Your Honor, I am guilty.
When DALL-E Mini dropped, I spent hours generating images, laughing at the results, capturing screenshots and sharing with friends. Look at how easy it is! How funny! How surreal!
When Midjourney came out, I used the Discord bot to / imagine images that were much more “4k photorealistic.” I “wrote” an article about fantasy musical collaborations I wanted to see. In my cringiest moments, I have posted screenshots of a ChatGPT prompt and response.
I “wrote” a book in part from the perspective of an A.I. character. I tried pitching another 20K word short story written from the perspective of an A.I. HR employee at the last remaining corporation in dystopian California. Even after Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun came out, which I cringed at and dropped into a Goodwill box about a quarter of the way through, I didn’t rewrite the book or abandon that short story.
A.I. has been a sci-fi trope for decades, and the topic’s recent surge in relevance, controversy, and popularity doesn’t mean it should disappear. The “right” people are “thinking” and “writing'“ about it in “thought-provoking” ways. But the way I’ve used it—particularly when I just ask ChatGPT something or generate some images and post an article purporting to pass that off as “content”—is an unforgivable offense.
A.I. is the cringiest topic in human history. It’s not going away and we have to reckon with that. The computers are getting smarter and we’re going the opposite direction. But we need to stop worrying so much. More than anything, we need to stop posting screenshots of our prompts and the A.I.’s responses. Let me figure out how to explain why.
It has only been a year or two since A.I. has made the gigantic leap from niche thingy to doomsday device.
Thinking about how far we’ve come, I recall a shameful and embarrassing moment from elementary school when I realized that technology had fundamentally changed forever. The way my inaccurate human brain remembers it, my computer class team had won the “search contest” at least three weeks in a row. Our teacher gave us a list of ten questions. We had to use the internet to find the answers and document our sources. Then one day, Bobby’s team finished all the searches with 100% accuracy well before I was able to find that a marathon was not just 26 miles but 26.2 miles. Posting the winning print-out on the bulletin board, I saw that Bobby’s team was using a new source I’d never heard of before: Google. My stupid human ass was still using Ask Jeeves.
In retrospect, it seems ridiculous that anyone would print out a Google search and post it on a bulletin board. That is what it looks like when you take a screenshot of Chatgpt and post it online. Sure it’s profound. Profoundly cringe. As cringey as the preceding two sentences.
With A.I., fundamental changes in technology of an even larger scope of significance than Google seem to arrive on the daily (Id ask chatgpt to rewrite this sentence to be more grammatically pleasing but I’m leaving it a shitty sentence as proof of my humanity). As a programming-illiterate, internet-addicted dumbass, I cannot keep up. My personal opinion is that A.I. will enhance creative work rather than destroy it. In various forms it’s already an integral component of what we perceive to be more “human” works of art. I don’t know how autotune works but that has to be an android doing that. Xandiloquence the Ab3rd is capable of writing hilarious sketches but also occasionally performs and animates scripts generated via ChatGPT. That video is the best example I know of A.I. being utilized as a creative tool. It is a blend of human and machine ingenuity.
The point of this article is not to say that A.I. is bad or good. Just that posting screenshots of Chatgpt or Midjourney prompts and responses and passing it off as content without any originality involved is cringe(y) and needs to stop. I am not taking aim at any particular person or article but at the general trend the algorithmic doomsday device that is my personal twitter feed wants to shove down my metaphorical human throat. I am guiltier than anyone. I am telling myself.