”. None of them are exactly wrong, but the hyperbole is a bit much and most takes are rooted in what I feel is a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI is.
A few years back I attended an event where someone made an impassioned plea that high-frequency trading just needed a PR makeover. To explain:
High-frequency trading, also known as HFT, is a method of trading that uses powerful computer programs to transact a large number of orders in fractions of a second. It uses complex algorithms to analyze multiple markets and execute orders based on market conditions. Typically, the traders with the fastest execution speeds are more profitable than traders with slower execution speeds.
What HFT isn’t doing, though, is taking into account gut feelings, or human conditions, or the world at large. Which is fine when you’re trying to shave a fractions of pennies of profit off millions of trades in a seconds time (which, let’s be real, is a legal version of something that happens 14 minutes into Superman III) but when you’re trying to create something it’s not necessarily the tool for the job.
AI really is just high-frequency trading for our own ideas. It’s confirmation bias! In the same way that reading Bobby’s article about AI makes me feel good about my opinions, AI makes you feel good about your ideas by delivering them back to you in a visual fashion that is better than what you could have drawn or painted or rendered or photographed but it still pretty much exactly what you wanted. And that can be entertaining and amusing and really, really hilarious and that’s great. But what it’s not is revolutionary because we aren’t really getting anything new from it, we’re getting variations on a theme. My buddy Scott (who is a tremendous digital artist in his own right) has been noodling around with AI prompts to create retro-sci-fi images like this:
You look at this and you think “Well, that is fuckin’ hilarious and kinda awesome” and you’d be right but there’s nothing new about it. Every single non-human in this photo looks like background from the Cantina scene in Star Wars or any number of Star Trek aliens, because it combed through all of that, aggregated them, and averaged them in a few different directions to create them. When you look at the image above it looks familiar because it is. But for contrast, when you look at the original concept art for Star Wars it was fresh and unheard of for the time. It was still an aggregate of information and inspiration that the artist, Ralph McQuarrie, had absorbed during his lifetime to that point but it was then filtered through his uniquely human perspective and through the unique art style he developed for himself as well as the physical limitations of what he could draw or paint. The result is singular in a way that the AI image above is not.
The AI gold rush right now is everyone looking to solve all of society’s ills using AI chatbots….from suicide prevention to customer service to editorial illustration, a metric fuckton of Very Smart People™ are trying to figure out how much money they can make off using a computer to generate an averaged version of the human experience.
In a time when people are lonelier than ever, and it’s already nigh fucking impossible to get a live person on the phone for anything from internet service to your gynecologist, it seems like a mistake to further remove people from online interactions and call it progress.
I understand the interest in technology and to be fair I’m usually an early adopter. I love things that are shiny and new and any chance to step forward is a chance I’m interested in taking, but nothing about this feels like a step forward…it just feels like a way for us to further absolve ourselves of a responsibility to each other.
I’m not sure what it says about us that we’re in such a hurry to remove ourselves from things that define us a human beings. We’re the only species on this planet that creates art, and now we’re trying to automate it. We’re capable of empathy and we’re trying to automate that as well. We connect to each other in a myriad of ways for a myriad of reasons, we build and create elaborate networks of interpersonal relationships that elevate and improve us as people and now that we’ve automated that we’re trying to remove the people from it, too.
I’m not the guy to rail against technology, but it definitely feels like we might be using this wrong. I have no doubts that AI could be used to improve and elevate our society, but right now it appears that we’ve once again forgotten to lead with our hearts instead of our heads. I have no idea where this is all headed (who does?) but I hope that once the initial dopamine rush of NEW NEW NEW wears off we can steer this in a direction to remove some of the menial from our life instead of cutting ourselves out of the act of creating and acts of compassion, which should be things we’re proud to do on our own.